Bluesky’s “Starter Packs,” Curated lists of recommended users to follow have proven a popular way to help people connect with others on social networks — so popular that X is now copying the feature.
On Wednesday, X’s product chief, Nikita Bearannounced in a post that the Elon Musk-owned app will soon launch its own version of these lists, which it calls “StarterPacks.” (How original!)
The idea behind the new feature is to help users find accounts that match their interests across categories including news, politics, fashion, technology, business and finance, health and fitness, gaming, stocks, memes and more.
However, unlike Bluesky’s starter packs, which anyone on the platform can create and share with others, X has built its own inventory internally.
As Beer explains His post on X, The company “scoured the world for the top posters in every niche and country” compiled its list over the past few months. In other words, the packs are based on X’s internal data – not on the personal recommendations of individual users.
Bear notes that the starterpacks will roll out to everyone on X “in the coming weeks”.
Recommended user lists are nothing new for X — they’ve been used on the social network since its early days, when it was called Twitter. As one of the first interest-based social apps, Twitter users didn’t want or need to find and connect with their friends like other apps like Facebook. Instead, they wanted to find people whose ideas and interests aligned with their own. To help them get started, Twitter offers a list of recommended users who would make for a good following.
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Still, there were features Controversial At that time because it greatly increased the popularity and follower base of users when they were added to the recommended users list. Others think the system is unfair, which led Twitter in 2010 Reorganization of editorially created lists to become determined by the algorithm.
X isn’t the only social app to copy Bluesky’s innovative idea for starter packs. Meta’s Thread has started testing its own version of Bluesky’s starter packs In December 2024, which were also lists created by individual users. These collections of recommended users are shown to users when they first sign up to the thread and at other times in the feed for you. Decentralized social networks Mastodon has been making “packs” more recently To help with user onboarding.
