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Bluesky “Starter Packs”, Curated lists of suggested users to follow have proven to be a popular way to help people connect with others on the social network — so popular, in fact, that X is now copying the feature.
On Wednesday, Head of Product X, Nikita Bearannounced in a post that the Elon Musk-owned app will soon offer its own version of these menus, dubbed “Starterpacks.” (How original!)
The idea behind the new feature is to help users find accounts that match their interests across a range of categories, including news, politics, fashion, technology, business, 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 created its own lists internally.
As Pierre V. explains: Position on X, The company “scoured the world looking for the best labels in every location and country” over the past few months to compile its lists. In other words, the packages are based on X’s internal data — not on the personal recommendations of individual users.
Bier notes that Starterpacks will roll out to everyone on X in the “coming weeks.”
Suggested user lists aren’t new to X — they’ve been used on the social network since its early days, when it was known as Twitter. As one of the first interest-based social apps, Twitter users didn’t necessarily want or need to just find and communicate with their friends, as they did on other apps like Facebook. Instead, they wanted to find people whose ideas and interests aligned with their own. To help them get started, Twitter offered a list of suggested users who would make a good following.
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However, it was an advantage controversial At that time because it greatly boosted users’ popularity and follower base when they were added to the list of suggested users. Others saw this system as unfair, which led to Twitter doing so in 2010 Revamp an editorially created list To become one determined by algorithms.
X isn’t the only social app copying Bluesky’s genius idea of Starter Packs. dead Threads has begun testing its own version of Bluesky’s Starter Packs in December 2024, which were also curated lists created by individual users. These groups of suggested users are displayed to users when they first sign up for Threads and at other times within the For You feed. Decentralized social network Mastodon has also recently developed “packages” To assist with user setup.