X copies Bluesky with a ‘Starterpacks’ feature that helps you find who to follow
Bluesky’s “Starter Packs,” the curated lists of suggested users to follow, have proven 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, X’s head of product Nikita Bier announced in a post that the Elon Musk-owned app will soon introduce its own version of these lists, which it’s calling “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 & Fitness, Gaming, Stocks, Memes, and more.
However, unlike Bluesky’s Starter Packs, which anyone on the platform can make and share with others, X created its own lists internally.
As Bier explains in his post on X, the company “scoured the world for the top posters in every niche and country” over the past several months to compile its lists. In other words, the packs are based on X’s internal data — not on individual users’ personal recommendations.
Bier notes the Starterpacks will roll out to everyone on X in the “coming weeks.”
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Suggested user lists are nothing new to X — they’ve been utilized on the social network since its earliest days, back when it was known as Twitter. As one of the first interest-based social apps, Twitter users didn’t necessarily want or need to only find and connect with their friends, as they had 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 up a list of suggested users that would make for a good follow.
Still, the feature was controversial at the time because it massively boosted users’ popularity and follower base when they were added to the Suggested Users List. Others felt this system was unfair, leading Twitter in 2010 to revamp the editorially-created list to become one determined by algorithms.
X is not the only social app to copy Bluesky’s ingenious idea for Starter Packs. Meta’s Threads began testing its own version of Bluesky’s Starter Packs in December 2024, which were also curated lists created by individual users. These collections of suggested users were shown to users when they first sign up to Threads and at other times within the For You feed. The decentralized social network Mastodon has also more recently been developing “Packs” to help in user onboarding.
