Bluesky’s “Starter Packs,” curated lists of recommended 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 calls “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 create and share with others, X created its own lists internally.
As Bier explains in his post on X, the company “searched the world for the top posters in every niche and country” over the past few months to compile its lists. In other words, the packages are based on X’s internal data — not personal recommendations of individual users.
Bier notes that Starterpacks will roll out to everyone on X in the “coming weeks.”
Recommended user lists are nothing 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 networking apps, Twitter users didn’t necessarily want or need to find and connect with just their friends like 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 recommended users who would make a good follow.
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However, the feature was controversial at the time because it massively increased the popularity and follower base of users when they were added to the Featured Users List. Others felt this system was unfair, prompting Twitter in 2010 to revamp its editorially-generated list to become one determined by algorithms.
X isn’t the only social media app to copy Bluesky’s clever idea of 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 featured users appeared to users when they first signed up to Threads and at other times in the For You feed. Decentralized social network Mastodon has also more recently developed “Packages” to help onboard users.
