Bluesky’s “Starter Pack”.“A curated list of recommended users to follow, has proven a popular way to help people connect with others on social networks – so popular, in fact, that X is now copying the feature.
On Wednesday, the head of product X Nikita Beer announced in a post that the app owned by Elon Musk will introduce its own version of the list, called “Starterpacks.” (Why actually!)
The idea behind this new feature is to help users find accounts that match their interests in various categories, including News, Politics, Fashion, Technology, Business & Finance, Health & Fitness, Games, Stocks, Memes, and more.
However, unlike Bluesky’s Starter Pack, which can be created and shared by anyone on the platform, X creates its own list inside.
As Bier explains in posted on X, The company “scoured the world for the top posters in each niche and country” over the past few months to compile its list. In other words, the package is based on X’s internal data – not based on the user’s personal recommendations.
Bier notes that Starterpacks will be rolling out to everyone at X in the “coming weeks.”
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List of recommended users is nothing new for X — it has been used in the social network since the beginning, when it was known as Twitter. As one of the first interest-based social applications, Twitter users do not always want or need to find and connect with friends, as is the case with other applications such as Facebook. Instead, they want to find people whose ideas and interests match theirs. To help them get started, Twitter offers a list of recommended users who will do well.
Still, the feature controversial at that time because it massively boosted the user’s popularity and follower base when they were added to the List of Recommended Users. Others felt this system was unfair, leading Twitter in 2010 to Revamp the editorially-created list be the one determined by the algorithm.
X is not the only social app to copy Bluesky’s smart idea for the Starter Pack. Your meta The thread started testing its own version of Bluesky’s Starter Packs in December 2024, which is also a list created by individual users. This collection of suggested users is shown to users when they first log into a Thread and at other times in the For You feed. A decentralized social network Mastodon also recently developed “Packs” to help with user onboarding.