Introduction of Starter Packs: X copies Bluesky
The US platform X is introducing Starter Packs. With this, the short message service is copying a popular feature from Bluesky.
(Image: Koshiro K/Shutterstock.com)
The US short message service X is introducing the function known from Bluesky, the so-called Starter Packs. Product Manager Nikita Bier announced this in a post on X. The US company makes it clear that X is borrowing from the functionality of the competitor service Bluesky. The new function is called Starter Packs and is to be rolled out to all X users in the coming weeks.
Starter Packs were originally introduced by Bluesky in mid-2024 and quickly gained popularity. The curated collections of accounts, which users can follow with a single click, help new users to find their way around the platform. This is intended to mitigate the problem known as "cold start" when switching to a new platform. The lists of suggested accounts became particularly significant during the second wave of migration from X after Donald Trump's election victory in the USA.
X does not give up curation
In contrast to the Starter Packs on Bluesky, the Starter Packs on X are not based on user suggestions. X users cannot create their own Starter Packs and share them with others. Instead, X provides its own internally created lists. These are intended to help new X users find accounts corresponding to their interests, Bier writes on X.
The X Starter Packs are sorted by topic and contain both unknown and known accounts from the areas of news, politics, fashion, technology, business, health and fitness, gaming, stocks, memes, and more. For their creation, the company searched its own platform to identify the top X users in each thematic niche.
No new idea
X is not the only social network copying the Starter Packs feature from Bluesky. Meta's Threads has been testing its own version of suggestion lists since December 2024, but similar to Bluesky, these are created by users. The decentralized social network Mastodon also plans to introduce curated account collections officially. So far, Mastodon starter packs are only unofficially available.
(rah)
