Bluesky Offers Starter Packs For Friends, Feeds To Follow

A competitor for Elon Musk’s X (formerly Twitter) is offering a new feature designed to grow the number of users and embedded them in its ecosystem.

Blueky this week announced that it is releasing starter packs, which it says are personalised invites that allow a user to bring their friends “directly into their slice of Bluesky.”

Essentially the starter packs are for users to create a curated list of people and custom feeds to follow, when people join Bluesky.

Starter packs

According to the Bluesky announcement, existing users can either utilise the platform’s auto-generation tool to create a starter pack, or make their own from scratch.

The user can create multiple starter packs and share the link or the QR code with someone who has yet to join Bluesky.

Users can recommend up to 50 people and up to 3 custom feeds. New users will automatically have Following and Discover pinned.

And if a person is already a Bluesky user, the starter pack could be a good tool for them to find new people or feeds to follow as well.

The new feature comes after Bluesky last month had added direct messages, along with a option to personalise the main discover feed by providing feedback with “Show more like this” and “Show less like this” buttons.

Growth challenges

Bluesky has some way to go before it build a community anywhere near as large as found on Musk’s X.

In July 2023 Bluesky achieved one million downloads, despite it being in a private beta release.

But in February 2024 Bluesky opened the app to public downloads, and is now said to have approximately 5.9 million users.

But last month it suffered a blow when Jack Dorsey departed the Bluesky platform he had helped create, and in a surprising u-turn endorsed Elon Musk’s X, despite publicly stating that Musk was not the right person to lead the platform.

Bluesky had been formally incorporated in late 2021 as a public benefit LLC, with Dorsey on its board of directors.

Bluesky is based on the open source Authenticated Transfer (AT) protocol, which is similar to ActivityPub, the decentralised protocol that powers Mastodon.