Threads is developing a feature inspired by Bluesky’s Starter Packs TechCrunch and others. Chris Messina, who invented the hashtag, posted a screenshot of the tool to social media application. He also says that if you have the latest Threads app, you can preview the tool yourself by adding “installedbarcelona://recommended_follow_lists” to Safari on iOS. We tried it and found it worked.
Starter Packs for those new to Bluesky are curated lists of people to follow helps newcomers get started in the program. These packages can be built in different ways. Engadget It has one with many writers and editorsincluding myself. Come for the promise of tech news, but stay random pictures of my cats.
The version coming to Threads works in a similar way. Lists of users are “Picked by People in Threads” and can be pretty much anything. Messina featured a list called “NBA Threads,” as seen above.
This feature has become so popular on Bluesky that it has even a searchable databasecomplete with over 37,000 of these human gangs. Packages can also be shared directly in threads, although we don’t know if Threads will allow this.
Bluesky responded angrily to this move, He writes in Threads “If this app is going to keep copying our features, you might as well join Bluesky.” For those paying attention, Threads “honors” all sorts of pre-existing Bluesky features in recent days and months. Recently platform presented special tapes and ability change the default feed to the people you follow. It’s like Sega and Nintendo, only with short messages instead of genre-defining game classics.
Why is Threads so eager to emulate Bluesky’s most popular features? Well, the latter has seen huge growth spurts in the past few months, recently reached 20 million users. The crowd is running sinking ship X looking for bundles and replacement software. Threads wants to be alone. Bluesky wants to be one too. You know how to dig.
Threads may play a weak role here by adopting some of Bluesky’s features, but it actually has a big head start. The platform announced this recently over 35 million registered in November alone.
