'Starter packs' have played a central role in Bluesky's rapid growth
40 comments
·July 12, 2025delichon
_Algernon_
I (and I assume this is probably true for most people) don't want you to have access to this kind of information about me. It's as if you'd want to know every book on my bookshelf. I'm not letting strangers into my home to get that information.
mostlysimilar
Follows are already public information.
slg
So is one's location while in public. It doesn't mean I want someone tracking my location every time I leave the house. The aggregation of public data can end up being an invasion of perceived privacy.
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righthand
Personal tracking? What is stopping you from building a bot that uses this feature to view other peoples personal taste and building a shadow profile that then is used to manipulate them?
You can already do this by scraping their follows list and building a pseudo display of what a person looked at.
tokyolights2
You are just describing what advertisers actually do in practice. Maybe if everyone had the same access people would realize how invasive it is.
bombcar
Advertisers less track you and more decide what demographic bucket to stick you in.
It’s a subtle but important (and hard to admit) difference; because it relies on realizing that we’re not special snowflakes, but we have a whole group of people we’re like.
righthand
So we give everyone single click access and people become bigger monsters or people wake up finally? Make it a separate tool.
Dilettante_
Yeah! The only people who should be allowed to see my own feed are me and the malevolent corporate entity that owns the platform!
righthand
I said this was already possible by anyone.
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AlienRobot
Funny. I want the opposite. I want people to stop posting their opinions on the Internet.
Every time I go to Youtube and I see "the X situation is insane!" I'm like "what is even X? Why are you showing me this?"
The whole social media landscape is engineered toward drama and people arguing over pointless things they have no control over, being controversial all for "engagement." It's pretty depressing.
mosura
> I want people to stop posting their opinions on the Internet.
Interesting that you do not feel the need to lead by example.
whstl
"Yet you participate in society. Curious!"
MangoToupe
They're right, though. So many problems are caused by thinking that opinions matter.
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AlienRobot
I do lead by example, but comment replies don't count ;)
MangoToupe
> Compare the relevant items in each of our feeds and summarize the difference in values, facts and sources that we consume."
Surely it'd be easier to just view the delta? Once you have an algorithm in there summarizing things that value is lost.
pnw
I thought Bluesky usage was declining? Sites like https://bsky.jazco.dev/stats show a 10 to 20% drop across most metrics in the last year.
giingyui
It talks about rapid growth because bluesky really did have rapid growth in the past. It doesn’t anymore though.
Ferret7446
These facts are related. "starter packs" only work if you're cultivating a very narrow social bubble of users, which is the same reason bluesky is declining now.
Unbubbled people have a wide range of interests and preferences that cannot be captured in a few "starter packs".
paradox460
Never let the truth get in the way of a good story
ujkhsjkdhf234
As I said in another comment, all of these statements are true. Blue Sky blew up very quickly and starter parks were a key part of that. Blue Sky is also losing users which I find to be expected. Threads is quickly gaining users because of network effects. If you have an Instagram account, you have a Threads account.
PaulKeeble
The bluesky transfer extension helps a lot as well, helps you find the same users you follow on twitter on bluesky. https://www.sky-follower-bridge.dev/
hombre_fatal
It's a great idea.
I make a new Twitter account every time I realize I'm stuck in the same thought loops every day with the same timeline. And every time it's pretty annoying to restart from scratch.
I'll pick a couple accounts to start off the timeline and then autofollow Twitter's "follow these 7 ppl too" recommendation, but I often start following the similar accounts every time.
I'd like an easy way to try out completely different feeds without having to know ahead of time who I want to seed it with.
WJW
> Be OP
> Get stuck in the same thought loops every time on twitter, remake your account in slightly different ways every time until the algorithm catches you again.
> Still don't realize it's twitter itself which is the problem.
It really sounds you would be better off by just deleting it altogether.
zzzeek
Sorry we were just told that Threads is quickly catching up to X in terms of users and that Bluesky is a flat line at the bottom of the graph compared to them [1]
[1] https://techcrunch.com/2025/07/07/threads-is-nearing-xs-dail...
ujkhsjkdhf234
All of these are true. Bluesky blew up because it was the first large "not Twitter" social media and it has solid communities. Threads has blown past them because of network effects. If you have an instagram account, you have a Threads account just waiting to be activated. It's very easy transition.
The great thing about decentralized social network is that you can easily push to all of those accounts and if I were Bluesky, I would make it easy to link Threads and Mastodon to Bluesky so you can push messages to all 3.
moomoo11
Cool.
OT but I must be a weirdo because I just don’t get any satisfaction out of these apps.
I just don’t give that much of a shit about what other people think or say.
HN is enough for me lol.
AlienRobot
The only social media app I can stomach is Tumblr, because people share lots of cool photos and art there.
It's weird because on Tumblr you can post posts of any size, place images anywhere you want, edit posts, edit tags afterwards, and all this cool stuff... but no, people WANT to use the character-limited immutable post with embedded hashtags thing for some reason. I don't get it.
kgwxd
i give a shit about what some people think and say about some things, but there's no one who's every thought i want to know. don't care how anyone feels about anyone else, if that level of sharing doesn't get annoying eventually, you're still in the honeymoon phase, or you're just lying to yourself.
moomoo11
More that I don’t care to “follow” and “like” people. Just being honest like I said I don’t give a crap what people think or say for the most part.
I want a button on each user (that opts in) that allows me to see their feed just as they do. A read-only impersonation. When I see a take that I wildly disagree with I frequently wonder what set of views of the world they are operating from. This feature would help look at the world from behind the eyes of those I need to learn from the most: those that seem to live in a different one.
A starter pack in comparison is a one-click embubbler. We need better bubble explorers and comparers. Like "Grok, me and @joe disagree on <topic-x>. Compare the relevant items in each of our feeds and summarize the difference in values, facts and sources that we consume."