Hoping to quell some of the momentum behind social network Bluesky, a competitor to X and Meta’s Threads, Meta is developing a feature that takes inspiration from one of Bluesky’s more popular additions: the concept of “Starter Packs,” or hand-curated lists of suggested users that help newcomers find people to follow. Meta’s version of these Starter Packs will also suggest profiles that are “handpicked by people on Threads,” according to screenshots of the feature, which is still in development.
Unlike Threads, which is built off the back of Instagram’s existing social graph, Bluesky needed a way to quickly and easily connect new users to others in its community whose posts they may find interesting. Instead of importing users’ address books, the startup introduced the concept of “Starter Packs,” which are curated lists of recommended users that anyone in the community can make.
These lists can center around topics of interest, geographies, industries, fan groups, languages, or anything else.
The feature has become so popular there are now websites that organize everyone’s Bluesky Starter Packs into a searchable database. Starter Packs can also often be found shared by others in the Bluesky feed and are available as a tab on users’ profiles. (There’s also a TechCrunch Starter Pack!)
Of course, Threads doesn’t necessarily need to create a Starter Pack-like feature, since it’s already able to connect users to accounts they follow on Instagram and can leverage other signals from Meta’s family of apps to infer users’ interests when suggesting others to follow in Threads’ user interface.
However, Meta may feel threatened by how popular the process of building and sharing Starter Packs has become on Bluesky, allowing people to instantly form connections and feel a part of a growing community.
Technologist and reverse engineer Chris Messina recently discovered that Threads appears to be designing its own Starter Pack alternative. The feature can be accessed by entering a string of code in Safari on iOS that points to a new feature called “Recommended Follow Lists.”
On the screen that pops up, Threads offers lists of “profiles to follow” where various suggested user lists would be made available. In the current test, only one suggested user list was shown: a list called “NBA Threads.”
The screenshot attributed the NBA list’s creation to an individual Threads user, indicating that the lists themselves would be built by people on Threads, not the company itself.
Meta was asked for comment on the new development but a response was not immediately provided.
TechCrunch was able to test the feature, per Messina’s instructions, and was also able to make it appear for us on iOS. This doesn’t mean that Threads will definitely launch the feature to the public, but it’s clearly something being explored.
In recent weeks, Meta has increasingly behaved as if it sees Bluesky as a threat.
The company publicly disputed third-party data that found that Bluesky was narrowing the gap with Threads, and then proceeded to roll out other Bluesky-inspired features like custom feeds and the ability to change your default feed from the algorithmic For You feed to something else. It also adjusted its own algorithm to start showing more content from accounts you follow.
In addition, following the U.S. elections, Threads began circulating a reminder that you could adjust your political content settings. The move came after backlash over its earlier decision to limit political content from being recommended across the app and on Instagram — a choice that pushed some users to adopt Bluesky instead.
This week, Meta also announced that Threads added 35 million new users in November so far. It was an obvious response to the ongoing coverage of Bluesky’s rapid growth, which has seen the company go from over 9 million users in September to now nearly 23 million.
Instagram head Adam Mosseri admitted on Threads that Meta had shipped “a few things” on the app without testing them first, in response to a post about Bluesky’s competitive threat.
