'Starter packs' have played a central role in Bluesky's rapid growth

https://www.tu-darmstadt.de/universitaet/aktuelles_meldungen/einzelansicht_512064.en.jsp

by FinnKuhn • 1 year ago

70 54 1 year ago

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.

WJW2• 1 year ago

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.

hombre_fatal2• 1 year ago

If you're going to insult me, at least insult me directly instead saying it in a weird roundabout 3rd person caricature.

I get value from Twitter and I just acknowledged that it's quite shit, so you'll have to elaborate on what you think I'm missing. I don't like how it turns my timeline racist/political over time. I mostly follow indie gamedev chit chat. The community is on Twitter.

Bluesky/Mastodon aren't a real option. They are a splinter group who complain about Twitter all day and everything is infected with just-as-rotten political discourse.

delichon• 1 year ago

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."

righthand3• 1 year ago

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• 1 year ago

You are just describing what advertisers actually do in practice. Maybe if everyone had the same access people would realize how invasive it is.

Dilettante_• 1 year ago

Yeah! The only people who should be allowed to see my own feed are me and the malevolent corporate entity that owns the platform!

_Algernon_• 1 year ago

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• 1 year ago

Follows are already public information.

AlienRobot3• 1 year ago

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• 1 year ago

I want people to stop posting their opinions on the Internet.

Interesting that you do not feel the need to lead by example.

saagarjha• 1 year ago

Sometimes. Sometimes people actually do care about things and wish to express their opinions on it.

MangoToupe2• 1 year ago

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.

lonk11• 1 year ago

This is definitely doable and anyone can build such a feed using Bluesky's APIs.

As an example, I built a "For You" feed https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:3guzzweuqraryl3rdkimjamk/fe... that finds the posts you liked, finds other people who liked the same posts and shows you what else they liked.

To help me debug the algorithm I built a simple web UI that allows you to see the feed for any user by plugging their account id: https://linklonk.com/bluesky

You can switch perspective to other users and explore how the would experience the feed.

lovetox• 1 year ago

You want to judge someone based on some social network feed algorithm, sounds crazy and dystopian to me.

GuB-42• 1 year ago

He doesn't want to judge people he wants to understand people. It is the opposite of a judgment. The idea is that you see someone on social media with ideas you disagree with, but instead of stopping there and dismissing that guy as an asshole, you try to see where these ideas come from and maybe realize that he has a point.

Now this feature could be used to reinforce your bubble (the crazy and dystopian scenario you refer to) instead of bursting out of it. How you see such a feature may be more telling about your own personality than about the feature itself.

PaulKeeble• 1 year ago

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/

moomoo112• 1 year ago

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.

kgwxd• 1 year ago

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.

moomoo112• 1 year ago

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.

AlienRobot3• 1 year ago

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.

harimau777• 1 year ago

Twitter and Bsky are also big platforms for artists sharing their work due to censorship issues on other platforms.

seabombs• 1 year ago

I deleted Twitter years ago as I was getting over it. When Bluesky starting take off it sounded like it was "Twitter but better", so I created an account. Felt just the same as Twitter. Lot's of rage bait, hot takes and tired jokes (in my opinion).

This was my default feed to be fair, if I'd taken the time to follow some good people maybe it would be better.

jdminhbg• 1 year ago

Bluesky is basically "Twitter as it was years ago," so if you didn't like Twitter then, you won't like Bluesky now.

pnw• 1 year ago

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.

paradox460• 1 year ago

Never let the truth get in the way of a good story

ujkhsjkdhf2343• 1 year ago

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.

Ferret7446• 1 year ago

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".

ClimaxGravely• 1 year ago

I kind of feel like G+ got this right the best. It was great being able to subscribe to a circle of pixel artists, chili cooks, whatever niche etc.

For me the golden age of social media. Lots of niche hobby discussion and not a lot of noise.

cyberge99• 1 year ago

BlueSky is still growing according to the official metrics..

zzzeek• 1 year ago

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...

ujkhsjkdhf2343• 1 year ago

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.

sandspar• 1 year ago

Sounds like a form of social proof combined with low friction following? Authors say it creates a "rich get richer" dynamic. Also I wonder if there's a long-term risk that it creates a "everyone follows the same people" effect which may decrease delight, plus decrease chance of random jackpot posts that come out of nowhere and hook everyone for a day. If I've diagnosed correctly then I'm sure that Bluesky has figured out answers to these but I'm not sure how.

'Starter packs' have played a central role in Bluesky's rapid growth

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