Many people have taken the leap over to Bluesky, the hot new social media platform. Unfortunately, when you get there, one of the most glaring problems is that your follower count is nearly zero. Luckily, the platform has a very easy solution for newcomers.
Where Are All the Cool People to Follow?
Signing up to Bluesky is easy, and it even gives you a few broad categories to create beginner feeds for your account. You’ll first notice the discovery feed tab and the other feeds featured on your account. Depending on your interests, these feeds collect relevant hashtags and serve them to you. While this makes it seem a bit like a Twitter-X clone, it’s got its own thing going on.
Bluesky’s Discovery feed gives you a single place to find things you may be interested in. The plus side is that it’s a very Twitter/X-type feed, making it easy to pick up accounts that stand out. However, it’s also difficult to pinpoint a single interest in the sea of posts.
Luckily, Bluesky makes it much easier to have a ready feed of people with a particular interest that you can follow with a single click. Let me introduce you to the Starter Pack.
Taking a Shortcut to Discovery
Starter Packs are a collection of accounts that share an interest or are linked together in some way. They’re a great starting point for users just getting into Bluesky. Users can curate their starter packs, allowing their friends to follow the accounts they already follow. A Starter Pack offers users customized feeds and a series of suggested accounts to follow.
Curating Starter Packs may seem like a hassle. Who has the time to go through all the accounts you follow and interact with and pick out the best people? Luckily, Bluesky has a function that lets users craft a starter pack themselves, allowing people who follow them to get a cross-section of the people with whom they interact.
Now, that’s not to say that you HAVE to let Bluesky make the Starter pack for you. If you have the time and patience, you could build a Starter Pack yourself and find an easy way to share it on other social media sites. It’s a great way to bring new users in and let everyone following you know which accounts you value the most.
Finding The Interesting Accounts
If you’re now moving to Bluesky and are looking for accounts to follow, Bluesky has made it easy to search Starter Packs. The Bluesky Starter Pack Directory gives you a simple way to find relevant accounts you might enjoy following (like How-To Geek writers). The directory has a search function for easy navigation.
The directory has its limitations, however. Most of the Starter Packs are a bit old, and many aren’t maintained anymore. There don’t seem to be many users taking advantage of the site, preferring to use organic discovery instead. There are a few good reasons for this.
Starter Packs are a great way to get relevant content quickly if you’re the type of user who uses apps like Bluesky or Twitter/X for news and opinions. However, if you’re a creator or a regular user who just likes talking to other users on the app, using curated Starter Packs in this way is strictly worse than organic interaction. Most of those accounts you automatically follow through the Starter Pack won’t follow you back.
How to Use Starter Packs the Right Way
So, how do you find all the cool people to follow if you’re just moving to Bluesky? While Bluesky may look like Twitter, they’re completely different social media experiences. You’ll probably find a few people you’re already friends with when you first join. Some of those people may have Starter Packs of their own that you can use to follow the same people they follow. Even if they don’t, you’re likely to see the same people cropping up to comment on content, and replying and following from that content is great for building a community on Bluesky.
If you use one of the directory’s premade Starter Pack accounts, you should be able to see who they’re following, commenting on, and interacting with. You could also make connections through them, expanding your reach to other places on Bluesky and covering more things you like. If you end up on a Starter Pack, it’s likely to increase your social reach exponentially.
Once you have a large enough series of accounts you follow, you can build your own Starter Pack for others to use. What’s even cooler is that you can develop a Starter Pack for each of your interests. If you’re like me and enjoy many different things like tech, travel, and game development, you could potentially build a Starter Pack for each of these individual interests!
Here Are a Few Things to Pay Attention To
Bluesky already offers users a way to build customized feeds. The feed system is one of the best ways to keep content focused on a particular topic. So, for example, a “Travel” feed displays all the stuff with travel-related hashtags. You could easily use these feeds as a basis for building a Starter Pack or following people directly after interacting with them. It’s also a lot more socially connected than simply using a Starter Pack.
What happens if you end up on a Starter Pack that you don’t want to be on? Unfollowing the person who put you in the pack doesn’t really help, so you’ll have to add them to your ignore list. Starter Packs will usually tell you who made them, so unfollowing is as simple as searching for the account on Bluesky and using the menu to ignore them. You can also report the Starter Pack to Bluesky support and await action.
Are Starter Packs Worth It?
Starter Packs may be worth it, depending on the type of user you are. If you want to build a following or are interested in talking to people and getting genuine interaction, Starter Packs may not be your cup of tea. If you’re seeking genuine connections, Starter Packs may feel impersonal and less effective than organic interactions.
Overall, Bluesky’s Starter Packs can be positive or negative, depending on how you want to engage with the platform and its users. The final decision about whether they help or hurt comes down to how you want to use the site.
