About a week after the US presidential election, I signed into my account on Bluesky, the social media platform with the strongest claim to being X’s successor. I hadn’t been especially active in this other place. So I was surprised, that evening, to see a hefty bundle of notifications and more than a hundred new followers—a modest number, to be sure, but significant enough to suggest something had happened. My first feeling was not flattery, but panic. Who were all these people, and why had they all come looking for me at once? What did they want?
Bluesky introduced its “starter packs,” the platform’s term for user-curated lists that identify and recommend accounts, back in June. But in the week following the US election, when the New York Times reported a surge of a million new users, starter-packing took on a new intensity as the influx of people sought to find their chosen communities. Now, scroll through the directory of more than eighteen thousand packs and you can find everything from “Scholars of U.S. Federalism” to “Baking Swifties” to specific outlets, like The Walrus, gathering the accounts of their editors and contributors. The feature offers a handy “follow-all” button, allowing you to beef up your feed immediately and immodestly.
