'Starter packs' have played a central role in Bluesky's rapid growth | Hacker News Reader

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

tu-darmstadt.de

70 pointsFinnKuhn54 comments

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."

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.

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

So we give everyone single click access and people become bigger monsters or people wake up finally? Make it a separate tool.

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.

It seems that the most effective method of sticking people in buckets is actually track them, so I don't see the practical difference for this discussion.

> because it relies on realizing that we’re not special snowflakes, but we have a whole group of people we’re like

yet buckets become more valuable the more specific they are (for example "dad of 3" is more valuable than "male"). it's not hard to see how that would scale into "every detail about the person would allow maximally manipulative advertising = most valuable", just think about any vulnerable position you might find yourself in that can now be used to manipulate you

Is that true? Pretty sure everything is way, way fuzzier and ultra-high dimensionality now. Not placing people in discrete buckets.

I’d love to meet more of the people in my bucket. I think we’d get along well.

...until it's time to fight over the same scarce holiday gift item that your bucketeers all crave also? :D

That might've been true 20 years ago, when fine-grained individual data was expensive for marketing teams to store, organize, and access. Nowadays that's dirt-cheap; advertisers absolutely do track you on a very individual level. Yes, they also correlate you with other individuals based on various demographic buckets, but those buckets are getting tinier and tinier.

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

I said this was already possible by anyone.

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.

Follows are already public information.

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.

Nonetheless, follows have always been public information on Twitter and Bluesky.

A lot of what drives feed algorithms are interactions rather than just follows.

I imagine it’s one reason why X/Twitter made likes private as they want people to like things for the algorithm but not be judged for their likes.

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.

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

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

They're right, though. So many problems are caused by thinking that opinions matter.

"Yet you participate in society. Curious!"

https://imgur.com/sl3fXat

Ironically this comment is doing the exact thing the comic is criticizing because it is a subtle bastardization of what the comic says.

The comic is about not criticizing people who want to see improvement in something in which they participate. It isn't saying hypocrisy can't be criticized, just that we shouldn't misidentify hypocrisy. Notice the characters aren't saying that no one should buy an Apple product/car or participate in society. The replies are tangential to their original complaints. In order to see hypocrisy, the replier needs to view any participation as a full fledge endorsement, which is a silly thing to do.

Meanwhile, OP genuinely is acting hypocritically because they are doing the exact thing they are criticizing, posting an option to the Internet. The original replier is therefore not the one embodying this comic, it's you.

There is an interesting other layer here where the posting of an opinion is triggered by the way the content is presented. “The medium is the message.” The opinion posted didn’t itself exist before the content was consumed, making it all self-fulfilling and a positive feedback loop.

The interesting thing about HN in that context is it doesn’t fine-tune its algorithm per-user, it presents a consistent view to all users. Content should be much less positive-feedback-loop because of that.

And so OP might not be hypocritical if that consistent-view is the change we need to better our society.

There is zero irony for anyone not engaged in black and white thinking, Mr Gotcha.

OP is talking about very specific kinds of opinions here, not forum posts. Other than that, a librarian often has to talk out loud in order to tell people to keep quiet.

I do lead by example, but comment replies don't count ;)

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

> 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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

How has threads managed to gain 275m users while producing absolutely zero impact on any other part of society? Are you sure these are actual human beings and not just Instagram users who are being baited into clicking through and "signing up" for a service they don't use?

Am I sure they aren't? No, in fact I think that is exactly what they are. Or people that made an account out of curiosity because it is so easy to do so. However, that delves into speculation and we won't get a full answer on that because Meta will never say.

I'll say -- when I see a single bit of Threads discussion impinge upon my life, the news I read and watch, or any other place that culture happens.

The people who should actually care are advertisers, who are probably getting scammed for vast numbers of dollars.

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".

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.

BlueSky is still growing according to the official metrics..

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...

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.

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/

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.

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.

> 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.

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.

It's a well known template from the internets, mostly popular on other message boards. I don't actually care about insulting you; it's just a meme that fit the situation well. If you get more value than annoyance from twitter, more power to you.

The original post you posted seemed like you were very much annoyed at twitter turning into shit each time, yet you were looking for solution in restarting accounts regularly. I don't think that's the problem: Twitter is just home to a great many shit people and it gets more engagement from exposing the most controversial people to everyone else. Timelines always converge to racism and hatred, no matter who you initially follow. Your desire to follow just indie gamedev talk doesn't matter to Twitter, sadly enough.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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