In a bid to slow the momentum of social network Bluesky, which competes with X and Meta's Threads, Meta is building a feature that draws from one of the features that's most gained popularity in Bluesky: "Starter Packs," or curated lists of user suggestions meant to guide newcomers to the network as to who they should follow. Meta's versions of these Starter Packs will also offer profiles that are "handpicked by people on Threads," according to screenshots of the feature, still in development.

While Threads 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. The startup didn't import users' address books but instead introduced the concept of "Starter Packs," curated lists of recommended users that anyone in the community can make.

These lists can be about anything-interesting topics, 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 does not have to implement a Starter Pack type feature, because it's already connecting users to accounts that they are following on Instagram, and then utilizing signals coming from other applications in the family to deduce interests when recommending others to follow in Threads' UI.

However, Meta may find itself threatened by how viral the process of building and sharing Starter Packs has become on Bluesky, allowing people to instantly connect and feel 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 popping screen, Threads provided profiles to follow lists where such suggested user lists would be available. In the current test, only one suggested user list was visible: a list called NBA Threads.

The screenshot had it that the NBA list was a creation of an individual Thread user, meaning that lists themselves would be built by the people on Threads and not the company itself.

Meta was contacted for comment about the development, but no response has come in so far.

TechCrunch got to test the feature in question, per Messina's request, and was also able to make it appear for us on iOS. This does not mean that Threads will necessarily roll this out to the public, but something is clearly in the works here.

Within recent weeks, Meta has tended to act like it is very threatened by Bluesky.

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, after the U.S. elections, Threads started publishing a reminder that you may change your political content settings. That was after it faced backlash for previously deciding to limit political content from being recommended across the app and even on Instagram — a decision that made some users switch to Bluesky.

This week, Meta also reported that Threads has added 35 million new users in November up to date. It was a no-brainer response to the ongoing coverage of Bluesky's rapid growth that saw the company grow from more than 9 million in September to nearly 23 million now.

In response to a post about Bluesky's competitive threat, Instagram head Adam Mosseri admitted on Threads that Meta had shipped "a few things" on the app without testing them first.