A new tool for the rapidly growing X competitor Bluesky helps you quickly create new feeds that you can pin to the app’s home page to follow your various interests. If you’re daunted by the prospect of having to rebuild your Twitter/X lists on Bluesky’s app, you can use the Pack2List web app to take advantage of the curation work other Bluesky users have already done to create your own customized lists.
While Bluesky and its third-party developer community today offer a variety of tools for building feeds, lists, and even Starter Packs of people you think are worth a follow, Pack2List is specifically designed to turn any person’s recommended set of users from their Starter Pack into a Bluesky List in just a few steps.
Starter Packs versus Lists
But first, let’s back up a bit to learn about these two types of lists.
The difference between a Starter Pack and a Bluesky List is that the former is meant to be used as a quick way to follow a group of users en masse. The idea is any user on Bluesky can create a Starter Pack of people they think others should follow, which they can then share with others on their feed or elsewhere on the web. These Starter Packs can also be found in a tab on users’ Bluesky profiles.
Starter Packs have served as a clever way for Bluesky to grow its community and its network of connections, which can be hard to do for brand-new social networks — at least ones that don’t rely on importing your entire address book. Unlike Meta’s X competitor, Instagram Threads, Bluesky didn’t have the advantage of building out its social graph on the back of an app that already had some 2 billion-plus monthly users, as Instagram does. Instead, Starter Packs let Bluesky’s own user base curate its network into distinct, thematic groups that make it easier for people to go from an empty timeline to one filled with posts they find interesting.
For instance, there are Starter Packs focused on politics, journalists, developers, technologists, academia, sports, AI, health, various other fan groups, geographies, and communities. A third-party site, Bluesky Directory, keeps track of the growing number of Starter Packs available across the network. (Here’s one for TechCrunch, for example!)
With a click of a button on a Starter Pack, you can follow everyone on this type of curated list, or you can optionally pick and choose from its set of recommendations to follow specific individuals.
Meanwhile, a Bluesky List is a curated group of Bluesky accounts that you put together for your own purposes.
Maybe it’s a list of people you want to keep track of or maybe it’s even a list of those you want to block. (For left-leaning Bluesky users hoping to avoid turning Bluesky into another angry Twitter, a block list of MAGA folks has become a popular addition, based on how many people have been resharing this list with others across the social network.)
But perhaps you want to pin a Bluesky List of your favorite scientists, journalists, AI researchers, authors, or other high-profile figures to your home page (or mobile home screen) for easy access. Maybe you want to build a list of your close friends, work colleagues, or other people who mainly post about a certain topic or participate in some type of community.
Unlike Starter Packs, which are meant to drive follows, you don’t necessarily have to follow everyone on the lists you make. Similar to X’s Lists, you can simply create a list and click on it to see its users’ posts in their own timeline, without having their posts clutter up your main Bluesky feed.
Turn a Starter Pack into a List
While both types of lists are useful, Bluesky is missing a key feature that would let you take someone’s shared Starter Pack and — instead of following its users — turn that Pack into a List that’s always accessible from your Bluesky account in a dedicated spot.
That’s where the Pack2List web app from developer Seth Miller comes in. The tool is available on GitHub and on this basic PHP website, alongside other tools that let you merge lists, convert lists, and more.
To use the service, you’ll enter your Bluesky credentials, including your username and an app password. (You generate an app password from Bluesky’s security settings. This security feature prevents you from having to share your main Bluesky password with a third-party app.)
You then simply paste in the URL to the Starter Pack you want to turn into a list and select whether it’s a list you want to follow (“Content”) or one you want to use to block people (“Moderation”).
Click the “Submit” button and the Starter Pack is immediately added as a List on your Bluesky account.
You can also optionally add the URL of one of your other lists that already exists on your account if you’d prefer to merge the Starter Pack into that list, instead.
Of course, you don’t have to use tools like this to have a good Bluesky experience.
A nice thing about Bluesky’s app is that you don’t have to be technically inclined to create an account, follow others, and engage with posts on your timeline. It looks and feels much like old Twitter, the app now called X under Elon Musk. But if you do want to explore Bluesky’s more advanced features, it’s helpful to know that there’s already a wide developer community out there building tools, services, and apps that help you do more with Bluesky if you choose.
