Ahead of the holiday season, Meta’s Threads is scrambling to replicate features from its much smaller rival, Bluesky. 

The platform appears to be working on cloning Bluesky’s wildly popular “Starter Packs” feature, while trying to pretend they’re not looking over their competitor’s shoulder.

Bluesky’s curated lists of recommended accounts have become so popular that entire websites now exist solely to catalog them. The concept’s brilliance lies in its simplicity – allowing community members to create personalized recommendations based on interests, industries, or locations. Whereas Threads’ version, spotted lurking in backend code, is cleverly disguised under the name “Recommended Follow List.”

What makes this development particularly striking isn’t just the feature itself, but what it reveals about the current state of social media innovation. 

Despite having Instagram’s massive social graph at its disposal, Threads still finds itself borrowing ideas from a smaller competitor. 

This isn’t an isolated incident. Threads has been systematically adopting Bluesky-inspired features – from custom feeds to algorithmic adjustments. Each move appears calculated to stem any potential exodus to their smaller rival. 

You can read more here.