News Threads follows Bluesky’s starter packs with curated collections of people to follow

[News]

Illustration: The Verge

Meta’s Threads is getting another feature seemingly inspired by Bluesky: curated groups of accounts that you can follow all at once. They basically sound like Meta’s take on Bluesky’s handy starter packs.

Instagram boss Adam Mosseri announced Thursday that Meta is starting to test the feature, and he said that you’ll see the collections “when signing up for Threads and within the For You feed.” A “handful” of “Threads community leaders” curated and shared the current collections.

People will be able to find collections built around topics like “basketball, style and fashion, food, books, pop culture, and more,” Meta spokesperson Alec Booker tells The Verge. “We’ll iterate on this feature based on learnings from the test, and hope to expand the functionality to more people soon.”

Image: Meta

Image: Meta

Meta has upped the pace of Threads feature updates after users really started flocking to Bluesky last month — Threads introduced its own take on custom feeds just five days after announcing the feature in testing, for example.

While I personally think Bluesky is the heir apparent to Twitter, Threads is still significantly larger. Meta saw 35 million Threads signups in November, but Bluesky user growth has seemingly slowed to a crawl: as I write this, Bluesky is on the cusp of surpassing 25 million users, a five million user jump from nearly a month ago.