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Today, Bluesky and its third-party developer community offer a variety of tools for building feeds, lists, and starter packs of people you think are worth following, but Pack2List is specifically designed to divert everyone’s set of recommended users from their starter pack. You can add it to your Bluesky list in just a few steps.
Starter Pack and List
But first, let’s back up a bit to learn about these two types of lists.
The difference between the starter pack and Bluesky lists is that the former is intended as a quick way to follow a group of users all at once. The idea is that any user of Bluesky can create a starter pack of people they think others should follow, and then share them with others in their feed or elsewhere on the web. These starter packs can also be found in the user’s Bluesky profile tab.
Starter packs serve as a clever way for Bluesky to grow its community and network of connections. This can be difficult to do, at least on newer social networks that don’t rely on importing your entire address book. Unlike Meta’s Instead, the Starter Pack lets Bluesky’s own user base curate the network into unique topical groups, making it easier for people to move from an empty timeline to one full of interesting posts.
For example, we have starter packs focused on politics, journalists, developers, technologists, academia, sports, AI, health, and many other fan groups, regions, and communities. A third-party site, Bluesky Directory, tracks the growing number of starter packs available across the network. (For example, here’s one for TechCrunch!)
You can follow everyone on this type of curated list by clicking a button in the starter pack, or you can optionally pick and choose from a set of recommendations to follow specific individuals.
Meanwhile, Bluesky lists are a curated group of Bluesky accounts that you put together for your own purposes.
It could be a list of people you want to track, or it could be a list of people you want to block. (For left-leaning Bluesky users who want to avoid turning Bluesky into yet another angry Twitter, the block list of MAGA people has become a popular addition, based on how many people have re-shared the list with others across the social network.) )
However, you may want to pin the Bluesky list of your favorite scientists, journalists, AI researchers, authors, or other celebrities to your home page (or mobile home screen) for easy access. You may want to create a list of close friends, coworkers, or other people who primarily post about certain topics or participate in certain types of communities.
Unlike starter packs that are meant to encourage followers, you don’t necessarily have to follow everyone on the list. Similar to Lists in
Convert Starter Pack to List
Both types of lists are useful, but Bluesky lacks a key feature that allows you to take someone else’s shared starter pack and turn that pack into a list that you can always access from your Bluesky account in a dedicated location, rather than following you.
This is where the Pack2List web app comes into play. This tool, along with other tools that enable list merging, list transformation, etc., is available on GitHub and this native PHP website.
To use the service, you’ll need to enter your Bluesky credentials, including your username and app password. (Create an app password in Bluesky’s security settings. This security feature eliminates the need to share your default Bluesky password with third-party apps.)
Then simply paste the URL into the starter pack you want to turn into a list and choose whether it’s a list you want to follow (“content”) or a list you want to use to block users (“moderation”).
Click the “Submit” button and your starter pack will be immediately listed in your Bluesky account.
You can also optionally add the URL of one of the other lists that already exists in your account if you want to merge the starter pack into that list instead.
Of course, you don’t need to use a tool like this to have a good Bluesky experience.
The great thing about the Bluesky 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 has a very similar look and feel to old Twitter, an app now called Elon Musk’s X. But if you want to explore Bluesky’s more advanced features, it’s helpful to know that there’s already a broad community of developers building tools, services, and apps to help you do more with Bluesky if you choose.
