Starter Packs with OPML and RSS
One of the things I like about Bluesky is the Starter Pack feature.
In a gist, a Starter Pack is a collection of feeds.
Bluesky users can:
- Create starter packs
- Share starter packs
- Subscribe to starter packs
Unfortunately, Starter Packs are limited to Bluesky.
Or are they?
As mentioned, starter packs are a collection of feeds that others can create, share, and subscribe to.
Bluesky supports RSS, which means you could organize the feeds using an OPML file that you can share with others and others can subscribe to. The benefits of this is, you can continue to keep up with activity on Bluesky from the feed reader of your choice without being required to have an account on Bluesky.
More importantly, because RSS and OPML are open standards, you're not limited to building starter packs for Bluesky. You can create, share, and subscribe to starter packs for any platform that supports RSS. That includes blogs, podcasts, forums, YouTube, Mastodon, etc. Manton seems to have something similar in mind as a means of building on open standards that make it easy for Micro.blog to interop with various platforms.
If you're interested in what that might look like in practice, check out my "starter packs" which you can subscribe to using your RSS reader of choice and the provided OPML files.
I'm still working on similar collections for Mastodon and Bluesky but the same concept applies.
Although these are just simple examples, it shows the importance of building on open standards and the open web. Doing so introduces more freedom for creators and communities.
Here are other "starter packs" you might consider subscribing to.
If this is interesting to you, Feedland might be a project worth checking out.