The Custom Bluesky Feeds I Need
There’s no reason anyone needs to be on just one Twitter-like social media platform, but for me splitting my attention was problematic. In the end, nearly all of the people, and the types of people, who made Twitter valuable or enjoyable for me have landed on Bluesky, so that’s where I’ve been spending my social media time.
I’m not going to go into the details and vagaries of custom feeds on Bluesky, but I do want to have one place where I’ve outlined the four primary feeds I’d like to have. So far, I’ve not found a custom feed builder that lets me do this, but maybe this post can serve as a sort of RFP.
Following
This is the default feed that comes with Bluesky. As you might expect, it contains the posts of the people you follow, in reverse chronological order. In addition, you will see replies from anyone you follow to anyone else you follow. This includes anyone you follow making a thread of self-replies. One semi-caveat is that sometimes you will see what looks like a reply from someone you follow to someone you don’t follow but in reality what you are seeing is someone posting a comment on a post whose original poster you also follow. Basically, in that latter case, you’ll see the original post from someone you follow, a placeholder marker indicating the presence of other conversation, a reply from someone you don’t follow, then a reply from someone you do follow. All of this is fine.
Home
However, there’s one problem with the Following feed, as I see it. If you yourself reply to someone you don’t follow, that post will not show up in Following. This bothers me because it’s like I’ve posted into the air and it vanished. I’d like a custom version of Following that functions exactly like the default feed, but with the addition of seeing any replies I myself post to someone I don’t follow. I’d likely just use this, then, as my own default feed, and stop using Following altogether.
Mutuals
Mutuals, for the record, are people you follow who also follow you. There are a couple of different custom feeds for Mutuals, but neither of them do what I want, which is to ape the behavior of the Following feed when it comes to replies between people I follow and when it comes to threads by people I follow. In other words, I want to see conversations and threads. As it stands, the existing custom Mutuals feeds do not show these things, which to my mind renders them incomplete.
Non-Mutuals
Non-mutuals are people you follow but who don’t follow you. There’s at least one custom feed for Non-Mutuals, but it doesn’t do what I want, which is to ape the behavior of the Following feed when it comes to replies between people I follow and when it comes to threads by people I follow. In other words, I want to see conversations and threads. As it stands, existing custom Non-Mutuals feeds do not show these things, which to my mind renders them incomplete.
Followers
Followers are people who follow you but whom you do not follow. There have been a few different custom feeds for Followers, but none of them do what I want, which is somewhat analogous to part of what I want for my other feeds, in that if someone who follows me is posting a thread or self-replying, I want to see those self-replies rather than only their first post. As it stands, existing custom Followers feeds do not show these things, which to my mind renders then incomplete.
As I said, there are a number of custom feed builders out there, but I’ve not been able to get any of them to construct these feeds, else I’m just not seeing how to do it. Hopefully, one or more of them will build out the tooling necessary to make these feeds happen, and my Bluesky life will become much more responsive and manageable to my particular use case.