Inspired by another recent post on ATProto I signed up for bsky, but all I see is endless American politics. I relentlessly click "less like this" but it doesn't seem to budge. Is this just what the platform is like? Being constantly barraged by the same predictable takes on today's bizarre overseas controversy is not very conducive to mental peace...
To add a (positive) point of comparison: The concept of multiple named "feeds" with various degrees of "algorithm-ness" to them, including ones largely controlled by the user's explicit signals, is something that Tumblr implemented in a fascinating way.
IMO Tumblr's constraints were quite unique in the social space: a userbase that one could quite naturally (and with a badge of pride) describe as "rabid" in its expectations that their historical dash experience be preserved in much the way it had been in the early 2010s (with or without a ball pit included); a legacy PHP codebase without the benefits of Meta's resources; and ownership under various companies throughout the years that (from an outsider's perspective) did not prioritize algorithmic optimization of its feeds as a C-suite-driven priority, unlike practically every other social network at scale.
The result is systems like https://github.com/Automattic/stream-builder that enabled Tumblr product teams to define Following, For You, Your Tags, Popular etc. feeds with complex but deterministic and predictable specifications, where each feed would round-robin each slot from a mixture of well-defined component streams.
I'm not as familiar with Bluesky's implementation, but I imagine it has a similarly predictable algorithm for these user-defined feeds.
I would encourage anyone building any kind of discovery experience to look at this repo, at least at its readme and guide, for inspiration. You can, and should, build magical experiences without needing to make your feed algorithms inscrutable. Not everything needs to be TikTok, and I think the world can be a bit more sane if we don't have that as our base assumption as engineers.
For You is based on your likes. If you get an empty feed then you probably haven't liked anything yet. Try liking a couple of posts in Discover feed and get back to For You.
Hmm... I found a couple of accounts I liked and completely removed "Discovery" tab and then I extend the followers list organically by the shared interactions (see some interesting comment in followers posting) or by following account from blogs/websites…
IMHO this is how "social-media" should work instead of being forced-feed with some automatic crap
It does thankfully have a functioning non-algorithmic feed that only shows who you've followed, which I feel is the only way to maintain sanity on any of these platforms.
I imagine myself switching over to that pretty quickly if I do stick with the platform (I also use YouTube that way) but that doesn't address the discovery problem.
It's just really sad that you give people a platform to say whatever they want to the world and most people seem to have little to say beyond "here's what made me unhappy today"...
The real problem is the expectation of immediate discovery. People have gotten used to "give me something new now", and the algorithm complies but then quality is low.
Slow, organic discovery is where it's at. Seed your feed by following people you already know, then slowly add other people you come across. If your feed is half empty for weeks, that's a feature, not a bug.
I made the mistake of selecting "art" as one of my topics of interest during the account setup process and my feed is full of drawings of furries and comic book superhero nonsense.
Lacking any useful deities to give us an objective definition of art, we're going to have to go with the majority opinion here: pictures people create with their hands and brain are art.
I tried bsky for one year, and I agree that I was getting mostly American politics… which as a European is just noise for me.
I went back to Mastodon, it’s much better to follow tech people.
And feedly for RSS to get all the news I can dream of.
Not sure what the point of Bluesky is anymore, it’s just twitter but on the left side of politics. Sad, the tech stack was interesting as an evolution of Nostr.
I would recommend not using an algorithmic home feed.
I don't know how it is on Bluesky, but on Mastodon I only see posts from people I follow, including posts they've boosted. When I see interesting boosts or replies, I check if those are people I want to follow. Works great.
Also go to Settings > Contents and Media > Your Interests and turn off News and Politics. If you were wanting news and politics but just non-American I don't have suggestions.
Do you follow anyone? If so, who? If not, you're in an edge-case for users who haven't yet started following anyone.
Follow people. Carefully curate who you follow. Your feed will be exactly what you pick. It's a lot like old-school Twitter before it went algorithmic.
Unpopular opinion: you do not need Twitter-style social media in your life. In fact, it is actively harmful for your mental well-being.
I signed up for bsky, had the same experience, and realised my life is qualitatively better without constant exposure to manufactured drama, ragebait and American politics. I deleted my account. Life is still meh, but could be much worse.
Use the "Following" feed and select what you want to see as a most recent of what you've followed. The client will stay on the Following feed until you logout. It should be the default, but you aren't forced into an algorithmic feed on bsky.
It's not just who you follow, it feels like the way people post changed as well: I follow mostly the same people as I did on twitter but most act different now, more hot takes and opinions, less signal. To be honest I'm not fond of the popularity contest vibe, but that's irrelevant to the protocol itself.
