I've had eleven Bluesky tabs open in my browser for something like four days now, which is a very on-brand way for me to procrastinate on writing this. But I finally got my feed into a shape where I actually want to open the app in the morning instead of just doomscrolling out of habit, and a few people asked how I did it after I complained about my old timeline on here last week. So, tutorial time.
Quick context for anyone who hasn't been paying attention: Bluesky crossed 25 million users a little over a week ago, which is a genuinely wild number for a site that felt like a ghost town as recently as last spring. I moved most of my posting over there back in November, mostly out of exhaustion with the other place, and my first two weeks were rough. Not because the people were bad, but because the default "Discover" feed is basically algorithmic soup, the same as every other big platform's default feed. Lots of dunking, lots of main-character-of-the-day stuff, not a lot of the actual niche tech chatter I moved there for.
Here's what fixed it for me.
Turn off Discover as your home tab. This sounds obvious in retrospect but it took me embarrassingly long to notice. Tap the little feeds icon at the bottom, then the pencil/edit button up top, and you can reorder or straight up remove Discover from your pinned feeds. I kept it around but moved it three tabs to the right, out of muscle-memory range. My actual home tab now is a plain chronological Following feed, no algorithm at all, which feels almost quaint in 2024 but is exactly what I wanted.
Go build or borrow some custom feeds. This is the part people sleep on. Bluesky's whole feed system is open — anyone can build a custom feed generator and publish it for others to subscribe to, and there are already a bunch of good ones floating around covering specific topics: game dev, academia, various regional and interest-based communities. Search "feeds" in the app, not accounts, and just start subscribing to two or three that match what you actually care about. I run one for local tech/startup chatter and one that's basically just people posting about mechanical keyboards, because apparently that's who I am now.
Use starter packs to bootstrap follows fast. If you know even one person already active on Bluesky, ask if they've made a starter pack — it's a shareable bundle of accounts and a feed around some theme, and clicking through one is a much faster way to build a real following list than searching around blind for twenty minutes. I made one for local tech writers a few weeks back and it's genuinely the easiest way I've onboarded anyone onto anything in years.
Mute words liberally. Settings > Moderation > Muted Words. I muted a handful of terms tied to stuff I just don't want showing up in my main feed, regardless of who's posting it. This isn't about avoiding disagreement, it's about not having my main social app double as a stress source before 9am. No shame in it.
One complaint while I'm at it: the mobile app still doesn't let you reorder feeds as smoothly as I'd like, and dragging on a small screen is fiddly enough that I ended up doing all my feed reorganizing on desktop instead. Minor thing, but if you're going to do this setup, do it on a laptop, save yourself the frustration.
None of this is complicated once you've done it once, it just isn't obvious from the default experience, and nobody really walks you through it when you sign up. The whole point of a feed you control is that it stops feeling like a chore, and mine finally does. I check it now the way I used to check RSS readers, which if you've been reading this blog since the early days, you'll know is about as high a compliment as I hand out.
Anyway. Holidays are this week, posting here might get sparse for a bit. Go fix your feed in the meantime.