Comment by mcintyre1994 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mcintyre1994 | Hacker News Reader

I'm not familiar with the other similar sites, but Bluesky seems much more interesting as a product than Twitter/X ever did. I think the way they encourage users to build/share custom feeds, and especially how they can be independent of your follow graph, is really interesting. The problem with these sites has always been having a single algorithmic feed controlled by someone else IMO.

Some interesting feeds I've seen are only posts by mutuals, lots of curated feeds that just show a subset of posts by a small number of accounts (whether or not you follow them), a following feed that filters out reposts/replies, a custom open source Discover algorithm based on your likes.

This feels way more interesting to me than anything Twitter/X has ever tried to do, even if you really like their single algorithm and the way their following feed works.

Custom feeds and starter packs seem to be promoted much more on Bluesky than lists were on Twitter, but how different are the actual capabilities from Twitter lists? I never looked at my algorithmic feed. Instead I make a "list" of accounts I followed and pinned that list to my home view. That way I only got exactly their posts in chronological order (with no ads). I saw that recommended by some HN user long ago, but I don't remember who.

I have fully switched to Bluesky at this point anyway, but the list approach worked fine for me on Twitter long after most users were complaining about the feed algo.

I thought Twitter lists could only be used for a list of accounts, so you'd see everything posted by everyone in the list. Whereas Bluesky feeds can only show posts with certain tags/content etc, and can be based on things like your following/likes without you maintaining the list of those. I might be wrong though about the limitations of lists because I never used them much.

And the starter packs who make it easy and quick to straight up build a follow base of curated content uniquely. That stuff only makes Twitter less relevant in an instant.

It's not that interesting, it's essentially just tweaking some knobs here and there. The problems it causes are far worse though, it just intensifies echo chambers, and self-selected filter bubbles, and ultimately ignorance and polarization.

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