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Comment by nocoolnametom | Hacker News Reader

You've got three tools, mutes, blocks, and lists. Yeah, there's no centralized algorithm that does it for you, it'll take a couple days of actual effort, but it's extremely easy to prune your main feed into looking how you want it to look. Which is pretty much like how it was to use Twitter a few years ago before everything got algorithmed.

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> Yeah, there's no centralized algorithm that does it for you,

Bluesky doesn't really present it that way. The default "Discover" feed at least pretends to be exactly that.

> it'll take a couple days of actual effort, but it's extremely easy to prune your main feed into looking how you want it to look

I think this has changed recently. Months ago I tried to actually use Bluesky, and my Discover feed was awful. 90% of my time on the site was muting/blocking or thinking "show more/less like this" did something and it was an miserable experience which nothing seemed to improve except quitting it.

Checking it now, it's dramatically better. Still includes a lot of content I don't want, but less aggressively so, although that seems to largely be that I was gone so far it could be mostly content from accounts I follow.

A Bluesky dev has admitted that the "show less/more" items did nothing. It was in the context of supposedly hooking them up to real code at long last, though I've yet to see any practical difference. Anyone who claims they worked all along is not arguing in good faith.

That's hilarious. No wonder they didn't seem very effective.

Bluesky is centralized, despite the constant protests that it isn't. https://arewedecentralizedyet.online/

> it'll take a couple days of actual effort, but it's extremely easy

If it takes a couple of days of actual effort, then it’s not extremely easy, especially for the average user who can just go to Threads with their existing Instagram account and not be bombarded with furry and diaper porn.

It actually takes effort to see furry and diaper porn. I'm pretty sure Adult Content is disabled by default and needs to be enabled.

For what it's worth, I've never seen anything like this either.

Just to solidify, I just went and created a new account to ensure I was right, and I was. You need to go to your settings, go to moderation, and enable adult content. I scrolled continuously for 5 minutes straight and saw no adult content on a default account. And on top of this, as far as I can google, Bluesky has never had adult content enabled by default, so if you are seeing it, you enabled it.

The reason why I chose those examples is because they were already brought up in the thread here:

> I've found Bluesky does a really bad job at not showing me stuff I don't want to see. Furry p*rn on the "cute internet cats" feed? Yup.

— https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45397250

> i kept getting weird sexual posts of dudes in diapers, no matter how much i blocked or asked not to see that.

— https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45397733

By default bluesky blocks adult content, once you enable it you can dial in what kind of adult content you wish to see. I know this is all anecdotal, like the links you posted... But I started a new account to see what it's like. I can scroll the default algorithm for 5 minutes and not see anything questionable, and my actual account exists with adult content turned on and I never see it. After signing up the new account, I can search for furry or diaper content, but it appears that none of it is like "nsfw" (mostly just people in furry costumes or diapers but no sexual content or nudity).

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