Moderation and Custom Feeds

Moderation

What does muting do?

Muting prevents you from seeing any notifications or top-level posts from an account. If they reply to a thread, you’ll see a section that says “Post from an account you muted” with an option to show the post. The account will not know that they have been muted.

What does blocking do?

Blocking prevents interaction. When you block an account, both you and the other account will no longer be able to see or interact with each other’s posts.

How do I flag abuse?

You can report posts by clicking on the three-dot menu. You can also report an entire account by visiting their profile and clicking the three-dot menu there.

What is your plan for moderation?

Our approach to moderation is three-fold: automated filtering, manual admin actions, and community labeling. It stacks new approaches to moderation on top of what centralized social sites already do, and exposes the internals of the system for anyone to observe.

The open and composable labeling system for moderation we’re creating will allow anyone to define and apply labels to content or accounts, and lets anyone choose to subscribe to these label sets. Labels can be automatically or manually generated, and can be applied by any service or person in the network.

For example, an organization like the ACLU could create a “hate-speech” label, and services or users in the network could subscribe to their labels to flag, filter, mute, or ban content. The Bluesky reference app we’re building has custom controls that lets users hide, warn, or show content, and will add more controls over time. Through this approach, we aim to prioritize user safety while giving people more control and transparency over how moderation is done. For more information, read our original blog post on composable moderation.

Custom Feeds

What are custom feeds?

Custom feeds is a feature on Bluesky that allows you to pick the algorithm that powers your social media experience. Imagine you want your timeline to only be posts from your mutuals, or only posts that have cat photos, or only posts related to sports — you can simply pick your feed of choice from an open marketplace.

For users, the ability to customize their feed returns control of their attention to themselves. For developers, an open marketplace of feeds provides the freedom to experiment and publish algorithms that anyone can use.

You can read more about custom feeds and algorithmic choice in our blog post here.

How do I use custom feeds?

On Bluesky, click "My Feeds" on the left side of the app. From there, you can add and discover new feeds.

How can I create a custom feed?

Developers can use our feed generator starter kit to create a custom feed. Eventually, we will provide better tooling such that anyone, including non-developers, can build custom feeds.