Lol no worries I think at least a few very basic functions of feeds could be simply improved if there was an innate way to treat individual hashtags as feeds, or if beside feeds people could also create collections of manually saved posts (cause some people use feeds to organize their own posts)
Mar 29, 2026 at 6:10 PM
Custom Feeds Are Not Communities — A Design Theory of Feeds and Commons - Nightflight
Beginning I learned something from Hamakaze no Ryodan, who has deep expertise in creating Bluesky custom feeds. Feeds collect posts without the poster's co…
Middleware for Feed Recommendation in Practice: How Feed Creators Build, Maintain, and Sustain Custom Feeds on Bluesky
Scholars have long proposed third-party middleware as an alternative to centralized algorithmic feeds: feeds built and distributed by independent feed creators. This vision saw no large-scale instantiation until Bluesky, a decentralized microblogging platform, introduced custom feeds in 2023. Although central to the middleware ecosystem, we know little about how feed creators understand their role, build feeds, and sustain them. Through interviews with n = 26 feed creators and third-party developers of feed-building tools, and analysis of n = 88,302 custom feeds, we identify two creator orientations---utility-providing and community-building. Additionally, creators struggle to maintain feeds that fully realize middleware ideals: they lack granular interaction data, receive little feedback, and lack technical expertise to act on either. Finally, creators sustain their feeds as unpaid hobbyists with little platform support and are divided on whether to monetize beyond covering costs. We conclude with design and policy implications for strengthening the middleware feed ecosystem.
Bonsai: Intentional and Personalized Social Media Feeds
Social media feeds use predictive models to maximize engagement, often misaligning how people consume content with how they wish to. We introduce Bonsai, a system that enables people to build personalized and intentional feeds. Bonsai implements a platform-agnostic framework comprising Planning, Sourcing, Curating, and Ranking modules. This framework allows users to express their intent in natural language and exert fine-grained control over a procedurally transparent feed creation process. We evaluated the system with 15 Bluesky users in a two-phase, multi-week study. We find that participants successfully used our system to discover new content, filter out irrelevant or toxic posts, and disentangle engagement from intent, but curating intentional feeds required more effort than they are used to. Simultaneously, users sought system transparency mechanisms to effectively use (and trust) intentional, personalized feeds. Overall, our work highlights intentional feedbuilding as a viable path beyond engagement-based optimization.
Making a feed is really easy
Feeds are Not Fit for Gardening — Sympolymathesy, by Chris Krycho
—at least, in their current instantiations with RSS, Atom, JSON Feed, etc.
h-feed
h-feed is a microformats2 specification for marking up HTML as a feed with optional with name, photo, common author, that contains h-entry items (or other root (h-*) objects), and published by numerous personal sites and consumed by social readers.
feeds.social — Minimalist Bluesky Client
RSS Feed to Social Media | Fedica
Fedica's RSS Feed to Social Media auto-posts new articles, videos, or podcasts to 13 platforms via Pipeline, with auto-formatting and thread-splitting.
Permissioned Data Shapes: Feeds - Nick's Blog
Public feed generators drink from a firehose that permissioned data never enters, so a feed that includes space content has to become a syncer, keep a live model of who can see what, and serve a different skeleton to every viewer.
Custom feeds are the singular theory of action for growing the open social web and reorienting distribution and monetization in the attention economy. I don't have all the answers, but the future of social is becoming clearer everyday. jshaked.leaflet.pub/3mhqtyaufyc26
Exploring the Frontier of Feeds - The Open Garden
jshaked.leaflet.pub@toni.bsky.team @alexbenzer.com i think yall need to wrestle with the fact that the app’s most distinctive feature (“custom feeds”) is something only (relative) nerds use and benefit from. normal people won’t swipe between many algorithms or whatever. have a look at past designs for “communities”
