Bluesky’s feeds feature is one of its most interesting features and what differentiates it from other social media platforms.
Bluesky users can follow different feeds that show different kinds of posts or they can even create their own feeds that show the kind of posts that they want.
This feature allows users to really feel in control. Which is what everyone wants ultimately.
How to Create a Feed on Bluesky
Since Bluesky is an open-source platform, people can create their own feeds with code.
Luckily, if you’re not a programmer you can use a tool that will help you create a feed without touching any code. And that’s the way that we’re going to take a look at.
1. Create an app password on Bluesky
App passwords are ways that you can use to give access to third-party Bluesky clients to your Bluesky account without providing your main password.
This is the same way as authorizing a third-party app to have access to your Bluesky account.
Here is how you can create an app password:
1. Head over to the settings page
2. Click on ‘Privacy and security’
3. Choose ‘App passwords’
4. Click on ‘Add App Password’ to create a new app password.
5. You should provide a name for the app password and you will have an option to check whether to give it access to DMs or not. But to create a feed, we don’t need access to DMs
Your app password will be created and on the next page, you can copy it.
2. Log in to SkyFeed
SkyFeed is a real-time client for Bluesky. Think of it as TweetDeck for Bluesky.
Head on to SkyFeed and input your credentials. For the password, use the app password that you just created in the previous step.
3. Create a feed on SkyFeed
Now the last step is to create a feed on SkyFeed.
Here is how you can create a feed on SkyFeed:
1. Head over to Feed Builder
You’ll start with something that looks like this.
There are many options/blocks here, but think of all these as what you’re inputting, filtering, and searching for in terms of posts that you want to display on your feed.
Let’s take a look at all the blocks that you can use to create a feed in Bluesky
Input
This refers to what you’re inputting in your feed so that you can show (output) posts.
Here there are a couple of options to choose from:
- Entire network (All Bluesky users) – This is useful if you want to fetch posts from all users based on certain criteria
- Tags
- Single user – if you want a feed to contain posts from a single user only
- List – if you want a feed to contain posts from certain Bluesky list
- Feed – if you want your feed to fetch posts from another feed
- Single Post
- Labels – If you want to fetch posts from Bluesky moderation labels such as nudity, graphic-media, etc
Remove
This is used to remove posts from your feed that match the criteria that you set.
For example, you can remove replies from your feed so that it only contains original posts. Or you can remove posts based on likes or reply counts
Here are all the criteria that you can filter:
- Item
- Labels
- Image Count
- Like Count
- Reply Count
- Repost Count
- Embed
- Duplicates
- List of Users
- Language
RegEx
You can use this to match Regular Expressions for post text, image alt text, or links
Replace
Sort
Sort is used for sorting. You can sort based on likes count, repost count, reply counts or creation date.
Limit
Limit is used to limit the count of posts that will be shown in the feed.
Stash+Pop
Stash and Pop are used to save your posts to your feed temporarily then clears your feed then fetches back your saved posts.
Remember Posts
Remember posts keep track of all posts to ever enter your feed.
Creating a Feed on Bluesky
Now that we know all the blocks we need to create a feed, let’s create one.
The feed that we’re making is simple. We want to display posts from a certain list but remove all replies and posts in a thread (hellthread)
Here is how you can create a list on Bluesky
1. Go to the lists page from the left navigation
2. Click the ‘New’ button on the top right.
3. Provide a name and description for your list
4. To add a new person to your list, go to the account’s profile, click on the three dots button and choose ‘Add to lists’ then choose a list.
Now that we have our list. Let’s head back to sky feed.
In the input block, let’s choose list instead of entire network. Then paste the link to your list.
We will also add a remove block and remove posts if they are a reply or if post is in a hellthread.
This is all that we will have for this simple feed.
You can now publish your feed directly in Sky Feed and copy its link.
