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I selected my interests as Cooking, Fitness, Nature, Video Games, and my feed has absolutely none of that. Just random politics, activism, and jabs at Twitter.

I selected my interests as Cooking, Fitness, Nature, Video Games, and my feed has absolutely none of that. Just random politics, activism, and jabs at Twitter. Anyway, nope.

BryantD 3y ago
I don't actually know how the interests are intended to work, but I can say that the key feature of Bluesky is feeds. (I know this isn't at all obvious.) Feeds are third-party created, for the most part, and essentially function as filters. So, for example, I follow a movies feed. Any post which includes the movie camera emoji, the word "filmsky", or a few other keywords is included in the movies feed. It makes it very easy to swipe over and see discussions of cinema. That sounds (and is) a lot like tag-based feeds over on Twitter. However, there's additional potential. Behind the scenes, a feed is a service which takes the user info of the person viewing it and the firehose and decides which posts to include based on that input. So "include all posts with these keywords" is valid, but so is "include the top 100 posts with these keywords, as measured by likes." Or "show a feed including only the most recent post from every user the viewer follows." In other words: feeds are the way a third party can build their own algorithm for the firehose. Very powerful, very useful.
ldoughty 3y ago
I found this confusing too I think the interests section was to try get you to find people and feeds.. but after that, the feeds (or just the Discovery feed?) are influenced by who you follow.. so if you are offered a 'bad' (for you) starting group of people to follow, your feed will probably not be great until you find people you like (that are active) and follow them too. Also was unsure what "Follow all +" button was.. why not "Follow Selected".. and a 'deselect all'.. I had no idea who all but 2 of the suggestions were. Not going to follow a random "Computer Scientist" the system picked for me sight/posts unseen.

I selected my interests as Cooking, Fitness, Nature, Video Games, and my feed has absolutely none of that. Just random politics, activism, and jabs at Twitter. Anyway, nope.

BryantD 3y ago

I don't actually know how the interests are intended to work, but I can say that the key feature of Bluesky is feeds. (I know this isn't at all obvious.) Feeds are third-party created, for the most part, and essentially function as filters. So, for example, I follow a movies feed. Any post which includes the movie camera emoji, the word "filmsky", or a few other keywords is included in the movies feed. It makes it very easy to swipe over and see discussions of cinema. That sounds (and is) a lot like tag-based feeds over on Twitter. However, there's additional potential. Behind the scenes, a feed is a service which takes the user info of the person viewing it and the firehose and decides which posts to include based on that input. So "include all posts with these keywords" is valid, but so is "include the top 100 posts with these keywords, as measured by likes." Or "show a feed including only the most recent post from every user the viewer follows." In other words: feeds are the way a third party can build their own algorithm for the firehose. Very powerful, very useful.

ldoughty 3y ago

I found this confusing too I think the interests section was to try get you to find people and feeds.. but after that, the feeds (or just the Discovery feed?) are influenced by who you follow.. so if you are offered a 'bad' (for you) starting group of people to follow, your feed will probably not be great until you find people you like (that are active) and follow them too. Also was unsure what "Follow all +" button was.. why not "Follow Selected".. and a 'deselect all'.. I had no idea who all but 2 of the suggestions were. Not going to follow a random "Computer Scientist" the system picked for me sight/posts unseen.