Jack Dorsey-backed Bluesky replaces 'What’s Hot' with 'Discover' feed; Know all about it

Bluesky, the Jack Dorsey-backed decentralized social media, is replacing its existing ‘What’s Hot’ feed with ‘Discover’ that will use the algorithm to recommend new posts. Check details.

Know all about Bluesky’s new Discover feed. (Bloomberg)

While the headlines are filled with Twitter rebranding itself to X, and Threads getting big updates, Jack Dorsey-backed Bluesky is also making important changes on its platform. Yesterday, July 27, the company announced a major change to its feed, changing it from a straightforward ‘popular posts get featured' system to more of an algorithmic play where users will get a more recommendation-based feed to see new posts that they might actually be interested in. This change will also rename the ‘What's Hot' feed to ‘Discover'. Additionally, those who do not prefer this new feed can always take advantage of custom feeds to choose something they do like.

Bluesky upgrades its feed

In its blog post Bluesky stated, “To improve the default experience, we're now replacing “What's Hot” with “Discover”, a more complex feed that you can expect to evolve over time. Unlike “What's Hot”, “Discover” will be customized for what you like to see, while still giving you a view into what's trending in the network. The initial version of “Discover” mixes in a global view of what's trending in the network with posts from accounts you follow and posts from accounts near your social graph”.

The post also added that it will also be improving the algorithm in days to come and the end goal will be to add more interesting content while taking the users' interests into consideration.

Bluesky's custom feed

In case users do not prefer the Discover feed, they can always use the custom feeds. In case you do not know what they are, here is an easy explanation. Custom feed is a marketplace of feed algorithms, where users can not only create feeds with a specific mix of algorithms to focus on a specific topic, user group, style of posts, and more, but they can also share it with other users.

This allows users to not rely on the company-provided algorithm and instead choose something that they will be more interested in.

“Whether you want to subscribe to a feed of only cat photos or to posts from only your mutuals, this is possible with custom feeds — think of them as super-powered, more customizable hashtags or lists,” the blog post added.