Post

WHAT IS A CUSTOM FEED‽ A lot of people are still confused about it, so I figured a thread might help clarify. On other social platforms, algorithms are governed by the platform owners. On bsky, algorithms are created, owned, and managed by the community (gimme that means of production bebe).

Is there a way to plug in more complex algorithms? Like user-written ML models for selection and / or ranking.

Yup! The feed can do virtually anything you want. It just needs to generate a list of skeets. Which posts are included, their sort order, and even how you collect them is entirely up to you.

Do you know where I can read about how to have more control? I had some urbanism and politics feeds I wrote regex’s for but I deleted the feeds out of concern that something would end up in the feed that was inappropriate. It would be nice if they had a way to filter out NSFW for example.

Where those feeds built with Skyfeed or did you write the code yourself?

With skyfeed — just using very long but basic regular expressions. The feeds returned desired results — but I have my own personal ability to see NSFW turned off so IDK if it was potentially returning inappropriate results. Long term bsky needs to make moderation responsibilities more transparent.

And RE: more complex skeet processing for feeds, you're not going to be able to do anything beyond what Skyfeed offers unless you get into the code. I'm happy to help with this, but you'd need to be able to provide your own ML setup to make it work.

It’s not relevant for my feeds either but a small mistake in a regex could easily cause something to sneak in. I’m not swearing off custom feeds but I might wait it out until I understand it more and until bsky makes it more clear who’s responsible for content that shows up in a custom feed.

And I have programming experience— if you know of any resources for programming for custom feeds let me know.