I don’t even like micro-blogging in general - a “twitter replacement” is the last thing the world needs but I signed up for bsky out of curiosity and feel like ranting about how god-awful the UX truly is.

The “Discover” feed that you start out with is absolutely useless. The site asks you for a list of interests when you sign up, which seems to determine what shows up in Discover, but there is no way to change your interests afterwards. also Discover shows lib-ass posts even if you didn’t select politics or news as interests, so fuck that. The good thing is you can remove the discover feed entirely.

“Feeds” is in interesting concept but is confusing and badly implemented. Feeds can work on different criteria - they can include posts from certain accounts and/or posts that contain certain keywords / hashtags. Or it can be a more complex user-written algorithm. But there is no way of seeing what criteria a particular feed operates on, it’s a total black box.

Feeds are not something a user can easily create - you have a write code and run a server. This is obviously a major problem and as long as this is the case, feeds will be geared towards the interests of tech/nerd types.

There are three different things you can do to a feed - like it (pointless), save it which adds it to “My Feeds”, or pin it which adds it to the horizontal scroll of feeds as well as the vertical list in the sidebar.

The horizontal feed scroll is stupid and works like shit on desktop - dragging with a mouse is clunky as you always end up accidentally highlighting text when you get to either end of the scroll. For the love of god, just give me a dropdown.

Clicking the + icon in the feed discovery page actually saves and pins that feed. To save a feed without pinning it, you have to go to the feed’s page, click on the ••• dropdown and click “Save to My Feeds” which also uses the + icon. So depending on the context, + can either mean “save” or “save and pin” apparently.

Btw why in the fuck do “feeds” use the hashtag icon??

There are also “lists” which is just a list of users, and “starter packs” (stupid term) which is a list of users and feeds - why are these two different things?

Worst of all, there are no communities on bluesky. Shouldn’t there be like, groups that you can join and see all posts from others who have joined that group? Nope, much like twitter the experience is of course hyper-individualized. You can create your own personalized feeds, lists, or starter packs, or view other people’s personalized feeds, lists, or starter packs, but you can’t really belong somewhere. There is no community, only curation.