Bluesky is bringing innovation back to social media

If you haven't had a chance to take a look at some of Blue Sky's recent product and platform announcements, I highly recommend that you go and read them. In particular, what they've done with introducing custom feeds as well as starter packs gets me very excited about some real innovation from a social network.

When I saw starter packs introduced, it immediately felt like a no-brainer feature for a social network, and such a powerful thing especially for an emerging social network to offer. Starter packs allow anyone to create a "getting started pack" for a new Bluesky user. This can include a set of recommended follows, and up to three recommended custom feeds (more on those below). This enables their passionate users to be able to personalize an introduction for people not yet on Bluesky. It's a smart way to activate users to play a meaningful role in onboarding new people to the network and grounding them with an existing community to interact with. Of course, Bluesky benefits by likely getting more people onto their new network than they would otherwise.

Custom feeds is an incredible innovation to put the choice of algorithm for the social network in the hands of the wide range of users and different niche communities that exist on the network. The way that the Bluesky team have built custom feeds enables a ton of flexibility for the types of content alogrithms can serve up, and creates a marketplace for browsing and enabling different custom feeds you can choose to view. Something I've observed from the Bluesky team is their commitment to, and intentionality around, building tools for the governance of the network itself. It's very meaningful that on Bluesky you can choose your own algorithm and you can adopt an algorithm that someone else has written, or create your own algorithm for what content shows up in your feed. And I think it's very smart that Bluesky has done this, because it's both innovation and it's strong strategy because it's a highly defensible move which many of the other networks would not be able offer. It would be highly unlikely for the commercial social networks to move away from the company, the network themselves, holding on to ownership of the algorithm and what is served up to you.

I had a wonderful conversation with Rose from the Bluesky team a couple of weeks and one of the topics we got into was around the values that are embedded in the Bluesky team and the work they're trying to do. It was clear to me how thoughtful and intentional they are being around the governance of the network and the flexibility they're building in to allow users to really shape the community and what is important to them.

Something I appreciate about Bluesky is that their goal is to create a social network not controlled by a single company, while also ensuring that it comes together as a cohesive and easy to use experience. Decentralized social media can be daunting and feel complex and inaccessible to people initially, and so I think intentional work going into the simplicity of the experience is paramount.

With great innovation from the Bluesky team such as starter packs and custom feeds, along with their focus on simplicity, I strongly encourage you to go and take a look at this new social network. This is a platform and community that's worth taking a deeper look at, and worth participating and investing time into.