Bluesky lets users opt their posts out of its Discover feed

Bluesky rolled out an “algorithmic opt-out” feature on Thursday, a day after adding support for longer videos. The new setting lets users stop their posts from appearing in the app’s main Discover feed, which can currently surface any post on the network since posts on Bluesky are public by default.

The company was careful to draw a distinction: this is not a way to make posts private. Bluesky is still working separately on rolling out support for private data at the protocol level. Instead, the new feature simply makes a user’s public posts less discoverable to people outside their existing personal network, while leaving them visible to anyone who already follows that user or seeks out their profile directly.

Bluesky said it built the feature because not everyone on the platform wants their posts to go viral. Some users, the company said, just want to post for their existing followers without having their words surface to a much larger audience through the algorithmic feed.

To turn off Discover-feed distribution, users can toggle a new option in the app’s Privacy and Security settings. Bluesky says the change can take up to an hour to fully take effect across the network.

The opt-out also extends beyond Bluesky’s own app. Because the preference is recorded at the account level rather than as an app-specific setting, it travels with a user even when they post from a different app built on AT Protocol, the decentralized protocol that underpins Bluesky. Other apps on the network can see that a user has opted out, but each one still has to decide for itself whether to actually honor that preference.

Why it matters

The feature gives Bluesky users more control over how widely their posts spread without requiring them to leave the open network’s public-by-default model, but its cross-app design also exposes a limit of building on a shared protocol: respecting user preferences ultimately depends on every app choosing to comply, not just Bluesky.