The hoary marmot (Marmota caligata) inhabits the mountains of northwest North America. They're in the ground squirrel family, albeit their mature weights range from two-and-a-half to ten kilograms. One of its nicknames is the whistler after its propensity for using a high-pitched whistle as a method of communicating with other marmots. (📸 Steven Pavlov, via Wikimedia Commons under the Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported license.)
Active Custom Feeds
How about a Bluesky Custom Feed that notifies you when there’s something new?
By Terence C. Gannon
Notifications are Attention-Getters
Because they’re increasingly rare, I’ll cop to a little adrenaline rush every time the perky notification badge shows up on the Bluesky app icon. Doubly so if it turns out to be a follow. Triply if it’s the coveted repost. As such, they’ll tend to make me pause whatever it is I’m doing and take a look. I bet yours make you look, too.
I propose the same capability be extended to Bluesky’s Custom Feeds,1 at least under certain conditions. Each time a new post meets the criteria of an Active Custom Feed—as I proffer they’re called—that feed will provide a notification visually similar to the notifications provided for likes, replies, reposts, and new followers.
It’s a seemingly small change to the existing Bluesky Custom Feed functionality. However, it has the potential to change everything.
I’m Standing Here Whistling and … Bupkis
Ifyou want to know what’s going on with the hoary marmots in the Rocky Mountains—as discussed in the highly specific but entirely fictional Rocky Mtn Hoary Bluesky Custom Feed—you have to navigate to the feed and take a look. Once you’re there, you then have to try and remember which posts you’ve previously seen. This will be hard to know with any certainty, given you may not have looked at Rocky Mtn Hoary in months or maybe even years.
In the beginning, shortly after discovering it, you may have optimistically checked Rocky Mtn Hoary every hour on the hour. Never mind the feed only has three likes; there has to be more people interested in the whistler than that, right? However, when it began to seem there wasn’t much of anything going on, it was only natural for your time-constrained attention to drift. The hourly checks slide to daily ones, then weekly, then monthly, then never, and after that, it’s like Rocky Mtn Hoary never existed at all.
It’s not that your attention span is challenged; it’s actually pretty easy to entirely forget a Custom Feed under these circumstances, given new posts show up so infrequently. On the other hand, it’s the rarity of these posts that often makes them so interesting when they finally do show up.
Hoary Marmot Fans Unite
How exciting it would be to pin Rocky Mtn Hoary as an Active Custom Feed. As such, it would start sending you those attention-getting notifications, each one with the potential to trigger a click over to the new and intriguing post in the feed. Of course, this would also be the case for all those with whom you share your passion for large wild rodents and, as such, also pinned Rocky Mtn Hoary as one of their Active Custom Feeds.
When one of these rare, precious, and highly anticipated posts appears in Rocky Mtn Hoary, the simultaneous notifications rippling out to everybody who pinned this Active Custom Feed will trigger this community to reconvene around the post, which is hyperlinked in the notification. Synchronous, interactive engagement with other hoary fans is likely the potential happy consequence.
Incidentally, if your primary and perhaps only initial interest in being on Bluesky is Rocky Mtn Hoary, make it your default feed. This would favour Bluesky as the go-to for the wildly scattered but closely-knit hoary marmot community, and nobody caters to hoary marmot-lovers like Bluesky does! you’ll undoubtedly tell your friends as you pass along the share link for Rocky Mtn Hoary.
Passions like this can be very sticky, particularly if the feeds supporting them are lively and active. Having arrived on Bluesky and found your people, in at least this one regard, there’s a higher likelihood you will stick around to find other communities where you have something in common. With the sky-high signal-to-noise ratio Active Custom Feeds enable, you’ll definitely have the time to poke around.
Not All Custom Feeds Should Be Active
Wildly popular Bluesky Custom Feeds, such as Discovery and For You, address the potential barrier to acceptance for new users resulting, ironically, from Bluesky’s absence of any black-box, civilisation-destroying algorithm. These feeds seem to be targeted at new users so their initial experience is somewhat similar to the social platforms from whence they came, and make them more comfortable with Bluesky in their newby days. Fair enough.
However, the prime directive of these mainstream feeds—to get users lots of stuff in a hurry without a lot of work—makes them inherently ill-suited as Active Custom Feeds. With their volume of posts, pinners might well spend their entire day dealing with notifications. When received too frequently, notifications get turned off and you’re right back where you started—forgetting the feed ever existed.
Although it may seem counterintuitive, the quieter the feed—and there are lots of them on Bluesky—the better suited they are to be an Active Custom Feed. To help with discovery, each and every Bluesky post would afford a reverse lookup of the hyperlinked Active Custom Feeds in which that post appears.
The Existential Reason Why This Needs to Happen
Asteady stream of new users is finding its way to Bluesky, adding up to an impressive total of over forty-one million as of the end of January, 2026.2 That’s amazing. However, it’s not as rosy a picture as it may first appear.
Under these steady growth circumstances, it’s logical to expect engagement would roughly keep pace, at a minimum. However, it’s actually the opposite: engagement is currently falling in both relative and absolute terms,3 as per statistics provided by BluFacts, for example, and likely corroborated by other similar services.
New Bluesky users are coming in the front door, taking a look around, and then fairly quickly turning on their heels and walking right back out again. The potential for increased engagement and stickiness associated with Active Custom Feeds supports the absolutely essential work of turning around this disturbing, potentially fatal trend.
Oh, and One More Thing. Actually Two.
Bluesky is on the hunt for revenue: currently, it has none, and this obviously has to change. To avoid advertising—which nobody wants—one potential source would be a new class of paid Bluesky accounts with some additional premium services. The ability to create and maintain Active Custom Feeds would be a great candidate to be included in a hypothetical future Bluesky Plus offering. Simply pinning the Active Custom Feed created by someone else would still be free, of course.
Finally, Bluesky should promptly use some of that recent, whopping investment4 to acquire one of the companies with a Custom Feed-focused product, such as SkyFeed. It’s the one I use, and it does a lot of things right, but there are others, of course. With this acquisition, Custom Feeds, a key differentiator from other social platforms, could then become part of Bluesky’s core offering, as opposed to seemingly one of its best-kept secrets.
As the first order of business, after the deal closes, give them the job of putting the Active in Active Custom Feeds.
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Terence C. Gannon is Founder and President of Intellog Inc., a firm engaged in digital content creation, social media marketing, and digital project development. He is currently seconded to the aviation-oriented publication BluFly as their Managing Editor. Terence would love to hear from you about his proposal for Active Custom Feeds; here's where you can leave your comments on—where else?—Bluesky.
