I wasn’t sold on Bluesky.

I quit Twitter the week Musk took over in 2022. Since then, I’ve bounced between Threads and Bluesky, following my usual mix. Bloggers, journalists, friends, artists. Threads is fine, but its heavy-handed political downranking makes it feel too sanitized. Bluesky on the other hand, is the opposite. A firehose of liberal outrage. Political posts drown out everything else.

It’s not that I don’t want to be aware of what is happening in the world. I do. But I want to decide when and where.

To manage the chaos, I stuck mostly to my mutuals feed. It had the right mix, but it was limited, because well, I don’t have that many mutuals. I even muted a friend whose feed was 95% outrage. That sucked because I liked their other posts.

Then I heard Jay Graber, Bluesky’s CEO, mention personalized moderation in an SXSW interview. I had no idea that was even a thing. Turns out, Bluesky lets you mute posts by keyword for up to 30 days. I set up my list – Trump, Musk, Tesla, the usual suspects – and unmuted my friend.

And it works.

Now, I get the stuff I actually want to see. My feeds are fun again. At least for the next 30 days.