(edit: claimed!) I was offering these on X/Twitter before but I think most people I know there might have already moved to bluesky.
So, if anyone here wanting to give bluesky a try, let me know, I have an invite code to share.
FYi: I'm happy to discuss what features bsky has/doesn't have, but I'm not really interested in a discussion between whether fedi or bsky are "superior" (morally or otherwise).
If it helps to know: I think AstroSky has a bigger population than Astrodon, though!
@hannorein about two weeks ago there was a rapid growth in astros. The way I found people was thru the AstroSky and Astronomers feed. It's basically like Lists here but can be dynamically updated instead of manually, which I find helpful!
(Astrosky feed shows every post from every person that signs up, meant to be a community feed, off topic)
(Astronomy feed is the same roster as AstroSky but only posts tagged for this feed appear here, meant to be more astro topic relevant)
@hannorein I think it's more like a customized algorithm that a user or community can develop. It's my favourite part of bsky.
The algorithm can be in Python (like the astrosky) but there are other APIs too (not super familiar on those details).
Every post in bsky is public and goes in one giant global feed (the "firehose"). One can view the firehose but it's meant for a machine to read.
Feeds essentially take the firehose as input and apply filters (cont'd)
@hannorein feeds apply filters on the firehose such as post content (include/exclude words or filters), usernames (include/exclude a list of users) and other metadata to create a timeline that match the feed criteria.
Once you have a Feed, others can search for feeds and view it too. Technically your default timeline is a feed too. So is your Notifications.
Some common feeds are subject matter and are opt in using a hashtag or an emoji.
@hannorein finally, feeds can be programmed to be relative to a user. For instance, I can make a feed that shows the user all the posts that their followers make which have 5 or more likes. So the feed is like a function that generates a timeline for each user using the firehose as input, if that makes sense! Or like the output of an advanced search function.
One thing to note is that since all posts are public, feeds include your posts if they match feed criteria. You don't get a notification.
@hannorein some feeds have a hashtag you can include to opt out of a feed. But few feeds have an exclusion criteria.
Feeds can be used beyond just filtering by topic. Eg there is a feed, Alt4Me, where people who are unable to provide alt text would include a hashtag and crowd source alt text from volunteers visiting the feed.
That's enough from me about feeds lol. You can probably tell it's my favourite feature!
Henry Ngo
Hanno Rein