Flipboard introduces a custom feed for Bluesky

Social magazine app Flipboard has introduced a custom feed for the decentralized social network Bluesky. The company said that the “Tech by Flipboard” feed is a curated feed by the app’s recommendation algorithm.

Last month, Bluesky rolled out the ability to create custom feeds built using custom algorithms. Users can add these feeds to their accounts to browse different content and accounts on the social network. The idea was that Bluesky shouldn’t have a single feed with a core recommendation algorithm like other social networks.

This presents an opportunity to app makers to build their custom feeds to show relevant content to users. Flipboard’s tech feed is all about different articles posted by users. Think of it as the article recommendation system Nuzzle (RIP), which Twitter killed a few years ago, but on Bluesky.

Flipboard said that its algorithm looks through the firehose of content on Blueksy and picks relevant posts.

“For our Tech feed, our AI topic extraction algorithms don’t just look at the raw text being posted to Bluesky. Instead, they dig into shared articles, categorize the content inside them, and confirm that the article meets Flipboard’s quality standards. This delivers streams of stories that are both topical and high quality,” the company said in a blog post.

It added that soon it will introduce custom feeds for different topics like Business and Entertainment. You can connect your Bluesky account to Flipboard and see these feeds in the news app.

Flipboard has integrated with different open protocols like ActivityPub and AT Protocol. This lets users see their Mastodon, Bluesky, and Pixelfed feeds in the Flipboard app.

Bluesky currently has a limited user base but with custom feeds it is giving people a taste of the algorithmic choice Jack Dorsey and the company’s CEO Jay Graber have talked about. As networks like Twitter, TikTok, and Instagram are experimenting with a heavy-handed approach to what should appear in your feed, having feeds populated by different algorithms could be refreshing.