Bluesky Discover Feed: How It Works and How to Fix a Bad One
The Bluesky Discover feed is Bluesky's own ranked feed of recent, popular posts. Its official description is one line: "Trending content from your personal network." It sits next to the Following feed, which is chronological and shows only people you follow. Discover is the one that guesses.
Bluesky hasn't published how Discover ranks posts, so I looked at what it actually serves. On November 13, 2026, I paged through 1,900 posts of the public Discover feed, with no login and no language filter. That's Discover with nothing personal to go on, so it shows what the feed favors by default. Not one of the 1,900 was a reply or a quote post, 63% carried images, and half were less than 5.3 hours old.
Below: what's in the feed, what the app tells it about you, and how to fix a Discover feed that's empty, political or just bad.
(Disclosure: I make Agent Sky, a Bluesky growth tool. It doesn't change your Discover feed. More on it at the end.)
How Does the Bluesky Discover Feed Work?
Discover is a custom feed run by Bluesky itself. It's the same kind of feed as the thousands of custom feeds anyone can build, but Bluesky pins it first for new accounts. It launched in July 2023 as the successor to an older feed called What's Hot, and it has 39,622 likes (Bluesky API, November 13, 2026).
Bluesky doesn't publish the formula, but the app's open-source code shows what it sends Discover while you're signed in:
- Seen. Which posts scrolled past on your screen.
- Liked, reposted, replied to, quoted, shared. Your normal actions on a post.
- Tapped into. Opening the post, its author, a reposter, or whatever it embeds.
- "Show more like this" / "Show less like this." Two buttons in a post's three-dot menu, added in May 2024. They only appear when you're signed in, on Discover and on feeds that accept this feedback.
- Your interests. The topics you picked in Settings > Content and media > Your interests go along with every request.
The code shows what Discover receives, not how it weighs it. Put that next to the official description ("your personal network") and my best reading is: who you follow shapes the pool, and what you do in the feed tunes it. (My older post on the Bluesky algorithm covers the creator side.)
What about the dislike button? Bluesky announced a "dislikes" beta in November 2025 as a way to improve Discover. I found no dislike button in the app's code as of November 13, 2026. "Show less like this" is the negative signal you can actually tap.
Bluesky says Discover is still a work in progress. In its January 2026 roadmap, Alex Benzer wrote: "The Discover feed has come a long way, but there's more to do." About who-to-follow suggestions, he added: "High-quality follows lead to a much better experience."
What Kind of Posts Show Up in Discover?
In the public feed: recent posts, mostly with images, no replies or quotes, and usually some likes already. The table below shows 1,900 Discover posts from November 13, 2026. For comparison, the right-hand column is a three-hour sample of every new top-level post on Bluesky that I took on November 10 for my Bluesky vs Instagram post.
| What the post carried | Discover (1,900 posts) | All new top-level posts (Nov 10) |
|---|---|---|
| Image(s) | 63.2% | 23.6% |
| Link card | 21.3% | 27.4% |
| Text only | 9.1% | 29.8% |
| Video | 6.5% | 4.0% |
| Quote of another post | 0% | 15.1% |
| Reply | 0% | (replies excluded) |
Five things in that table matter if you want to show up in Discover:
- Images dominate. About a quarter of new top-level posts carry images, but nearly two-thirds of Discover does. Text-only posts are under a tenth.
- No replies and no quote posts. I found zero of either in 1,900 posts. Public Discover showed only standalone posts, so a great reply in a big thread probably won't land there.
- It's a one-day feed. The median post was 5.3 hours old. 97% were under 24 hours old, and the oldest was about 30 hours.
- You don't need a huge following. The median post had 46 likes, and 8.6% had fewer than 10. The 1,275 authors had a median of 4,244 followers, and 15.7% had under 1,000.
- In my sample, higher spots went to more-liked, newer posts. The top 100 had a median of 158 likes and were 3.4 hours old. Posts ranked 1,000 to 1,900 had a median of 30 likes and were 6.2 hours old.
The public feed was 61% English, and 4 of the 6 accounts that showed up most were news outlets from Brazil, Spain and Germany. That's the feed with no signals from anyone. Signed in, Discover draws on "your personal network," so yours will look different, and so will a friend's.
What's the Difference Between Discover and Following?
Following shows everyone you follow, newest first. Discover picks and ranks posts for you, from roughly the last day.
| Following | Discover | |
|---|---|---|
| Order | Chronological | Ranked by Bluesky's algorithm |
| Whose posts | Only accounts you follow (plus their reposts) | "Trending content from your personal network," not limited to follows |
| Replies and quote posts | Yes | None in my 1,900-post sample |
| How far back | As far as you scroll | About a day (oldest post in my sample: ~30 hours) |
| Can you tune it? | By following and unfollowing | Show more / Show less, interests, follows |
| Can you unpin it? | Yes | Yes |
Want the app to open on Following? Tap the Following tab once. The app remembers the last feed you used and reopens there. To make it the default, go to Feeds > Edit My Feeds and move Following to the top of your pinned feeds, since the app falls back to the first pinned feed when it has nothing remembered.
Why Is My Bluesky Discover Feed So Bad?
Usually because it has too little to go on, or the signals it gets lean one way. The common complaints:
| Problem | Likely cause | Fix |
|---|---|---|
| Empty | Too few follows, or content language settings | Check Settings > Languages > Content languages, then follow more active accounts |
| Too political | Your network, past likes and interests lean that way, and news trends | "Show less like this", update Your interests, add mute words |
| Wrong language | No content languages set, so all languages show | Pick your languages in Settings > Languages > Content languages |
| Same few people | A small network gives Discover little to pick from | Follow more people in the topics you want |
| Trending videos or topics you don't want | Both are on by default | Settings > Content and media: turn off "Enable trending topics" and "Enable trending videos in your Discover feed" |
Why is my Bluesky Discover feed empty?
Bluesky's own answer, from the app: "This feed is empty! You may need to follow more users or tune your language settings." The app asks feeds to stick to the content languages you pick, so if you chose only a language that's rare on Bluesky, the feed can come up nearly empty. Fix the languages first, then follow more active accounts.
Why is my Bluesky feed so political?
A political Discover usually reflects your own signals. Likes and taps on news posts are feedback Discover receives, and it likely sends more of the same. News also trends, and even the public feed I sampled leaned on news outlets. To turn it down:
- Open the three-dot menu on posts you don't want and tap "Show less like this." Do it on several posts. One tap may not change much.
- Check Settings > Content and media > Your interests and remove topics you don't want.
- Add words and hashtags under Settings > Moderation tools > Muted words & tags. Muting hides matching posts in every feed.
- Tap "Show more like this" on the posts you do want.
- Follow people in other topics, so news isn't most of your network.
If you'd rather skip Discover entirely, unpin it in Feeds > Edit My Feeds. Your Following feed and any custom feeds stay. For a ranked feed on one topic, the Bluesky feed directory lists popular custom feeds by subject.
Can You Reset or Turn Off the Bluesky Discover Feed?
There's no reset button or "clear my history" setting, but you can turn it off. What you can do:
- Retrain it. Use "Show less like this" and "Show more like this" for a while, and stop liking posts you don't want more of.
- Change the pool. Follow accounts in the topics you want, and unfollow inactive accounts and ones you followed by accident.
- Turn it off. Unpin Discover in Feeds > Edit My Feeds, or remove it from your feeds, and pin one or two topic feeds instead.
Want to keep your own posts out of other people's Discover? Turn on "Ask apps to hide my posts from algorithmic recommendations" in Settings > Privacy and Security (added in August 2026). The app says your posts "will only appear in the Discover feed to people who follow you." It doesn't make your account private.
How I sampled. On November 13, 2026 (about 17:00 UTC), I requested Bluesky's Discover feed (at://did:plc:z72i7hdynmk6r22z27h6tvur/app.bsky.feed.generator/whats-hot) from the public API with no login, 100 posts at a time, until the request cursor grew too long to send: 1,900 unique posts. A second pass a minute later shared 1,762 of the same posts, and a third pass that asked for English returned nearly identical numbers (the public API doesn't filter by language). I classed each post by its embed, and post age is time since the post's own timestamp. Follower counts come from the public getProfiles endpoint. This is the public, un-personalized feed only. A signed-in feed is personalized and language-filtered, so read these numbers as what Discover favors when it knows nothing about you, at one moment on one day. The comparison column comes from Bluesky's Jetstream firehose, 18:00 to 21:00 UTC on November 10, 2026 (252,064 top-level posts; there, quote posts carrying images or video were counted as image or video). Which events the app sends Discover is from Bluesky's open-source social-app code (src/state/feed-feedback.tsx and src/lib/api/feed/), read November 13, 2026.
If your Discover is thin, your network probably is too. Following more people who post in your subject gives Discover more to work with, and gives those people a reason to find you. I built Agent Sky for that. It follows active accounts in your niche at a pace you set, and checks for a real follow-back before it unfollows anyone. It's $9 a month and free to start. If you'd rather do it by hand, here's how to find people to follow on Bluesky.
Quick FAQ
How does the Bluesky Discover feed work? Discover is Bluesky's own algorithmic feed. Its official description is "Trending content from your personal network." When you're signed in, the app sends it feedback: which posts you saw, liked, reposted, replied to, quoted, shared or tapped into, plus any "Show more like this" or "Show less like this" you pick, and the interests you chose in settings. Bluesky hasn't published the ranking formula. In a 1,900-post sample of the public, un-personalized version on November 13, 2026, half the posts were under 5.3 hours old and none were replies.
Why is my Bluesky Discover feed so bad or political? Usually because it has little to go on, or the signals it gets lean one way. Discover draws on your network, so an account that follows few people, or mostly news and politics accounts, tends to get a thin or one-note feed. Use "Show less like this" on posts you don't want, update Settings > Content and media > Your interests, add mute words under Settings > Moderation tools > Muted words & tags, and follow more accounts in the topics you actually want.
Why is my Bluesky Discover feed empty? Bluesky's own empty-state message says: "This feed is empty! You may need to follow more users or tune your language settings." Check Settings > Languages > Content languages first. The app asks feeds to stick to the languages you pick there, so choosing only a rarely used language can leave Discover nearly empty. If that's fine, follow more active accounts so Discover has a network to draw on.
Can you reset or turn off the Discover feed on Bluesky? There's no reset button. You can steer it with "Show more like this" and "Show less like this" in each post's menu. To turn it off, go to Feeds > Edit My Feeds and unpin Discover, or move Following to the top of your pinned feeds. To keep your own posts out of strangers' Discover feeds, turn on "Ask apps to hide my posts from algorithmic recommendations" in Settings > Privacy and Security.