Is the Bluesky Following Feed Chronological? Why It Looks Out of Order
Yes. Bluesky's Following feed is reverse-chronological, with no engagement ranking. But a repost is placed by when it was reposted, not when the original was posted. That's the main reason an hours-old post can show up at the top. The app also hides some replies, and an experimental setting can mix in posts from your saved feeds. If your Following feed is empty or slow, the cause is almost always who you follow.
One guide that ranks for this question says the Following feed is scored 60% on recency and 40% on engagement, and reshuffled on every refresh. I checked that in two ways. First, I read the code. Bluesky's reference server code sorts the Following feed by time alone, and the app doesn't reorder it. Second, I checked the live API. In 8 large accounts' profile feeds, which use the same sort key in that code, all 779 pairs of neighboring items were in time order.
Then I rebuilt the Following feeds of 379 Bluesky users for one hour on November 2, 2026, to see what's in them. Reposts were 40% of the median feed, and 59% of those reposts were of posts more than an hour old.
(Disclosure: I make Agent Sky, a Bluesky growth tool. More on it at the end.)
Is the Bluesky Following Feed in Chronological Order?
Yes, newest first, by one timestamp per item. In Bluesky's open-source server code, every post and repost from accounts you follow goes into one list, sorted by time. There's no score for likes or replies, and a refresh only adds newer items at the top.
The timestamp depends on the kind of item:
| Item in your Following feed | Sorted by | What you see |
|---|---|---|
| Post from someone you follow | Earlier of post time or the time Bluesky received it | Normal order |
| Repost by someone you follow | When they reposted it | An old post appears at the top, under "Reposted by…" |
| Reply from someone you follow | When the reply was posted | The older post it replies to is shown above it |
| Your own posts and reposts | When you posted or reposted | Mixed in. About 10 per page when your follows fill the page, more when they don't |
| Saved-feed samples (experimental, off by default) | Not by time | Posts from your saved feeds placed between Following posts |
The "earlier of the two" rule stops a post with a fake future date from staying at the top. A post with a backdated timestamp is placed at that old date. Those are rare: 0.01% of the posts in my sample.
There's no setting for a "more chronological" Following feed, because it already is one. If you want a different order, a custom feed can sort however its maker likes. Discover is Bluesky's ranked feed, and it works very differently.
Why Does My Bluesky Following Feed Look Out of Order?
Mostly because of reposts. A repost goes into the feed at the time of the repost, so a post from this morning can appear above one from a minute ago. Here's how often that happened in the 52,499 reposts that reached my sampled users' feeds:
- 59% were of posts more than an hour old. The median reposted post was 1.7 hours old when it was reposted.
- 12.7% were more than a day old.
- 3.6% were more than a week old. Those are the ones that look like a bug.
Four smaller things add to it:
- Reply context. The post shown above a reply can be hours or days old.
- Hidden replies. By default the app shows a reply from someone you follow only if it's part of their own thread, or if the post it replies to, the one above that, or the thread's first post is by you or someone you follow. In my sample that hid about 35% of the replies posted by accounts people follow. That's why a conversation can look like it has gaps.
- One reply per thread. If several people you follow reply in the same thread, the app shows only the newest one. That cut the median feed from 83 items an hour to 69.
- The experimental setting. Settings > Content and media > Following feed preferences has an Experimental toggle: "Show samples of your saved feeds in your Following feed." With it on and at least two saved feeds, the app starts mixing in posts from those feeds after the first 15 items, at about 4 in every 10 slots. Those aren't in time order. If your feed looks shuffled, check this first.
And if Following is your first pinned feed and you scroll past its last post, the app says "We ran out of posts from your follows" and carries on with posts from Discover. Those are ranked, not chronological.
How Do You Get a Bluesky Feed Without Reposts?
Turn off Show reposts in Settings > Content and media > Following feed preferences. That screen has four switches: Show replies, Show reposts, Show quote posts, and the experimental samples. They only apply to the Following feed. To hide reposts from one person, open their profile, tap the three-dot menu and choose Hide reposts in feeds. (More on how reposts work here.)
In my sample, turning off reposts cut the median Following feed from 83 items an hour to 44. With reposts off, everything left is sorted by when it was posted, which is as close to strictly chronological as Bluesky gets.
Why Is My Bluesky Following Feed Empty?
Because it can only show people you follow, and many accounts follow too few active ones. Here's what one hour (14:05–15:05 UTC, a Monday morning in the US) looked like for my 379 users, by how many accounts they follow:
| Accounts followed | Users | New items per hour (median) | Got nothing that hour | Under 10 items | Reposts (median share) |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Under 50 | 53 | 3 | 20.8% | 67.9% | 11.7% |
| 50–199 | 103 | 28 | 1.9% | 14.6% | 36.1% |
| 200–999 | 162 | 145.5 | 0% | 1.9% | 40.6% |
| 1,000–5,000 | 61 | 673 | 0% | 0% | 52.1% |
| All | 379 | 83 | 3.4% | 14.2% | 40.5% |
Following fewer than 50 accounts means a very quiet feed. The median user in that group got 3 new items in an hour, and one in five got nothing. By 50–199 follows, almost nobody had an empty hour. Past 1,000, the feed moves faster than anyone can read, and half of it is reposts.
Two other causes are worth ruling out:
- The Following tab is missing. If you removed it, the Feeds screen says "Looks like you're missing a following feed" with a link to add it back.
- The people you follow have gone quiet. Following 300 accounts doesn't help if most of them stopped posting. That's why I unfollow inactive accounts now and then.
For a quiet feed, the fix is to follow more people who actively post about what you care about.
How Do You Make Bluesky Open to the Following Feed?
Tap the Following tab once. The app saves the last home feed you picked and opens to it next time. To make Following the first tab, go to Feeds, tap the gear icon, move Following to the top of Pinned Feeds, and tap Save. (Settings > Content and media > Manage saved feeds opens the same screen.)
This part of the app may change soon. Bluesky's app code has a new version of the Following feed behind a feature flag, for the mobile apps only. It adds a "new posts" pill and keeps your place between visits.
How I measured it, and the limits. I replayed every post and repost on Bluesky's public Jetstream stream from 14:05 to 15:05 UTC on Monday, November 2, 2026: 179,854 posts (81,965 of them replies) and 175,740 reposts. To sample people who read feeds, not just people who post, I picked 400 random accounts that liked something in that hour. I fetched who each one follows with the public getFollows API. I dropped 19 accounts that follow more than 5,000 and 2 that failed to load, which left 379. For each user, I counted the posts, replies and reposts by accounts they follow, plus their own, as Bluesky's timeline does. I applied the official app's reply rule from its source code. I couldn't see the post two levels above each reply, which the app also checks, so the 35% is approximate. "Items" counts each repost separately, even when two people repost the same post, and the table counts items before the one-reply-per-thread step. Repost age comes from the original post's ID, which encodes when it was created. The age figures are for reposts that reached these users' feeds, so people who follow many accounts weigh more. One weekday hour isn't a whole week, and other hours may be busier or quieter. The ordering check used the public getAuthorFeed API, not anyone's Following feed. Bluesky's live server isn't open source, so the sorting rules come from its reference code.
A Following feed only shows the people you follow. If yours is quiet, I built Agent Sky for that. It finds active accounts in your niche, follows them at a human pace, well inside Bluesky's limits, and checks for a live follow-back before it unfollows anyone. $9 a month, free to start.
Quick FAQ
Is the Bluesky Following feed chronological? Yes. The Following feed shows posts and reposts from accounts you follow, newest first, with no engagement ranking. A post is placed by when it was posted, and a repost by when it was reposted, which is why older posts sometimes appear at the top. The app also hides some replies, and it can mix in posts from your saved feeds if you turn on an experimental setting.
Why is my Bluesky Following feed empty? Usually because you follow too few active accounts. The Following feed only contains posts from people you follow (and your own). In a sample of 379 Bluesky users on November 2, 2026, people following fewer than 50 accounts got a median of 3 new items an hour, and one in five got none at all. If the Following tab is missing entirely, the Feeds screen shows a link to add it back.
How do I see my Bluesky Following feed without reposts? Go to Settings > Content and media > Following feed preferences and turn off Show reposts. To hide reposts from one person only, open their profile, tap the three-dot menu and choose Hide reposts in feeds. In my sample, reposts were 40% of the median user's Following feed, so turning them off removes a lot.
How do I make Bluesky open to the Following feed? Tap the Following tab once. The app remembers the last home feed you picked and opens to it next time. To make Following the first tab, go to Feeds, tap the gear icon, move Following to the top of Pinned Feeds, and tap Save.