A great thing about Bluesky is that individuals can create and share new feeds. For example, I created the News Bay Area feed because I thought it would be great to have a news feed from a variety of news sources, but ones that focus on the area where I live.
Some types of Bluesky feeds can require doing some programming and hosting the feed yourself. Pretty difficult. But it turns out there is a website called skyfeed.app that does all the work for you if you just want to create a simple feed based on a list of accounts and/or some keywords. Skyfeed also hosts the feed for you and publishes it so that others can use it as well. Incredibly useful service.
There are also other feed creators out there, including blueskyfeedcreator.com which allows you to create up to three feeds for free.
Steps to create custom feed
Step #1
Go to skyfeed.app and create an account. Enter your Bluesky username or email address. And then click on the square icon with the arrow to create a Bluesky app password especially for SkyFeed. Note that you will not be using your normal password for your Bluesky account, so this is completely safe.
Step #2
You will be on the skyfeed.app site for your account. You can so things with SkyFeed like change your profile, read posts, or of course create a new feed. To create a feed click on Feed Builder and then on Create Feed.
Step #3
The Feed Builder is outlined in yellow below. You first need to specify the Feed Name. Then you need to change the Input from Entire Network to a List. And lastly you need to remove the RegEx filter unless you also want to search based on words or phrases.
Step #4
Your Feed Builder should now look similar to the image below, where I was creating a new feed named News – US. You will get an ugly error message on the right because you haven’t yet specified the List of accounts to be used. In fact, you most likely don’t yet have a List that can be used.
Setp #5
You need to create the List of accounts that should be part of your new Feed. In a separate browser tab go to your Bluesky account at bsky.app . Then click on Lists, or use the link https://bsky.app/lists , to go to your User Lists window. Then click on the + New button in order to create your List of users.
Step #6
In the New User List window specify Name and Description for your new List. Then hit Save. The Name and Description won’t be public, nor will the List Avatar. You are just setting the values as a reminder to yourself for if you need to update one of your lists in the future.
Step #7
You will now be on the window for your new feed. Click on the About tab and you will see that it doesn’t yet have any Users/Accounts. So click on the Add button in order to add each Account to your List.
Eventually you will have a nice list of accounts in your List.
Step #8
Next step is to go back to your SkyFeed.app page and select the List you just created by clicking on the Your Lists link and selecting your new List.
Sometimes it takes a little while till your list is actually working. If you still see the error message after you have created your new Feed then try changing the input time or go to another SkyFeed tab and then back again. The feed should be working within a few seconds.
Step #9
Once you see that your new Feed is working in the Feed Preview section, click on the Publish Feed button.
Step #10
Upload avatar image so that your feed has a notable icon. Then add a Description so that will know what the feed is about and actually subscribe to it. And then hit the Publish button. You have now created a feed!
Step #11
Now go back to your Bluesky profile and add the newly created feed to your profile so that you can easily use it yourself.
Tips and Tricks
The Skyfeed Builder can be a bit tricky to use. Therefore here are some tips:
- How do I get user “did” identifier? – To go from a user’s pretty handle, like nytimes.com, use the API call https://bsky.social/xrpc/com.atproto.identity.resolveHandle?handle=nytimes.com and you will get a result like “did:plc:eclio37ymobqex2ncko63h4r”
- Why do I get errors on Skyfeed? – Sometimes Skyfeed gets bogged down. Check out https://status.skyfeed.xyz/ to see how it is currently doing.
- How do I change order of blocks? – Click on Switch to JSON editor and move the blocks as desired. Then switch back to the visual editor.
- How do I combine criteria? – If you want to do things like OR together two feeds in a complicated way, you can do this by creating a feed using one input, stashing it, creating a second feed using a different input and then filtering it, and popping the stashed feed.
- How can a feed be based on a Starter Pack? – There are some great Starter Packs out there with a list of people who contribute to your community. Wouldn’t it be great if you could convert that list of people into a Feed? Yes! It can be done by converting a Start Pack into a List, and then using that List to power your feed. There is a TechCrunch article on doing so. Simply use https://nws-bot.us/bskyStarterPack.php . And best tool for finding Starter Packs is https://blueskydirectory.com/starter-packs .
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