Thoughts on the 📰 News Feed

Uh, first off, hello to the several thousand new users of the 📰 News feed! 👋🏼

The last few days have been hectic trying to make sure everything works and that the feed is up to the challenge that's been presented to it. I'm writing this post to clarify the purpose and intention behind the feed, as well as discuss what I'd like to see going forward with it.

I started the News 📰 feed as a fun little side-project to learn how to use Bluesky's "feed generator" technology, which is what enables its custom feeds.

It wasn't very popular at the time, but popular enough for me to see a particular professional dilemma even back then: I work in news media and felt a space on the platform for high quality news titles was desperately needed, but I also was extremely reticent about the professional responsibilities involved with managing disinformation when gatekeeping entry to the feed.

A photojournalist earlier on in Bluesky's history had the same idea and started his own feed; his took off quickly and I was more than content to let my project languish in obscurity, feeling I'd possibly dodged a bullet.

That all changed when the creator of that feed added an account posing as the Kyiv Independent, who was only revealed as an imposter after accruing several thousand followers. Bluesky's initial unwillingness to do much more moderation beyond slap an "imposter" label on the account angered the feed creator to the point that he deleted his account, thus taking a feed used by several thousand people offline. I offered my own as a stable alternative with enhanced verification checks (to wit: namely requiring all contributing accounts have a custom domain handle pointing to their org), and folks quickly gravitated towards it.

Bluesky then eventually started surfacing the feed high in the list of recommended feeds; now with the massive influx of new Brazilian users, it's receiving on average about 4 requests a second (a "request" in this context is someone visiting or refreshing the feed in the Bluesky app). It is currently the 9th most-liked active feed on the platform. I've even been quoted about it in Press Gazette:

Twitter alternative? News publishers see potential in Bluesky

Twitter alternative Bluesky may still be a minnow among the social media giants, but news publishers appear to see potential in the platform.

Press GazetteBron Maher

I'm both awed and humbled by this response. It's truly incredible, and I vow to respect the trust that's been put in me by trying to keep the feed both usable and high quality. But with that comes a few challenges, namely:

• How should I gatekeep? I honestly struggle with the responsibility of determining who is and isn't "news". On one hand, new online upstarts are some of the most exciting spaces in journalism right now and deserve to receive attention for good work that they do. To restrict the feed to only established newspapers that have been around a hundred years is to vastly diminish the potential of the medium for creating news titles that are able to meet the substantial demands of this era.
  
  On the other hand, there's also a risk that savvy new online titles will create a lot of weak content, drowning out original journalism – a good example of this happening was when Google privileged AMP pages, which meant that a lot of low-quality blogs were able to get top positioning in their results. From a journalistic perspective, I consider AMP to have been an unmitigated disaster, and I very much want to avoid a similar situation happening due to my feed on Bluesky.
• Is it a platform or is it a firehose? I have always considered the 📰 News Feed to be a mostly-uncurated firehose. There's no rate limiting or algorithmic sorting, the news you see is as news orgs publish it, in real time, regardless of whether it's happening in the U.S. or elsewhere in the world. It surfaces headlines regardless of whether they're paywalled or free-to-read – I've been asked endlessly to remove paywalled newspapers from the feed, but I refuse to do so simply because it's not the mission of the feed to take a political stance about paywalls (full disclosure, I also work for a paywalled newspaper; paywalls keep the lights on.).
  
  In general, I'm trying not to take any political stances with the feed – if an established org with a verifiable handle wants to join the feed, I don't want to say no (this includes my former employer, whose editorial stances I frequently find frustrating, to say the least). The great part of Bluesky's feed implementation is that it respects mutes and blocks; if you don't want to see a particular title, you can simply mute it and it won't appear in your feed.
  
  As such, I don't see the 📰 News feed as a "platform", and I don't see myself as "platforming" the content of any org in the feed – if I sorted it algorithmically so that people were more likely to see specific news, then it would be because I'd have exerted something of an editorial voice with my algorithm choice, but ultimately I perceive of the feed itself as a fairly unopinionated piece of infrastructure. You can use SkyFeed to extend it, and create curations of its output to be better reflective of the content you and your communities want to see, and I really hope people do that.

I'm thus establishing a few specific guidelines for adding orgs to the News 📰 feed:

1. All orgs must be verifiable by their domain name. No ifs, ands or buts. This is to protect me and the feed's users. Creating a TXT record should be a fairly trivial task for any org with even a rudimentary IT department. It shows an org is treating Bluesky as a serious audience and is willing to take the necessary steps to create a quality presence on the platform.
2. All orgs must be established news presences with audiences of greater than 10,000 daily readers; this threshold is subject to change and I may make exceptions in order to help serve the needs of smaller communities and local journalism.
3. All orgs must produce original journalism. I don't want aggregators polluting the feed by reposting other people's hard work.
4. Original journalism must fundamentally be produced by people, not AI. While AI tools are increasingly common in journalism, I don't want the feed to promote work that's been solely produced by machines.

The first one of these is really easy for me to check. The other three are much more difficult, especially in languages that I myself do not speak:

To that end, I've been looking for help validating news orgs that apply to the feed. The response I got to the above post was incredible; my DMs are utterly impenetrable at the moment because there's so many people wanting to help:

I thank you for that, I'm deeply grateful for people being willing to give me their time and expertise, but it also made me realise another thing: if I don't personally know any Brazilian journalists, how do I know I can trust the recommendations and advice of any particular person I ask? At the end of the day, the buck stops with me.

To that end, I think I'll ultimately create a survey and send it to everyone who responded. I may do this with some regularity, as new titles ask to be added. The survey will enquire both about the trust perception and newsworthiness of titles and not focus overly on their stances or biases. I'll ultimately have to make decisions myself based on feedback, but I promise to do so in as even-handed a manner as I possibly can. Please respect my process, I'm doing this in my own time and with non-trivial personal reputation risk. I won't always get it 100% right, but I'll do my best. I'm literally one person and I receive zero income from this.

In the meantime, think about how you'd make the feed better – and just do it. Sign up for SkyFeed and build your own custom curations based on 📰 News. Create blocklists of titles you don't like and share those with your communities. Design custom algorithms that surface the hottest content from the feed in your language (I would honestly love to see someone create a "Most Popular Portuguese-language News" feed). Really, the only limit is your imagination; if you struggle with the tech side of it, ask for help, Bluesky's dev community absolutely rules and it's more than likely someone will give you a hand.

-æ.

P.S. The Onion is staying, if you don't know it's a satirical title in this-year-of-our-lord-twenty-twenty-four, then I really can't help you. I promise not to add any others, though.