I clicked into For You earlier and remembered how much I like it. It’s the only algorithmic feed (for Bluesky, at least) I’ve ever gone back to after a few weeks of using and still enjoyed what I’m being shown.
Every other one has the same two problems. It doesn’t show me enough of what I want, and when it does, I have no idea why. For You solves both. It shows me what I want, and it gives me tools to see why and to fix it when it gets weird.
For You finds the people who liked the same posts you did, then shows you what those people have been liking lately. That is really it. It’s collaborative filtering, the same trick behind “customers who bought this also bought.” Nothing about it is novel. I know it sounds simple, and it sounds like how every “for you” page should work… but then look at the Discover feed.
What’s novel is that it’s the most-liked custom feed on Bluesky, it’s built by one person (@spacecowboy17.bsky.social), and it runs off a personal gaming PC. In their closet, I think? There’s a writeup on the ATProto blog about how it actually gets served.
The feed itself is the small part. foryou.club is a pile of tools pointed at it. Stats and Profile are what you’d expect. Rewind is a companion feed that catches the posts you scrolled past and lost on refresh, which is a fix for a problem I’ve had but didn’t know how to articulate. Also Liked takes any post URL and tells you what else the people who liked it liked.
Playground is where you can see your actual recommendations, and for each post, the specific likes of yours that put it there. When a post shows up because of one weird like from four months ago, you can see that, and you can go take the like back. Or like more things like it, idk!
That’s a different relationship than “why am I seeing this ad?” on Instagram, which tells you that an advertiser is targeting people aged 25 to 44. This tells you which of your own actions did it.
My numbers are embarrassing. I’ve loaded For You 573 times, seen 17,190 posts, and liked 34 of them. That’s a 0.2% like rate. Going the other direction, my own posts were shown in For You 21,742 times and picked up 187 likes, which is 0.86%.
I’m going to stay in it as my primary feed for a few days and watch these numbers 📈. No other platform would ever hand them to me. Somebody’s gaming PC did real work to put seventeen thousand posts in front of me!!
The other thing happening in atproto feeds is Attie, which Bluesky launched back in March. You describe the feed you want in plain English and Claude writes the feed program.
I made one for SNAP!
“For SNAP experts, caseworkers, benefit navigators, and technologists working to deliver food assistance programs. Covers program administration, EBT/tech, WIC, policy implementation, and the frontline work of getting food benefits to people.” Two sources, published, and anyone on Bluesky can pin it now.
That took a few minutes. This is the part of the atmosphere I keep trying to explain to people and keep failing to explain: the network is open enough that a specific, unglamorous, forty-people-care-about-it feed is a reasonable thing for one person to make on a Tuesday and share with that small network.
But most people don’t want to know how their feed is built. They want to know what it’s doing. Those are close enough that transparency people conflate them constantly, and they’re not the same.
Publishing the ranking source code is transparency. Nobody reads it, I promise! Telling me “this post is here because you liked these three posts about incredibly deep Warcraft lore, want to undo that?” is legibility, and it works whether or not I understand a single thing about collaborative filtering or machine learning.
For You gets this right, I think. The Playground isn’t a paper, and it isn’t source code you’re invited to go read. It’s a list of my own behavior, reflected back to me (it all of it’s ugly glory), with an undo button to fix my algorithm.
The open-source-your-algorithm argument has always been a little bit of a decoy. What I want isn’t the source. It’s a feed that can be honest with me about why it’s showing me a post, in words I’d use myself, and an easy way to fix it when my algorithm starts showing me too many shirtless guys or deep dives on crusader kings family drama.
If you’re on Bluesky, pin For You and then go look at your Playground. I’m @keithlaugh.love if you want to send me your favorite feeds!