Understanding the Landscape of Custom Feeds on Bluesky

Bluesky’s custom feeds allow users to create, govern, and share their own algorithmic feeds, shifting curation away from platform control. To understand how this ecosystem works in practice, we interviewed 26 Bluesky feed creators and third-party tool developers and analyzed 97,719 existing custom feeds. We find that hobbyist labor is central to sustaining the ecosystem, but creators face recurring challenges around maintenance, visibility, and long-term viability. Based on these findings, we lay out design implications for designing usable decentralized social media.