Skylimit: A curating web client with fine-grained controls to mimic the newspaper experience

The goal of many social media platforms is to maximize your screen time. Skylimit is a curation algorithm designed to optimize your limited screen time. It attempts to answer the following question: If I decide to limit myself to viewing, say, 500 posts per day (on average), what is the best way to manage my Following Feed?

As a Bluesky user who follows many people, I would like to view the most relevant and interesting posts in my feed. This is similar to the decisions editors make when populating a fixed number of pages in a printed newspaper—they must choose from news items on numerous topics, regular pieces by columnists, and more. Skylimit aims to mimic aspects of the print news reading experience in the digital world by creating a curated version of the Following Feed with statistical settings for each followee that go beyond just muting.

The talk will discuss the various trade-offs involved in achieving this goal and demonstrate a prototype Bluesky web client (skylimit.dev) that implements the curation algorithm. Issues to be discussed include: how to (statistically) select and display “important” posts, handling “quiet posters,” and presenting periodic digest editions.