automatic Unlisted feed

[prohr]

Describe the Feature

Each user has an automatic Following feed of every account whose content they want to see

We can optionally also create one or more feeds for subsets of that content by pinning a named List of accounts. (It's a great way of focusing attention on a more browsable sub feed)

To complement that feature, it'd be great if we also had an automatic Unlisted (or "Other") feed of all followed accounts which aren't on any of the Lists I maintain

Attachments

No response

Describe Alternatives

Three alternate approaches:

1. I've experimented with trying to create a "subtractive" feed which excludes from a single list from my following feed, but that never seems to result in a clean partition of results between the feeds:

https://bsky.app/profile/pevohr.bsky.social/post/3lzzgxb4cmk2t

Moreover, doing this manually is clunky, error-prone, + often stale. Whereas both Following + List feeds automatically refresh cleanly as soon as set membership changes, so having a single "catch-all" feed which maintains itself would be much easier to understand + use

2. Another way to support this manual curation workflow could be to unfollow every account you move to one of these the themed lists. (So effectively your Following feed becomes this catch-all feed)

However, this workaround would turn all of those "list only" accounts into second-class citizens, which is undesirable. They no longer participate in social proof cues, + aren't available for follower-only permissions throughout the UX

3. Finally, a more general-purpose backend implementation might allow any feed to be described as a set algebra to mix + match flows of content from different feeds:

https://bsky.app/profile/pevohr.bsky.social/post/3knnz4icfi32b

But that's way more work, + not as user-visible as this narrower proposal

Additional Context

This is a manual curation feature which allows users to effectively split an overwhelmingly large Following feed (of everything) into a disjoint subset of parallel List feeds

BEFORE

Following = (every undifferentiated interest of mine)

AFTER

Following = Slow | Fast | Other

The core intuition is that it's more efficient to skim through parallel feeds of similar content at different speeds than it is to trudge through everything at one

• slow through some folks
• fast through news, skipping a lot
• skim the rest (if any)

[prohr]

BTW, if this proposal feels like too much of a UX surface, here's a much simpler variant:

When displaying the Following feed, exclude posts from anyone you follow who's also on a pinned list you maintain

This would allow you another way to incrementally curate the volume of your Following feed. If you don't wanna see that person at all, unfollow (or mute or block) them. Alternatively, "move" them to a parallel feed by adding them to a pinned List

Instead of inventing a new term (Unlisted or Other or whatever) + percolating it throughout the client UX, this behavior change could be deployed with literally zero visible UX changes

Optional UX enhancements:

A. When logged-in, augment profile pages with a list name label

B. Maybe a setting to toggle this new behavior (on by default)?