Bluesky Rolls Out Granular Repost Control, Enhancing User Feed Customization

Bluesky has rolled out a highly anticipated feature allowing users to hide reposts from specific accounts, offering a granular control over content feeds that addresses a long-standing pain point in social media. This update, which also includes automatic numbering for posts within threads, reinforces Bluesky's commitment to user agency and customizable experiences within its decentralized architecture. To activate the feature, users can navigate to a person's profile, tap the three-dot menu, and select "Hide reposts in feeds". This means that individuals can continue to follow accounts for their original content without their feed being cluttered by an abundance of shared posts they may not find relevant.

The significance of this seemingly minor addition extends far beyond a simple preference toggle. Reposts, while valuable for content distribution, can often lead to feed saturation, where a user's timeline becomes dominated by content curated by others rather than original posts from those they follow. This dynamic can dilute the user experience, leading to content fatigue and a sense of losing control over one's personal feed. Bluesky's new control separates these layers, allowing users to maintain a connection with an account while rejecting a specific behavior that might otherwise lead to an unfollow. This aligns perfectly with Bluesky's broader identity as a platform built around user agency, where custom feeds, robust moderation controls, and a decentralized protocol are designed to offer an adjustable social experience, rather than one dictated by a top-down algorithmic system. The platform's 2025 Transparency Report highlighted that labels, which give users control to hide, warn, or show content based on comfort levels, were applied 16.49 million times, a 200% increase from 2024, indicating a strong user desire for content control.

Compared to its rivals, Bluesky is positioning itself as a leader in offering nuanced feed customization. Mastodon, another prominent decentralized platform, has long offered the ability to hide "boosts" (their equivalent of reposts) from specific users, accessible through a profile's menu. It also allows users to hide all boosts globally. This demonstrates a shared understanding within the fediverse of the importance of such controls. X (formerly Twitter) also provides a similar setting, allowing users to turn off reposts from specific accounts. However, Threads, Meta's challenger, has historically lacked a native feature to hide reposts from individual users, with users resorting to muting entire accounts or relying on third-party browser extensions to filter their feeds. While Threads does offer the ability to remove a repost after it's been made, and has general content filtering for words and phrases, the per-user repost control has been a notable omission. This highlights Bluesky's proactive approach to addressing user feedback and differentiating itself in a crowded social media landscape.

The implementation of thread numbering, a beta feature that can be enabled in settings, further streamlines the user experience by making longer conversations easier to follow without requiring manual numbering by authors. Threads already displays the number of posts in threads, indicating this is becoming a standard "quality of life" improvement across platforms.

Looking ahead, this move by Bluesky signals a deepening commitment to user-centric design and a recognition that fine-grained control over content is a critical differentiator. With over 40 million registered users by October 2025, and 41.41 million by year-end, Bluesky saw a nearly 60% growth in 2025, creating 1.41 billion posts that year. The platform's growth has been notably influenced by events like Brazil's X ban and the US presidential election, driving significant user acquisition. This user base, with over 62% under 35 years old and about 60% male, is actively engaging with the platform, making approximately 35 posts per user as of March 2025.

Bluesky's 2026 roadmap emphasizes user retention, live engagement, and improved feed discovery, including smarter "who to follow" suggestions and enhancements for real-time events. The platform's open-source moderation tool, Ozone, already allows users to install independent moderation services and custom filters, demonstrating a broader vision for community-driven content management. The ability to hide reposts from specific users is a logical extension of this philosophy, empowering individuals to curate their digital environment more effectively. This granular control is not merely a convenience; it is a fundamental shift towards a social media experience where the user, not the algorithm or the actions of others, ultimately dictates the signal-to-noise ratio of their feed. As the social media ecosystem continues to fragment and users demand more agency, such features will be crucial for platforms like Bluesky to convert their expanding user base into a loyal and engaged community. The next logical step may involve even more sophisticated per-user content filters, perhaps allowing users to filter specific types of original posts or even curate different "views" of a single user's content based on their interests.