Bluesky Will Hide Your Posts From Discover If You Ask

Bluesky added an account-level toggle so you can keep your public posts out of the Discover algorithmic feed, according to TechCrunch.

The open social network announced the change on Thursday, August 27, a day after rolling out longer video support. Discover can currently surface any public post on the network, which means something you wrote for a few hundred followers can suddenly land in front of strangers who never followed you. That viral jump is fun for some people and a headache for everyone else who just wanted a quieter timeline.

This is not a private-account switch. Bluesky is still working on private data at the protocol level, so your posts stay public if someone finds your profile or follows you. The new option only makes those posts less discoverable to people outside your existing network, which is a narrower kind of control that still matters a lot when the main algorithmic feed is the thing that turns a casual reply into a pile-on.

You turn it on in Privacy and Security settings. Bluesky says the change can take up to an hour to fully apply, so do not expect an instant cutover the second you flip the switch.

What makes the feature more interesting than a typical in-app preference is where it lives. Instead of locking the choice inside Bluesky’s own client, the preference is recorded at the AT Proto account level, so it can travel with you when you post from another app built on the same protocol. Those other apps can see the preference, but they still have to decide whether to honour it, which means the real-world effect will depend on how seriously third-party clients take the signal.

The company framed the move around a simple reality: not everyone on Bluesky wants to go viral. Plenty of people want to talk to the people who already follow them without becoming tomorrow’s main character, and that tension has been sitting under every big social feed for years. It also fits the privacy-minded streak Bluesky has been pushing elsewhere, including the privacy-safe Find Friends tool that uses mutual consent and hashed contacts rather than dumping your address book into the open, and earlier work on blue-check verification aimed at cutting down impersonation.

That kind of feed control is becoming a competitive talking point across social apps. Meta’s Threads has been experimenting with algorithmic preference tools like Your Algo, and regulators keep pressing platforms over how recommendation systems amplify content and keep people scrolling, including the EU’s recent push on Instagram’s addictive design patterns. Bluesky’s opt-out is coming from the other direction: instead of asking you to train the feed on what you want to see, it lets you ask the feed to leave your own posts alone.

If you are already posting on Bluesky and prefer a smaller audience than Discover can create, the toggle is worth checking now rather than after a post starts circulating. Followers still see what you share, replies and profile visits still work the way they did before, and you are not locking the account behind a wall, you are just asking the algorithm to stop putting you on blast when you did not ask for it.