The upstart social network Bluesky is beta testing a trending topics feature that cold help users keep up with current events via the service.
While the decentralised social media platform has avoided a heavily algorithmic approach, it has made keeping up with breaking news and big time sports, politics, and cultural events more difficult than it once was via Twitter.
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For the millions of people who’ve moved over from Elon Musk’s X, the trending topics might be something the new arrivals might actually miss from the blazing right wing hellscape the service has become.
“Merry Christmas from us to you,” the company wrote in a Christmas Day post. “We launched Trending Topics today, and you can find it by tapping the search icon on the bottom bar of the app or the right sidebar on desktop.”
The feature is currently in beta, but is available via the Bluesky app, sitting above Recommendations in the search tab. Currently, we’re seeing terms like Christmas, St Stephen, Beyoncé, and Japan Airlines trend on the service. Click on a trending topic and you’ll see the top and latest mentions of the term within the interface.
If you’d rather not see them, you can head to Settings > Content and Media and uncheck the “Enable trending topics” button. You can also tap the ‘x’ button to remove Trending from the search tab.
Elsewhere, Bluesky promises this is only version one of the feature and it’ll only get better, but mute words will also transfer to trending. Right now the feature is only available in English.
The feature hasn’t been universally acclaimed by some users, with one commenting: “Twitter turned into a cesspool because people started to manipulate the algorithm and pushed bad actor accounts to the top of everyone’s feed.”
What do you make of the new Trending feature? Let us know @trustedreviews on Bluesky.
