Hashtags Walked So Custom Feeds Could Run: Why Discovery on Bluesky Feels Different

I’ve been on Bluesky for a year and a half now, watching the platform evolve from its early invite-only days into something genuinely different from the social media landscape we’ve grown accustomed to. And in that time, I’ve witnessed something I didn’t expect: the slow, quiet death of the hashtag .

Don’t get me wrong—hashtags still exist on Bluesky and you’ll still see them scattered across posts like digital breadcrumbs. But here’s the thing: they’ve become largely irrelevant. Not because the platform actively discouraged them, but because something better came along and made them obsolete.

The Promise Hashtags Never Quite Kept

Hashtags as Organisers

Hashtags were meant to be the great organisers of social media chaos—a way to find your tribe, discover content that mattered to you, and participate in broader conversations. On Twitter, #MondayMotivation was supposed to connect you with inspirational content. On Instagram, #foodie was meant to surface the best culinary photography.

The Messy Reality

But hashtags always felt a bit... clunky, didn’t they? They were like trying to organise a massive library by scribbling keywords on scraps of paper and tossing them into boxes. Sometimes you’d find the book you wanted, sometimes you’d end up with a pile of irrelevant junk, and often you’d get both at once.

I remember spending entirely too much time on Twitter crafting the perfect hashtag combination—something discoverable but not oversaturated, specific but not so niche that nobody would find it. It was content strategy masquerading as spontaneous expression, and frankly, it was exhausting.

Enter the Custom Feed Revolution

What Custom Feeds Are

Bluesky’s custom feeds, or feed generators , are services that provide custom algorithms to users through the AT Protocol. This allows users to choose their own timelines, whether it’s an algorithmic For You page or a feed of entirely cat photos.

But it’s more than just algorithmic choice—it’s algorithmic curation by people who actually understand their communities.

A Personal Example

Take my werewolf feed , for instance. (Yes, I have a werewolf feed. Don’t judge me—everyone has their special interests.) Before custom feeds, I would have relied on hashtags like #werewolf or #lycanthrope, hoping to surface relevant content whilst filtering through a lot of noise. The problem is that hashtags are binary—either you use the exact term or you don’t get discovered.

With custom feeds, someone who actually understands werewolf culture can create an algorithm that captures not just explicit hashtags, but the broader conversation. Discovery feels less like rifling through a card catalogue and more like walking into a bookshop curated by someone who knows your taste. Instead of saying, “Here are all the books with ‘werewolf’ in the title,” it says, “Here’s a shelf pulled together by someone who understands transformation myths, horror cinema, and the poetry of the full moon.”

The Mathematics of Discovery

Hashtags are essentially crude Boolean searches—you’re either in or you’re out based on exact string matches. They’re on/off switches: a lightbulb in a dark room. Either you typed the keyword, or you didn’t exist.

Custom feeds, by contrast, are like motion-sensor lights spread across a garden—they pick up on context, shape, and movement, casting illumination on things even if you never thought to flip the switch yourself.

A well-designed custom feed might surface a post about Peter Stumpp’s 1589 werewolf trial not because it uses #werewolf, but because the feed generator recognises the historical and cultural relevance to lycanthropically-minded users. It’s pattern recognition rather than keyword matching, and the difference in quality is stark.

This isn’t just theoretical—I’ve watched it happen. The most engaging content in my custom feeds rarely relies on hashtags at all. Instead, it’s surfaced through intelligent curation that understands context and community better than any hashtag system ever could.

Community Over Keywords

The Human Touch

Custom feeds have also fostered something that hashtags never quite achieved: genuine community curation. For non-techies curious about custom feeds, I highly recommend trying Graze . Tools like this have democratised feed creation, allowing community members to become active curators rather than passive consumers.

There’s something deeply appealing about feeds curated by people who share your interests and understand the nuances of your community. My werewolf feed isn’t just algorithm-generated noise—it’s curated by someone who genuinely cares about lycanthropic culture and can distinguish between thoughtful analysis and low-effort content.

The Weakness of Hashtags

This human element was always hashtags’ weakness. They were democratic in the worst way—anyone could use any hashtag, regardless of relevance or quality. Custom feeds, by contrast, can implement community standards and editorial judgment. It’s the difference between a curated bookshop and a warehouse where books are organised solely by the colour of their covers.

The Challenges of Feed Creation

Accessibility Gaps

For all their promise, though, custom feeds aren’t without their shortcomings. The biggest hurdle is accessibility. Unless you know how to code, or you’ve stumbled across no-code tools like Graze , the mechanics of feed creation remain murky. This means the power to define curation is still concentrated among those with technical expertise, which undercuts the democratic promise of algorithmic choice.

Duplication and Confusion

Another complication is duplication. Because feed creation isn’t centralised or standardised, the same idea can spawn half a dozen slightly different feeds. Search for something as simple as “cat photos,” and you’ll find multiple feeds, each with its own quirks and rules. On one hand, this reflects diversity in curation—different people interpret “cat photos” in different ways. On the other, it creates confusion for users: which feed do you trust?

It’s like wandering through a food market where every stall claims to serve “the best cat photo feed.” Some offer hearty meals, some snacks, and others reheated leftovers. Without guidance, you’re left wandering, unsure which one will actually satisfy your appetite.

Trust and Transparency

This opacity contrasts with hashtags, which were simple—even if crude. Everyone understood that typing #werewolf got you every post tagged #werewolf. With feeds, you’re often relying on trust in the feed creator, who holds the invisible logic behind what gets included or excluded. Until feed creation is radically simplified and surfaced more clearly in-app, hashtags may linger—not because they’re better, but because they’re easier.

The Fragmentation That Works

Hashtags fractured communities like broken glass: sharp, messy, and hard to piece together. Custom feeds, by contrast, fragment like a prism—splitting light into deliberate colours, each one distinct but still part of the same spectrum.

My werewolf feed is absolutely a silo, but it’s a good silo—one that consistently surfaces high-quality content relevant to my interests. When I want broader content, I switch to my Following feed or explore other curated feeds. It’s compartmentalisation that actually serves the user rather than confusing them.

The Creator’s Dilemma

From a content creator’s perspective, the shift away from hashtags has been liberating. I no longer spend time crafting hashtag strategies or worrying about gaming algorithmic discovery. Instead, I focus on creating content that’s genuinely engaging to the communities I care about, trusting that good custom feeds will surface it to interested users.

This has led to better content, frankly. Without the pressure to optimise for hashtag discovery, posts can be more natural, more conversational, more authentic.

There’s something refreshing about being able to write “I’ve been contemplating (hyperfixating on) the idea of creating a wolf-themed Bluesky client” without having to append #werewolf #bluesky #coding #developer #apps. The content speaks for itself, and the right feeds surface it to people who actually care.

The Network Effects of Good Curation

When a good feed surfaces your content, it’s not just reaching people who searched for a specific term—it’s reaching people who trust that feed’s curation. There’s an implicit endorsement that comes with custom feed inclusion that hashtags never provided.

This has created what I think of as curatorial authority—feed creators who build reputations for consistently surfacing high-quality content in their domains. Following a well-curated werewolf feed becomes a way of tapping into someone’s expertise and taste, not just their keyword matching.

The social proof is different too. When your post appears in a respected custom feed, it carries more weight than simply having the right hashtags. It suggests that someone with editorial judgment thought your content was worth sharing with their community.

The Remnants and Edge Cases

To be clear, hashtags haven’t disappeared entirely, and there are still edge cases where they serve a purpose. Breaking news events sometimes still coalesce around hashtags, particularly when they happen faster than custom feed creation. And some creators still use them out of habit or for SEO purposes on platforms beyond Bluesky.

But increasingly, hashtags feel like vestigial organs—evolutionary remnants that once served a purpose but have been superseded by better solutions. Bluesky hashtags facilitate content discovery in both algorithmic and chronological feeds, but facilitation isn’t the same as optimisation.

The real test is behavioural: when I’m looking for specific content, do I search hashtags or browse custom feeds? The answer is almost always the latter. Custom feeds have become my primary discovery mechanism, whilst hashtags feel like an afterthought.

What Dies With the Hashtag

The decline of hashtags represents more than just a shift in discovery mechanisms—it’s the end of a particular kind of performative content creation. The hashtag era encouraged a kind of strategic posting where you’d craft content to fit popular tags rather than expressing authentic thoughts.

Good riddance, honestly. The pressure to include #MondayMotivation in your Monday posts or #ThrowbackThursday in your nostalgic content was always artificial. It forced conversation into predetermined categories rather than letting ideas develop naturally.

Custom feeds allow for much more nuanced discovery. A post about feeling nostalgic might surface in a well-curated feed without needing to announce itself as a #throwback. The algorithm can recognise the emotional tone and thematic relevance without requiring explicit categorisation.

The Technical Elegance

From a technical perspective, the shift from hashtags to custom feeds represents a move from crude text matching to sophisticated content analysis. Bluesky’s implementation of algorithmic choice lets users customize one of the most important parts of their social media experience: their feed.

Custom feeds can analyse post content, engagement patterns, user relationships, and temporal factors to make intelligent decisions about relevance. They can understand that a post about lunar cycles might be relevant to werewolf enthusiasts even without explicit hashtags. They can recognise that technical discussions about AT Protocol implementation are valuable to developer communities regardless of whether they use #programming hashtags.

This isn’t just a marginal improvement—it’s a fundamental upgrade in how social media handles information organisation and discovery.

The Broader Implications

The death of hashtags on Bluesky might seem like a minor technical detail, but I think it represents something more significant: the maturation of social media beyond crude keyword-based organisation toward genuine understanding of content and community.

It’s part of a broader trend toward algorithms that serve users rather than advertisers, curation that prioritises quality over engagement metrics, and platforms that trust users to make their own choices about what they want to see.

This is what genuine algorithmic choice looks like—not just the ability to turn algorithms on or off, but the ability to choose from a diverse ecosystem of curated feeds that actually understand your interests and communities.

Looking Forward

The future of social media discovery won’t be hashtag-based, and Bluesky is proving that there’s a better way. Custom feeds represent a more sophisticated approach to content organisation—one that combines algorithmic intelligence with human curation, community understanding with individual choice.

Will other platforms follow suit? It’s hard to say, but the user experience improvements are so substantial that it’s difficult to imagine going back to hashtag-heavy discovery once you’ve experienced good custom feeds.

For creators, this shift represents an opportunity to focus on authentic content creation rather than strategic hashtag optimisation. For users, it means better discovery of genuinely relevant content without the noise and gaming that plagued hashtag systems.

For the broader social media ecosystem, it suggests that we might finally be moving beyond the crude organisational systems of the early internet toward something more sophisticated and user-centric.

The hashtag served its purpose for a time—it helped organise the chaos of early social media and created a shared vocabulary for content categorisation. But like many transitional technologies, its usefulness has been superseded by better solutions.

On Bluesky, the hashtag isn’t dead because it was killed—it’s dead because it’s no longer needed. It’s like the streetlamp that guided travellers through the dark before electricity: once brighter, smarter lights came along, the old post remained standing, but its glow was no longer what people relied on. And that, perhaps, is the most elegant epitaph it could have.