Bluesky reaches 40 million users, rolls out beta of Dislike feature.

Social network Bluesky, which on Friday announced a new milestone of 40 million users, will soon begin testing “dislikes” as a way to improve personalization in its main Discover feed and elsewhere.

The news was shared alongside a host of other updates and changes to Conversation Control, which includes smaller adjustments to replies, improved detection of toxic comments, and other ways to prioritize conversations that are most relevant to an individual user.

With the Dislike feature rolling out soon, Bluesky will take into account the new signal to improve user personalization. When users “dislike” posts, the system will learn what type of content they want to see less. This will help inform more than just how feeds rank content, but also respond to ratings.

The company explained that the changes are designed to make Bluesky a place for more “fun, real, and respectful exchanges” — an edict that comes after a month of unrest on the platform in which some users once again criticized the platform for its moderation decisions. While Bluesky is designed as a decentralized network where users run their own moderation, some subsets of Bluesky users want the platform itself to ban bad actors and controversial figures rather than leaving it up to users to ban them.

However, Bluesky wants to focus more on the tools it provides users to control their own experience.

Today, that includes things like moderation lists that allow users to quickly block a group of people they don’t want to interact with, content filtering controls, muted words, and the ability to opt in to other moderation providers. Bluesky also allows users to segregate quote posts to limit unwanted attention, which has long influenced the toxic culture of “dunking” on X (formerly Twitter).

In addition to dislikes, the company says it’s testing a combination of rating updates, design changes, and other feedback tools to improve conversations on its network.

This includes a new system that will identify “social neighborhoods” on Bluesky, meaning connections between people who often interact and respond to each other. Bluesky says it prioritizes replies from people “closest to your area,” to make the conversations you see in your feed more relevant and familiar. The new “I Don’t Like” may have some impact here, too, Plosky says.

This, in particular, is an area where Threads, from Meta, has been challenged at times.

As newsletter writer Max Read pointed out last year, Threads tends to put its users in a confusing feed where conversations they weren’t connected to show up, sometimes midway through a story. “It is often impossible to know who is responding to whom and where and why you see certain posts,” Reed noted. “They appear out of nowhere and lead nowhere,” he wrote at the time.

Bluesky’s plan to map social neighborhoods could address this problem as it expands.

The company also said its latest model does a better job of detecting “toxic, spam, off-topic, or posted in bad faith” replies, lowering their rankings in threads, search results, and notifications.

Another change to the reply button will now take users to the full thread instead of going directly to the compose screen, which may encourage users to read the thread before replying.

Plosky says this is a simple way to “reduce content collapse and redundant replies” — another criticism he tends to levy on Twitter/X.

Additionally, the company is tweaking the reply settings feature to make it clearer for users as they can control who is allowed to reply to their posts.