Möwe #2 — What the Feeds Leave Out

July 18–25, 2026

Observation

Issue #1 was about feeds that gather. This week the Japanese Atmosphere built the opposite. A fan shipped a feed defined mostly by what it refuses. A developer shipped a feed that selects by other people's attention. Bluesky's own team floated a mute for reposts. And the illustrators still on X named, again, the one subtraction this protocol does not offer them yet. Different layers, same move: deciding what will not arrive.

Curated Posts

Sky Beyond — so-asano.com released a custom feed that shows you the likes of people whose likes you liked. Selection at one remove: you are not picking posts, you are picking whose taste to borrow. (July 18)

A fandom feed built on exclusion — ryoyamato0107 re-announced a Touken Ranbu pairing feed, explicitly for fans arriving from X. It collects by keyword, drops any post that also carries a rival pairing's emoji or a disallowed name form, and holds what survives for seven days. The precision is the point. No platform would ever ship a filter that knows what a rival pairing is; a fan built one and asked people to spread it. (July 23)

Repost mute, signalled — Bluesky's Eric said muting reposts and quote-reposts might arrive soon. The Japanese relay account feednavi carried it the same week and drew 26 reposts. Protocol news reaches this community through volunteer translators, usually first. (July 21)

SkyFeed went dark — custom feeds hosted on SkyFeed became unreachable late on July 23, with no official word. They came back the next day, still with no official word. Much of the filtering described above runs on one volunteer's infrastructure. (July 23–24)

The subtraction nobody can build — asanori708042 explains why their friends will not follow them over from X: the people are there, and Bluesky has no locked accounts. "鍵アカだけでも実装してくれないかな" — just give us private accounts, at least. Several posts said the same thing this week. (July 19)

Proposition

A feed is normally described by what it collects. This week argues the reverse is more informative. The pairing feed's rules are almost entirely negative — it is defined by what it drops, at the granularity of a single emoji. Sky Beyond subtracts by delegation: everything not liked by someone whose likes you liked is gone. Repost mute removes a post type. In each case a person is specifying, precisely, an absence.

This is what an open protocol actually changes. It does not hand users a better filter than a platform would design. It lets them build filters a platform could never design, because the platform does not know what a rival pairing is and never will. Perception here is not a setting anyone was granted. It is a thing people wrote.

The ceiling shows up in the same week. Private accounts are not a filter you can bolt on top — they require the protocol to withhold data at the source, and no amount of feed-building substitutes. A permissioned-data proposal has been in public review since June, and until it lands the answer to those illustrators is: wait. The population most fluent in building its own filters is stuck at the one boundary it cannot draw for itself.