ability to opt-out of "Discover" feed (and other feeds)

[mm14kwn]

Seeing as there seems to be a refusal to provide privacy features like locked accounts and visibility controls, there should at least be a way to keep your account as private as possible - the "discover" feed is controlled by bluesky Devs and directs accounts towards users with no consideration for if they actually want that. Ideally it should be opted out by default and people can choose if they want to be featured in it, but if that's not acceptable then it's imperative we have a way to opt out of this feed, it drives unwanted attention and is a clear safety risk to privacy focused users. Bluesky Devs control this feed so should be able to control this.

Similarly, we need to be able to opt out of other feeds - I understand this is more complex but should still be implemented.

[beholdnec]

If I'm not mistaken, it is possible to prevent yourself from appearing on a feed by blocking the feed creator. Please correct me if I'm wrong. The creator of the Discover feed is @bsky.app .

[mm14kwn]

You can't do this as far as I know with the bluesky Discover feed as it's run by bluesky devs? Unless I can do this by blocking @bsky.app?

[qazmlp]

Having this as a per-post setting would be great for Activity Pub cross-compatibility.

(I assume it would also be easiest to implement that way, in terms of letting feed generators filter out those posts.)

[DrewMcArthur]

bumping this as I'm seeing some conversation that this would be a desirable feature

I was initially looking for the source code for the discover feed to see how it'd be implemented there, but now I'm realizing it should probably go in the appview anyways.

could potentially be hacked into https://github.com/bluesky-social/atproto/blob/main/packages/bsky/src/hydration/feed.ts ? at that point, the appview fetches thread mutes, so could theoretically also fetch the list of users that opt out of being shown. something like

SELECT did FROM users 
WHERE did IN list_of_posters_being_hydrated 
AND did IN opted_out
AND did NOT IN current_users_following

then removing posts based on that list of DIDs, if they're from a user that has opted out of discoverability and the current user doesn't currently follow them (what should the logic of showing someone anyways be? following? mutuals?)

taking some notes, could probably introduce a noUnwantedDiscovery rule here, based on an actorRequestsNoDiscovery function here, and similarly to how they figure out "does the author of this post block the viewer", write a similar function that answers "does the other of this post want to opt-out of discoverability"

[RonaldZielaznicki]

Going to throw my support into this as well.

I'm seeing folks show up in the discovery feed that actively don't want to be there.

They are able to keep their media out of the feed with labels (marking them as suggestive, nsfw, etc.). But, their text posts show up. The particular post I saw was just them complaining about being in discover, followed by a series of nsfw words they were throwing into the post as an experiment. It was their attempt to get the algo to drop them from the feed.

In the end, this didn't work. And they've decided not to make text posts until they can do so safely.