New Ad Free BookSky Feeds and Hashtags vs Emoji

Hi! It's been a minute. There's been a lot of things happening behind the scenes at BookSky HQ and some tough decisions being made (more on that later this week) but for now I wanted to get the website up to date with all of the new BookSky feeds that I've created over the last 6 months. All of these feeds have a special moderation node on them that removes obviously identifiable ads. This is still a work in progress but the review from the BookSky Patreon community seems to be that this is a big improvement if you think the main BookSky feed has too many ads.

Main BookSky (ad free) - the classic feed you know and love with the junk removed!

BookSky Trending (ad free) - the most popular BookSky posts, sorted by a 'trending' metric, with the ads removed.

Sci-Fi / Fantasy / Spec Fic / Weird Fic (ad free) - our biggest and oldest genre feed has been tweaked (to include more spec fic/weird fic posts!) and the ads have been removed

BookSky Multi Genre Aggregator (ad free) - this one takes all the posts from the BookSky genre feeds and filters out the ads (so this is where you would see ad free posts from the Literary Fiction or Historical Fiction feeds for example).

Mega Genre Fiction Feed (ad free) - this is an aggregator of all of the most popular fiction hashtags I could find on bluesky with the ads removed.

Now, the last two may sound really similar but they actually have pretty different content. The Multi Genre Aggregator is based on the emoji code I created for BookSky where different emoji get your post into different genre feeds. The people who use these emoji are BookSky community who understand the system and use it to their advantage. The Mega Genre Fiction Feed is based on popular hashtags and pulls in posts from the wider bluesky network; these posters are not necessarily familiar with BookSky but may be posting content you enjoy nonetheless. If you're not familiar with the difference between hashtags and emoji, read the first part of the BookSky FAQ!

I picked emoji for the BookSky project because I wanted my feeds to have more a opt-in, community feel and because I'd seen how easily hashtags became overrun with spam. As this project has continued and BookSky became bigger than I ever thought possible, I've added in hashtags wherever I thought they would improve the quality of the feed and added spam removal tools to the best of my ability. As this project has progressed, some feeds have become much more active than others. Some feeds get lots of posts but limited engagement, other feeds get far fewer posts but much more engagement on the posts themselves. Some feeds get lots of views but also very limited engagement.

I built the original BookSky feed in 2023 and while the feed is much larger in terms of viewership and daily posts than it was back then, engagement per post is much lower overall. One of my big BookSky goals for 2026 is to create an environment that fosters more engagement on the BookSky feeds. So much of social media has turned into mindless scrolling and consuming and I would really like BookSky to be the opposite of that.

The ad free feeds are just the beginning steps of that goal. And yes, they are currently exclusively available to the BookSky Patreon members! Running BookSky is an extremely time consuming project and I am so grateful to the (small but mighty) number of you who have joined so that I can take time off my other jobs to work on this. If you use and enjoy any of the BookSky feeds or resources, please consider joining at whatever tier you can on Patreon. The more support from the community, the more time I can dedicate to creating new features and feeds for everyone to use and enjoy.