TodayHow it works
How these feeds are ranked
All day long we read the public posts on Bluesky and Mastodon and pick the ones worth your time, topic by topic. This page explains how, what we leave out, and how to keep your posts out.
Our own model
The ranking comes from a model we built and trained ourselves. This edition used cand-v1.1 (Bluesky) and cand-v1.1 (Mastodon). It learned from 14,068 example posts, each labelled for topic, intent and quality.
For every post it predicts three things: the topic (one of 21), what the author is doing (giving an opinion, asking, reporting, sharing something they made, recommending) and how worth reading it is. Each topic’s list is sorted by that last score.
Only confident picks are ranked. When the model isn’t sure a post belongs in a topic, the post goes under “More in this topic” instead. Reading intents describe what the author is doing: a post only appears in an intent group when the model is sure of that label.
Posts with similar meaning are grouped so one discussion is less likely to take over a topic. The topic’s list keeps the best of those posts and links to the rest on a story page. A collection can include different events or examples of a broader subject; these groupings aren’t verified event matches. Cross-network topic links use overlapping keywords.
The front page also checks for signs that a post needs missing media or earlier conversation. Its opening sampler draws from different topic groups. These checks can miss context; the full topic lists and links to the originals remain available.
Bluesky and Mastodon are ranked separately, then woven together one by one in each network’s own order, because the two scores can’t be compared directly. A post that appears on both networks is shown once, with a link to each copy.
Likes never rank
We never use likes, reposts, boosts or replies to order anything. A post can’t climb the list by going viral.
Popularity does one small thing. A post in the day’s top 1% by interactions can be included even when the model isn’t sure of its topic. Those posts are labelled Popular today and their topic is shown as a guess, like probably Music. They are still ordered by the model’s score.
What we leave out
- Spam, junk and accounts that look automated or call themselves bots.
- Hard-sell advertising.
- Adult content.
- Posts we can’t make sense of on their own, like a bare emoji or a reply fragment.
- Everyone who opted out (see opting out).
Personal posts about people’s own lives are allowed, but that topic always comes last. Selected posts include images, author descriptions, linked-page previews and earlier conversation when available. Images are served from Wildroot; videos open on the original network. Posts with a content warning stay folded until you open them.
How we find similar posts
A meaning fingerprint
Every post is turned into a list of numbers that captures what it says, so two posts can match without sharing a single word.
Close neighbours
We look for the posts whose fingerprints sit closest to this one.
A second opinion
A second model, trained on our own judgements of which posts really belong together, puts those neighbours in order.
Related posts stay together
Posts on similar subjects are grouped, with links to read the rest.
Weak matches stay hidden
If nothing is close enough, we show nothing rather than a poor match.
Likes, reposts and follower counts never decide the order.
Search
Search looks through the last 48 hours of posts for your words, “exact phrases”, #hashtags, @handles and websites, and also finds posts about the same thing by meaning. New posts join every 10 minutes. Bluesky authors who opted out never appear, and Mastodon posts appear only if their author allows search (see opting out). Likes and follower counts never decide the order.
How often it updates
New posts are ranked and added every 10 minutes, and everything is rebuilt from scratch twice a day, at 04:00 and 16:00 UTC. The Bluesky pages cover the day so far; until 08:00 UTC they show the whole previous day. Mastodon posts come from the 36 hours before the ranking. This edition was ranked Bluesky ; Mastodon . Each edition replaces the one before, and old editions aren’t kept. “Happening now” looks at the last three hours of posts in the edition.
What this site doesn’t do
Reading this site needs no account, and there are no cookies, ads or trackers. One small script shows times in your own time zone and helps open posts in Wildroot Social. We don’t load pictures or anything else from other servers while you read a feed page. Authors’ profile pictures are copied to our own server first.
Read post links open signup for guests, with a prominent Continue to Bluesky Social or Mastodon link to the original post before the form. Signup is optional. If you are signed in to Wildroot Social, the post opens there. If your sign-in has expired, you can sign in again or continue to the original. Without JavaScript, feed text remains readable, but signup and its original-post continuation need JavaScript. Author-profile and linked-article links still go directly to their destinations.
What you type into Search or Similar posts is never stored, and our logs never contain it. Search reads it with a small model on our own server. Similar posts sends it to an outside service that turns text into a meaning fingerprint, and so does Search when our model is unavailable or for a small quality-check sample.
Opting out
Bluesky
In Bluesky, open Settings → Privacy and security → Logged-out visibility and turn on Discourage apps from showing my account to logged-out users. Accounts with this setting are left out completely: their posts never reach this site, its search or Similar posts, or Wildroot Social for guests, not even quoted inside someone else’s post. Posts that carry this label themselves are left out too.
We check every author before their posts are published, and re-check everyone at each full rebuild. Search also follows Bluesky’s live stream of account changes, so a new opt-out reaches it within seconds.
Mastodon and the fediverse
Mastodon posts follow the settings you already have:
- Turn off Feature profile and posts in discovery algorithms (discoverable) and your posts never appear in these ranked pages or in Similar posts.
- Your posts appear in our search only if Include public posts in search results (indexable) is on.
- Turn on Opt out of search engine indexing (noindex), or put #nobot, #noindex or #noai (or words like “no bots” or “no AI”) in your name, bio or profile fields, and we don’t collect your posts at all. The same tags in a single post keep that post out.
- Locked accounts, followers-only and unlisted posts, direct messages, boosts and replies to other people are never collected.
For this edition we re-checked 2,057 Mastodon authors on their own servers and left out 8.
Remove a post
Send the link to the post to matt@wildroot.io and we’ll take it off the site. Deleting the post itself also keeps it out of future editions.