Bluesky is rolling out some updates to enhance its notifications system, offering users of the social media platform and X (Twitter) rival a more customizable alerts experience.
First, there's a new Activity Notifications that enables you to receive alerts only for specific accounts, which is useful if you want to keep up to date with a particular friend, brand, or media outlet – like MacRumors, for instance.
Enabling this feature is similar to how it works on X: visit a profile and tap the bell icon to receive notifications every time that account publishes a new post.
Meanwhile, as part of wider notification preference updates, users can now opt to receive notifications only when certain accounts reply to them.
Other new options also include individual alert customizations for new followers, likes, replies, mentions, quotes, and reposts. Each option can be set to apply only to accounts the user follows or to everyone, or they can be disabled entirely.
Bluesky said that its previous "priority notifications" feature has been removed. This feature let users receive notifications only from accounts they follow. To replicate this behavior now, users need to manually set their reply, mention, and quote notifications to "people you follow only."
Bluesky has over 34 million active users, according to the company. That's still a lot less than Meta's Threads in total users, but the platform continues to gain popularity as an alternative to X.
