Social networking startup Bluesky is rolling out one of its users’ most in-demand features. No, it’s not an edit button—it’s bookmarks.
The company announced the new addition on Monday, calling it Saved Posts. The feature is accessible through a new bookmark icon underneath each post, located next to the heart icon for favoriting. Your saved posts can then be viewed at any time from a new “Saved” section in the app’s main navigation.
While it may seem redundant to have both likes and bookmarks on a social app, since both offer a way to mark a post for later reference, bookmarks provide a private alternative to the public “like.” On Bluesky, your account and its associated data are public, which means your likes are also public. That does not work for everyone, as some things you save are personal or simply not the types of things you want to publicly advertise.
Journalists, for example, may save posts they aim to reference later but do not necessarily want to broadcast that they have just started looking into something, which could invite unwanted attention. Others may simply want to bookmark their favorite adult content.
On X, Elon Musk realized that the public nature of likes could actually decrease engagement. This prompted the company last year to hide users’ likes. According to X employees at the time, public likes could incentivize the wrong behavior, as people might feel discouraged from liking content that is edgy or could harm their public image.
The AT Protocol, which powers Bluesky and other smaller social apps, does not yet support private data. Therefore, there is not a way to hide users’ likes. Instead, the company built a way to save a user’s bookmarks off-protocol for the time being, which allows them to be private, similar to Bluesky’s direct messages. If and when the protocol evolves to support private data, things could change.
In the meantime, the addition of saved posts on Bluesky could encourage users to engage more with content on the platform. It also offers a way to look back at a curated collection of only the posts you want to reference later, rather than everything you casually liked while scrolling your feeds. It will provide an alternative to replying to posts with a red pushpin emoji, as many Bluesky users currently do as a workaround for saving posts they want to return to.
The addition follows another recent update for the Bluesky app, which rolled out only days ago. That update offered a button for both photo and video uploads, tools to provide feedback to custom feed creators, and a way to add people to a Starter Pack, which is a pack of recommended people to follow that anyone can create.