Bluesky Now Supports Hashtags
Earlier this month, I posted an in-depth review of Bluesky, the social media platform that was originally envisioned as X/Twitter’s replacement. Although it has several things to recommend it over X/Twitter (e.g., improved content moderation), Bluesky still lacked several key features, chief of which was support for hashtags.
Hashtags have become the de facto way to organize your social media posts and see what others are saying about a specific topic. Bluesky’s lack of hashtag support was therefore pretty glaring, especially since Threads launched its own take on hashtags back in December. As is their wont, though, Bluesky’s developers were taking their time in order to address some of the concerns with hashtags.
With its most recent release, though, Bluesky now supports hashtags. When you see a post with hashtags, clicking on one will present three options:
- See all posts with the hashtag
- See all posts with the hashtag by that user
- Mute the hashtag
You can also mute hashtags (along with keywords) in Bluesky’s content moderation settings.
I’m glad to see Bluesky add hashtags, but to be honest, it’s unclear how this implementation addresses some of the aforementioned concerns, particularly with regards to presentation and accessibility. For instance, hashtags can’t include spaces, which was a proposed accessibility solution. (Hashtags with spaces are easier for screen readers to handle.)
Perhaps, however, Bluesky’s developers simply realized that they needed hashtag support now and chose to implement something that would be “good enough” for the time being while continuing work on a more comprehensive solution. In any case, support for hashtags — however incomplete it may be — is a welcome addition, and one less reason to keep using X/Twitter.