Bluesky can really keep up with the news now that it has activity notifications

One thing that has been missing from Bluesky until now was the ability to turn on notifications for specific accounts, but now Activity Notifications are live. If you want to know every time The Verge or ESPN, or one of your friends posts, you can, just by toggling the bell icon on their profile page, along with an option to see notifications for just new posts or with replies included too.

It’s the kind of feature I’ve gotten used to on other platforms, especially Twitter, where news breakers have been able to keep their audiences updated from minute to minute, making it easier to follow interesting topics or developing stories.

That goes double for sports, and Bluesky has called growing its presence in sports discussions “a top priority.” So far, ESPN reporter and Woj heir Shams Charania hasn’t brought his free agency coverage to the platform yet (to go with X, Threads, and the ESPN app), but now that it has push notifications for specific accounts, maybe he will.

Another small change is that it can also notify people if someone likes or reposts something they have reposted.

Of course, if your problem is that you’re getting too many notifications, the updates that rolled out on Monday also have something for you. There’s been an explosion in the amount of granular controls available to decide if you’ll get updates about reports, likes, new followers, or other activity, and if you want to receive them from activity by anyone, no one, or just people you follow. According to a blog post, the simple “priority notifications” toggle that was available previously has been migrated to the new setup, so anyone who had it turned on will still only get notifications from people they follow.