Curation, without an algorithm

The Following feed is chronological. It’s the default; it’s the way the network was always intended to work; and it’s the surface Lanai treats as the home of your reading. No re-ranking. No “for you” injections. No quietly moving things around because we thought you’d like a different order.

That’s the negative half of the curation story. The positive half is the long list of levers Lanai gives you for shaping the timeline yourself.

Custom feeds

The AT Protocol’s most important feature for readers is the one that lets a feed be a third-party object — built by anyone, subscribed to by anyone, mutable without anyone needing permission. Lanai shows them as first-class.

Switch to any custom feed from the feed selector. Pin the ones you live in. Browse the in-app directory when you want to find new ones. Subscribe and unsubscribe freely; nothing in your account is altered, no notifications get sent, no one is owed an explanation.

Lists

Lists are the AT Protocol’s grouping primitive. Lanai lets you make them, add people to them quietly, and browse a list as if it were a timeline. They’re the right answer for the people I follow because we work together vs. the people I follow because I want to read them. Both can exist; they don’t have to be the same feed.

Mute lists, including public ones

Block lists are aggressive. Mute lists are quiet. Lanai supports both, and it makes the quiet one easy: subscribe to a public mute list maintained by a community you trust, and the posts those accounts make stop appearing in your timeline — but the accounts themselves don’t know, the network state doesn’t change, and you can unsubscribe whenever the list stops feeling like your reading.

The community-maintained mute list is one of the most underrated AT-Protocol affordances. Lanai puts it forward.

Temporary mutes

Sometimes a person, a topic, or a tag earns a break. Lanai lets you mute for 24 hours, 7 days, or 30 days, with an explicit expiry. The mute auto-expires; you don’t have to remember to unblock anyone; the conversation comes back when the air has cleared.

It’s a small social affordance. It pays for itself the first time you use it on, say, the day after an election.

Labelers

AT Protocol labelers let third-party services apply labels to posts and accounts — for content warnings, fact-checks, community-maintained categories. Lanai exposes the labels in a quiet design treatment: a small visible indicator on the labelled post, never an interstitial, never a silent removal. You decide whether to view the labelled content. The labeller doesn’t.

Threadgates

Threadgates let an author scope who can reply to a given post — only people they follow, only people in a specific list, only mentioned accounts. Lanai supports them as an author and respects them as a reader. The composer surfaces the choice up front, where it belongs.

What curation is not

Lanai doesn’t decide which posts are good. It doesn’t infer your preferences and quietly shape what you see. It doesn’t suggest accounts to follow based on machine inference of your taste; discovery happens through the levers above, through links in posts, through profiles you visit on purpose.

There is no “For You” feed in Lanai. If you want one, the official Bluesky client offers one and it works well. It just isn’t a feature of this client.

Why this is the right answer

The shape of your timeline is one of the most consequential choices a social client makes for you. Most clients make that choice with an algorithm. Lanai’s bet is that the readers it’s designed for would rather choose for themselves — even when choosing is a little more work.

You picked who to follow. You picked which feeds to read. You decide who to quiet. Lanai’s job is to make those levers good, and then to disappear.