Bluesky just got a free update to make it more relaxing

There's a big battle raging in social media, and we don't mean a flame war. The two leading contenders for the former Twitter's crown, Meta's Threads and the independent Bluesky, are having a feature war – and the latest Bluesky update is an important upgrade.

It's not so much a battle as a case of Bluesky introducing new features and Meta allegedly "borrowing" them. For example, Meta has followed Bluesky's lead in giving you pinned feeds and starter groups of people you might want to follow. And, Bluesky's latest upgrade adds notification filtering, which even relatively modest accounts are going to appreciate.

Before today, all your Bluesky notifications were lumped together – so when you looked at your notifications you'd see every like, every repost and every mention. Even with relatively small follower numbers that gets very messy very quickly.

Now, you can swap between all notifications and filter to just your mentions. That should mean you won't miss anything potentially important amid all those Likes.

Threads is adding new features too, to a mixed response

As we reported earlier this week, Threads is hoping to woo more influencers and brands with a host of features including scheduled posts and post analytics. But, its latest announcement, of a new way to share media, is causing some consternation among artists and other creators.

The newly announced feature, which will roll out to the app imminently, makes it much easier for you to share other people's images or videos. It'll include the poster's username as a little watermark, but crucially it won't include a link to the original post.

This is not going down very well among the photography community or among people who make video content, and while it can be turned off in the app settings to stop other people sharing your stuff in this way, the feature is opt-out, not opt-in. You can't travel back in time to undo things people have already shared.

If you're not keen on being rewarded with exposure rather than traffic, you might want to check your app's settings.