Bluesky chooses sports news to launch push notifications

The social platform Bluesky announced new notification settings on Monday — including the ability to opt-in to push notifications from your favorite news sources.

Users who click the “bell” icon can get notified when accounts publish new posts. (You can, if you’re into that sort of thing, turn on notifications for Nieman Lab here.)

1.104 is rolling out with new ways to personalize your notifications!

• Activity Notifications: Get push alerts from your favorite accounts
• Repost Notifications: See when someone likes or reposts something you’ve reposted
• New Notification Settings: Fine-tune which notifications you receive

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— Bluesky (@bsky.app) July 7, 2025 at 1:45 PM

The Athletic, one of the first publications to be verified on Bluesky, got top billing in the announcement. A spokesperson for Bluesky confirmed it was not a paid partnership. (“The Athletic has a big presence on Bluesky and we asked permission to use their brand,” the spokesperson said.) The sports news site was the featured profile in the pop-up shown to users across Bluesky and in the blog post with details on the new settings.

It shouldn’t be a surprise that Bluesky chose to announce the new notifications settings with a sports news account. Bluesky has said sports is not just a top priority but the top priority.

Bluesky saw “record engagement and posts” for sports in June, the company told me. That includes a 25% daily increase in posts and a tripling of engagement rates. Bluesky said the bump was led by interest in the NHL and NBA Finals. The official NBA.com account launched in May and created its own custom feeds on Bluesky for Finals watchalongs.

“When we think about the core communities that really made micro-blogging as a format work on Twitter or other social platforms, sports was definitely a big one, especially for breaking news and real-time events,” a Bluesky spokesperson told Sportico, a news site that covers the business of sports, in November. Threads has followed a similar playbook, from recruiting scoop-heavy reporters like Shams Charania and Adrian Wojnarowski for #NBAThreads to, more recently, becoming the “official technology partner” of a mixed martial arts league.

Bluesky staffers realized how important sports could be for the platform after many Brazilians joined Bluesky during a ban on X in the country in 2024. (“We would be watching our dashboards, and then whenever there would be a spike, we were like, ‘Okay, someone just made a goal,’” the Bluesky spokesperson said.)

Sports news is (surprise) less polarizing than political news and, by some measures, the most popular topic on X. Sports news also has peaks scattered throughout each year — rather than an election cycle that’s most closely followed once every two or four years. The Super Bowl is the most-watched broadcast in the U.S. but even in the offseason, there are dream-making drafts, star-studded trades, and other things of that nature. The rise in online sports gambling, too, has put a premium on injury news and other real-time updates.

Bluesky has some journalist-friendly features. The most important is that, unlike X or Threads, the Bluesky algorithm does not deprioritize external links to news sites. Still, the platform has a long way to go if it wants to replace X as the home for sports news. Charania and his fellow ESPN Insider Adam Schefter are not on the platform. NFL teams haven’t joined.

And I’m personally looking for Kevin Durant, one of the greatest athlete-posters to ever do it, to make the jump before calling Bluesky a real rival.

I get what you’re saying but I come to Twitter to argue about sports and music Bro..it’s a simple concept for me lol

— Kevin Durant (@KDTrey5) March 18, 2021

Read the blog post from the Bluesky team here.