Today I noticed that Bluesky added a "Trending" panel to its sidebar that displays topics that are trending on the platform.
If you miss the anxiety of news-related hashtags on Twitter constantly on your face, be calm no more because now you can have those panic attacks in Bluesky as well! Or that's what I'd say if this feature worked exactly like Twitter's.
There is a few notable differences between Twitter's "Trending Topics" and Bluesky's "Trending" panel.
First and foremost, Bluesky's "Trending" panel only has links to "feeds" on Bluesky, not to hashtags like on Twitter. For example, right now I see a link to a feed called "Caturday," but this isn't a search page for posts with the #caturday hashtag, even though in practice all posts seem to have this hashtag. It's kind of confusing, to be honest, as there seems to be no information available for the user about what is a feed, or who decides what posts are included in the feed. If it's just the hashtag, why not just use the hashtag instead?
Second, and perhaps most importantly, there is a little X button on the top right corner that lets me get rid of this cursed feature—out of my sight, out of mind. For many years Twitter users had to come up with all sorts of tricks to get rid of the trending topics, including relying on third-party browser extensions that require full access to all content from the Twitter domain name in order to alter the pages. This is a security risk for users and although browsers share the blame for the lack of granularity in the extensions' permission model, it's something Twitter could offer first-party. Bluesky just lets you hide it like you would expect to be able to. I think this is a great feature—the X button, not the trending topics—and hopefully it stays that way in the future.
See also: [How to Hide Trending Topics on Bluesky].