LONDON: Social media platform Bluesky launched a new private bookmarks option on Monday, in response to user privacy requests.

The “saved posts” feature allows users to store posts for later viewing using a bookmark icon located under each message, next to the existing heart icon used for likes. User accounts and activity are public on Bluesky, which means that likes are visible to others, but bookmarks will remain private.

Described by news site TechCrunch as “one of users’ most in-demand features,” the saved posts option is the platform’s response to requests for a more discreet way to save content for later reference. It mirrors a similar step taken by rival platform X last year, which hid users’ likes over concerns that public visibility might reduce engagement.

Bluesky — which gained popularity following the mass departure of users from X, formerly Twitter, after Elon Musk’s takeover — has become the preferred platform of its kind for the global scientific community.

The results of a study published this month, which analyzed 2.6 million Bluesky posts referencing more than 500,000 scholarly articles, found significantly higher levels of interaction and textual originality on the platform compared with X.

However, striking a balance between user requests for privacy in some circumstances and the inherently public, transparent nature of the platform remains a challenge for Bluesky. Its underlying Authenticated Transfer Protocol does not yet fully support private data, so bookmarks will be stored off-protocol temporarily, similar to the way in which private messages are handled.

The addition of the private saved posts feature could improve user engagement, TechCrunch speculated, by allowing users to privately curate and revisit posts, and it offers an alternative to the workaround many users have been using, which was to reply to posts using the red pushpin emoji.