Instant Internet News

About

What this is, what it rewards, what it does not claim to know.

What This Is

Instant Internet News is a custom Bluesky feed and public signal desk. It runs a ranking algorithm called Receipts that surfaces posts where people show their work: original writing, primary sources, linked evidence, substantive replies.

The site you're reading is a read-only view of the same ranking output that powers the Bluesky feed. One engine, two faces.

What It Rewards

  • Original posts over repost sludge
  • Links to primary sources: court documents, government filings, research papers, code
  • Posts from trusted graph neighbors: mutuals, follows, curated lists
  • Substantive replies that add context
  • Recognized reporting outlets

What It Penalizes

  • Reposts
  • Screenshot discourse with no source link
  • Floodposting: more than ten posts a day starts costing you
  • Low-effort quote-dunks
  • Short drive-by replies

What It Does Not Claim

  • It does not verify factual truth
  • It does not do sentiment analysis or stance detection
  • It does not claim to be neutral. It has a point of view: substance over noise
  • It does not try to be comprehensive. It is deliberately narrow
  • It does not use engagement metrics as a primary signal

This is a ranking instrument, not an oracle. It admits it has taste instead of pretending to be weather.

Receipts: Claims With Receipts, Not Verdicts

Receipts is this project's evidence surface — the ranking engine described above, and the claim ledger built on top of it. The claim ledger is the next compiled object inside Receipts, not a new institution: separate lens, same substrate.

It takes the “does not verify truth” stance and makes it structural. It compiles a post into a claim only when the post carries a citable external source with resolved custody — then shows the receipt (seal, basis, freshness) and says “Truth: unknown.” The weight it reports is admissibility, not truth and not popularity. It is never a verdict about the subject of a claim. Posts that carry no source don't compile; they're surfaced honestly as uncompiled, not hidden and not judged.

Rendering Policy

Posts on this site are rendered natively with links to the original Bluesky post. If an author has disabled logged-out visibility, or has deleted their post, the item is omitted from the public edition. We do not mirror, screenshot, or cache post content.

URL metadata is different. The site may cache public source metadata for linked URLs — canonical URL, title, description, domain, content type, and retrieval status — so a story can wear its source's name instead of a passing skeet's. This is source metadata, not a post mirror. The cache holds nothing the linked publisher hasn't already chosen to advertise to the open web.

This is curation, not extraction.

Source Code

This project is open source: github.com/unpingable/atproto-feeds

Opt Out

Want your posts excluded from this project? DM @instantinternet.news with "opt out" and your account will be removed from the feed, site, and any future archives. DM "opt in" to reverse it.

This is a project-level exclusion, separate from Bluesky's own visibility settings. It applies to your DID across all surfaces this project operates.