How My Lucky☆Star Feed Works

So I’ve been making custom feeds on Bluesky for a while now! Been having lots of fun doing it, honestly, every feed feels like I’m getting to chart out a previously-unexplored corner of the network that I never knew existed beforehand.

But I have a limited amount of bandwidth, and I’ve been pushing up against my limit for a while. I’ve been very aware of this so, when I felt the urge to make a feed based on Lucky Star, I told myself to hold off and maybe (just this once) settle for what’s already been made.

Sure enough, someone had already made a Lucky Star feed before me! They also peaced out of Bluesky several months ago, but the feed still ran! With lots of posts about Madonna’s “Lucky Star” song included, among other false-positives. And AI imagery of the Lucky Star gals. Lots of that.

I made do, though, for a long while. Then I discovered the creator of that preexisting Lucky Star feed wasn’t just oblivious to AI and the need to remove it from their feed, but actually generated an AI video of Konata.

Welp!

That brings us to the present, where I’ve now made a Lucky Star feed of my own. I’m actually kinda proud of how it’s designed? It feels like the biggest swing I’ve taken in a while, and I’d like to go over how it all works.

To start us off, let’s go over a rule that almost all custom feeds ought to abide by!

Feed Rule: No Replies!

Replies are nice to have in your following feed, from people you follow. They are poison for maybe 99% of custom feeds.

For just one example: Say you have a Batman feed - I used to! If you include replies while you search for Batman stuff, you’re going to see every time the cringiest uncle in the world replies “Holy Covfefe, Batman!!!” at the latest Trump news.

Now imagine he sent that reply 12 times in the past 10 minutes, and you see them back-to-back before finally reaching someone else posting their thoughts on the latest issue of Poison Ivy by G. Willow Wilson.

Isn’t the latter just what you want to see when you look at a feed to begin with? Plus, if our Poison Ivy reader wrote a whole thread on the topic, you can choose to click through if you’re interested in reading that or scroll on to something you are interested in instead.

It’s not that Uncle Covfefe is a bad guy, but the experience of wading through a sea of replies like his to get to posts that’re meaningfully on-topic is just exhausting. Thus: no replies!

So What IS Allowed???

Well, unfortunately in the case of Lucky Star, people thank “lucky stars” all the time. People also have “lucky starts” while they’re playing Wordle! I’ve even seen “Lucky starring” once. So, as weird as it may sound: We can’t look for just “Lucky Star” in our Lucky Star feed. Not unless we want anyone who uses our feed to have to wade through a bunch of non-Lucky Star things.

That might make this whole endeavor seem like a dead-end, but there’s a solution! We just need to find…

Things That Are Definitely Lucky Star

What’s something that, if it’s written in a post, we know that post is going to be about Lucky Star? Konata! Er, Konata Izumi, at least - people are allowed to name whatever they want (including themselves!) “Konata,” but there’s just one Konata Izumi! So, if a post mentions “Konata Izumi,” or the full name of any character from Lucky Star, let it into the feed!

What else, what else… Right, Lucky☆Star - the special way the series’ title is spelled out! If there’s a star between the words “Lucky” and “Star,” that means it’s the Lucky Star we’re looking for! Let it into the feed!

Then there’s stuff like KonaKaga, a fandom term for the romance of Konata Izumi and Kagami Hiiragi - that’s guaranteed to be on-topic for our feed! We can also safely include stuff like “Lucky Star character,” since that’s just specific enough that we avoid the false-positives of just searching for “Lucky Star.”

“But…”

I can already hear you asking, “But what if I don’t want to put a star in when I write Lucky Star? What if my post doesn’t happen to mention the full name of a character? Don’t my Lucky Star posts belong too?”

This is where the fun begins. 😈

As I said, we can’t just search for “Lucky Star.” But. If you post “Lucky Star is my favorite anime,” you’re definitely talking about the right Lucky Star. Can we include that, or if the post mentions manga? Yes, to both!

We can’t just look for “Konata,” but if your post mentions Konata and Lucky Star? That can’t be about any other Lucky Star or Konata than the ones we want in our feed, so we let that (and any other given names we can’t include on their own without Lucky Star) into the feed.

If your post mentions “Lucky Star” and “Yoshimizu,” the surname of Lucky Star series creator Yoshimizu Kagami, you’re probably not talking about thanking your lucky stars!

And That’s Not All!

Thanks to recent updates to Graze (the feed builder I’m using to make this feed,) the fun doesn’t stop at just what I can find in post text.

If you have “anime” or “manga” in your bio and you post something with “Lucky Star” in it, I can safely assume it’s the correct Lucky Star and let you in. Hell, let’s include those posts if people have “Yuri” or “Yaoi” in their bio while we’re at it!

If you follow Viz or Crunchyroll and write “Lucky Star” in a post, you are probably talking about the right one.

Do I have to write “Lucky Star” in every post?!?

Nope! Like I mentioned earlier, “KonaKaga” is specific enough that we include it. You can post “Konata Izumi and Kagami Hiiragi are going to get married and have a baby together” and that’ll get in just fine.

But you can also just post the following:

“average person thinks of kissing Konata 3 times a day” factoid actualy just statistical error. average person thinks of kissing Konata 0 times a day. Kagami, who’s madly in love with Konata and thinks of kissing her 10,000 times each day, is an outlier adn should not have been counted.

And that would get in!… Probably didn’t need to go that far, you could just write “Tsukasa and Kagami are so relatable” and that’d be enough too. I’d still like the KonaKaga edition of the Spiders Georg meme, anyway.

So what ISN’T allowed?

… That might be a little hyperbolic, but I like to think I’ve illustrated just how open and easy to get into this feed feels even though we’ve had to largely design it around a title that’s kinda difficult to work with! But there are lots of things that’ll get your post taken out of the feed.

Most of the exclusions won’t even matter to whoever’s being excluded, since I don’t think anyone posting about “Lucky Star” by Madonna wants to be in a feed about the manga/anime of the same name.

I’ve taken care to exclude the names of just about every song artist I could find who’s sung a song with “Lucky Star” anywhere in the title, and posts that begin with “#NowPlaying” from automated radio accounts that cannot care about characters like Misao Kusakabe because they are heartless bots.

I’ve also done my best to proactively remove any posts that feature genAI or mention crypto bullshit, for a number of reasons we don’t need to get too deep into. Posts containing terms of that nature are often spammy, never heartfelt, and have no place in any feed of mine.

What if I don’t want to be in a feed?

That’s perfectly fine, too.

If you don’t want to be in my Lucky Star feed at all but still want to post freely about Lucky Star without worrying about your post showing up in it, you can use the hashtag #nofeed and you’ll stay out of it!

This isn’t a universal thing, custom feeds have to proactively choose to remove posts with that tag. All I can promise is that this feed will honor that boundary.

I think that covers basically everything I wanted to go over! I hope this gave you an appreciation for how custom feeds work and that it wasn’t prohibitively-technical. Feel free to give the feed a look, anyway!

Bye-ni!