The best time to post on Bluesky

There is a general answer, and it is only a starting point. Your own best hours come from your own posts, and they are free to see.

Updated 30 September 2026

Why timing matters more on Bluesky

Bluesky's default Following feed shows posts in the order they were made. There is no ranking pass that resurfaces an hour-old post to someone who was not looking at the time. If your followers are asleep when you post, most of them will never scroll back far enough to find it. The Discover feed and custom feeds do rank posts, but they favour posts that got early replies and reposts, which again means posting when your people are around.

So timing on Bluesky is not about an algorithm's preferences. It is about your own followers' clocks.

The general answer, for what it is worth

Across the accounts Updrift measures, the first-day engagement a post receives, counted per thousand followers the account had that day, is highest for posts that go out in the evening on the account's own clock, roughly 18:00 to 21:00, and again in the late morning, roughly 10:00 to 12:00. Weekday evenings edge out weekend evenings; weekend mornings edge out weekday mornings. That is a pattern across many accounts with UK and US audiences, and it is the pattern the Planner starts a new account on until it has measured that account's own.

Why the general answer is only a starting point

A photographer with a following in Japan and a small business in Manchester share nothing about when their followers read. An account that grew from a starter pack of night-shift nurses has a different day from one that grew from a book club. The general figure is an average of all of them, and an average of two different days is a time that suits neither.

Finding your own best hours

1. Post at a spread of times for a few weeks rather than the same hour every day. You cannot measure an hour you never post in.
2. Measure each post's first day, not its lifetime total. A post that went out at the right hour gets its engagement fast; one at the wrong hour gets it slowly if at all.
3. Count per thousand followers on the day, so a post from when you had 400 followers can be compared with one from when you had 4,000.
4. Set each post's figure against your own median post, and group by hour and weekday. The hours that beat your usual are your best hours.

Updrift does this for one account free: connect it and the best-hours view and the What works report fill in as you post. On a paid plan the Planner books posts into those hours by itself.

How often to post

On a chronological feed each post pushes the last one down, so spacing matters more than volume. Most accounts do best with one to three posts a day at least a couple of hours apart. If you have more to say, a thread keeps it in one place. The Planner keeps a gap of at least 45 minutes between your own posts for this reason.

Two clocks

If your audience is mostly in one time zone that is not yours, plan on their clock, not yours. A UK account with a mostly American audience posts at 23:00 UK time to catch the US evening; Updrift shows an account's best hours on the clock you set for that account, so the figures already say that.