Bluesky now has a specific tab for mentions in your notifications as part of the apps just-released 1.96 update. With the mentions tab, its much easier to see your replies or conversations youve been tagged in on the platform.Speaking of replies, update 1.96 lets you easily access settings that let you control how replies on posts appear to you. Replies can be linear, meaning they show up one post after another, or threaded, which means they will appear in indented threads (kind of like how they appear on Reddit). You can also sort replies by newest, oldest, most-liked, hot, and random (which Bluesky also calls Posters Roulette).If you choose to set a custom domain as your username, with 1.96, Bluesky will also reserve your old .bsky.social name so that it cant be picked up by someone else. I wish this feature had been available when I set my custom domain when I did that, I made an alt account thats parked on my old .bsky.social name so that it doesnt get taken.Bluesky saw a surge of new users in November, and although growth has slowed as of late, the platform surpassed 25 million total users last week. The company plans to launch a subscription service early next year and, at some point, its own payment platform.And the platform has some big competition from Metas Threads, which seems to be doing everything it can to remind people that it can ship lots of features and that its much larger than Bluesky.