Taking your first steps on Bluesky

(London) Many people whose expectations aren’t met by X, Threads and Mastodon are turning to social media platform Bluesky these days.

People looking to avoid the chaos, noise and political bluster in the wake of the US election are noticing a different environment on the social platform Bluesky, where the vibe is seemingly welcoming and there are noticeably fewer trolls.

The site, which said it quickly added more than a million new users in the week after Election Day, has become one of the fastest-growing rivals to Elon’s X platform Musk.

For people tempted to discover the new Bluesky space, a certain number of elements can help them find their way around.

Similar to

You may not be ready to commit to adding another social media account. No problem, you can still browse Bluesky without registering, because all posts and profiles are public.

You might get a sense of déjà vu, as the look and feel of the platform is very similar to X. This shouldn’t come as a surprise, as Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey was one of the first to support Bluesky. (Mr. Dorsey is no longer involved in Bluesky, which is owned and operated by his management team as a public benefit corporation.)

If you take the plunge and create an account, you will need a username. You’ll notice that Bluesky IDs are a little different, as they end with the site domain, .bsky.social, by default.

You can customize your login to make it more memorable, by using your own website domain or purchasing a custom one through Bluesky.

How to find interesting people?

Bluesky boasts that it offers users “algorithmic choice” to personalize the content presented to them instead of leaving it to the whims of a centralized system.

“Our online experience should not depend on billionaires making unilateral decisions about what we see,” he says.

What this means is that you can follow custom feeds set up by other users or design your own. If you tap #Feeds (or #Feeds) in the left menu, you’ll see default offerings, like Cat Pics and Gardening. My Bangers is a list of your most popular posts by likes and Catch Up shows the most popular posts on the site over the last 24 hours.

There’s also the usual “Discover” feed of suggested posts and a timeline feed of accounts you follow.

To help new users get set up, Bluesky offers starter lists of recommended threads and accounts to follow, which anyone can create and share. They do not appear in Bluesky search results, but can be found in online directories.

What about the people you followed on X? There is a browser extension tool called Sky Follower Bridge that will help you find X users who have migrated to Bluesky. But check before clicking the “Follow” button to make sure it’s not another user using the same display name or nickname.

How to publish

Ready to join the conversation? You can write messages or reply to others, but keep it short, as there is a limit of 300 characters, which is 20 more than on X. You can also upload photos and videos, although videos cannot be long more than 60 seconds. GIFs and emojis are of course also available.

You can still tag people by entering their username, like posts by tapping a heart icon, or use hashtags to highlight a topic. Bluesky has added a menu to hashtags, so when you click on one of them you will have different options to see or mute posts on that topic.

What about trolls?

Bluesky’s decentralization ethos extends to the content control options it offers.

To get started, users can choose in their settings menu whether they want to see replies, reposts, or quotes from posts in their feed. Specific words or handles can be disabled temporarily or permanently, while accounts can be disabled or blocked individually or in bulk by adding a moderation list to them. You can even fine-tune the level of adult content that appears in your feed.

Bluesky has a team of moderators to monitor the site for illegal or rule-breaking content. But the platform is also taking a different approach by making its content moderation system open software in an attempt to solve the problems of traditional moderation services which it says “lack transparency and user control.”

So individuals or groups can configure their own content filters, or taggers, that go beyond what Bluesky offers. These taggers can be used to categorize content or users, which can then be blocked or hidden. But they can also be used for informational or creative purposes, like curating or verifying content.

There are taggers to identify AI-generated images or to fact-check news articles. You can find lists of labelers online.