As an increasing number of people are abandoning Elon Musk's X, Bluesky appears to be among the networks many of these social media refugees people are flocking to. The decentralized social network has nearly 17 million users as of this writing—a massive increase considering it celebrated reaching 10 million users just two months ago. If you're among those who have recently quit X and are looking for a different place to connect with people online, I'm here to help you get started with Bluesky.
Creating an account
Setting up your Bluesky account is quite easy. You can go to the Bluesky website and and click Sign Up to get this underway. Key in your email address, set a password, add your birthdate, and click Next. You can choose a handle, which is essentially your username, and complete the captcha. Congratulations! Your Bluesky account is now set up. The process is similar if you download Bluesky's apps for iPhone or Android.
Your Bluesky username will be something like @prawnay.bsky.social. However, you can replace the Bluesky domain name with your own domain. Follow these steps to use your own domain in your Bluesky handle. If you’re switching your handle to your own domain, be aware that your old handle can be claimed by others.
Migrating your followers and data from X
It's a pain to start afresh on a new social media platform, but you don't have to do that if you're migrating from X to Bluesky. My colleague Joel Cunningham has written about two excellent apps that let you port your posts and followers from X to Bluesky.
Posting on Bluesky
You can use Bluesky's apps or website to start posting to the social network. Once you hit the new post button, you'll see that you can add up to 300 characters to a post and attach photos, videos, and gifs. There's another button called Anybody can interact and you should select it to choose your audience for posts. This lets you choose if you want to let people quote your post and if you want to limit replies to your followers, mentioned accounts, or disable replies altogether.
Alt text is an important feature if you want your posts to be accessible to low-vision users. It's a separate text field you can use to describe the images you've attached, and it's good etiquette to add it whenever you share media alongside a post. In the post draft, just look for the "+ ALT" icon in the upper left corner, and type away (alt text doesn't affect the character count for your post). If you want a reminder to add alt-text every time you share an image, click the gear icon in the left-hand sidebar, then select Accessibility and toggle on Require alt text before posting.
Setting up your Bluesky feed
Credit: Screenshot / Pranay Parab
When you start using Bluesky, the service asks you which topics you're interested in, and the feed you see in the app is based on that. If you want to use Bluesky's algorithmic feed as your primary option, you can like a few posts to train the algorithm. Once you've liked 10 posts, your feed will be adjusted to reflect your taste. However, the real fun is in setting up your own feeds. To do this, you can click the # button up top on the website or in the app, tap the three-lines menu in the top-left corner, and select Feeds.
You can now browse through the available feeds or search for specific topics, and subscribe to them. You'll find feeds grouped by topics such as cat pics (is any social network worth joining if there are no cat pics?), art, gardening, and so on. You'll also find other useful feeds such as OnlyPosts, which removes reposts and replies from the people you follow.
Once you've subscribed to a few feeds, they'll appear in separate tabs at the top of your Bluesky homepage. You can go to your Feeds page and reorder these feeds to set a preferred one as the default. This means that unlike Threads, Bluesky doesn't force you into using an algorithmic feed as the default option. I used this opportunity to put cat pics front and center on Bluesky and I have no regrets.
Use starter packs to find people to follow
Looking for interesting people to follow is vital on a site without an algorithm. To that end, Bluesky’s community has created some excellent "starter packs" of people you can follow, grouped by areas of interest. You can visit this page to find lots of useful starter packs and follow a whole bunch of interesting accounts in one tap. Alternatively, you cab search for starter packs directly in the app using relevant keywords—just click on the Feeds tab in your search results.
Use advanced search features
The Bluesky team has made it easy to search the app for posts from a particular user or including a particular keyword, but you have to know the right tags to get the most out of them.
You'll want to use advanced search operators to zero in on content you’re looking for. For example, you can put a search term in double quotes to look for those exact words, or you could use the mentions:username operator to find posts that mention a specific person on Bluesky. The full list of advanced search operators is available on this page.
Add more languages to your feed
If you're bilingual, you should set up Bluesky to show posts in more than one language. The service defaults to English and hides posts in other languages from your feed. You can go to Bluesky's Language Settings page to change this. In the app, this page is under the three-lines menu > Settings > Languages. Select Content Languages and add all the languages that you speak.
Stop trolls and garbage from appearing in your Bluesky feed
Credit: Screenshot / Pranay Parab
This is the last step in setting up your Bluesky account. This social network has powerful moderation tools built in and you should use them to ensure that your feed doesn't become toxic. Bluesky allows you to create lists of shareable lists of accounts that you can mute or block easily. I've used it to mute all kinds of content around politics and cryptocurrency, and you can block the things you don't care much for.
Go to Bluesky Settings > Moderation > Moderation Lists to create these lists. Alternatively, you can check out curated lists such as the anti-NFT/crypto list, content scrapers, etc. While Bluesky allows you to block these accounts in one click, I recommend muting them instead. Unless you can verify that each account in the list posts about something you don't want to see, you shouldn't mass-block people because you could end up blocking someone who accidentally got added to these lists as well.
Control who can reply to or quote your posts
Credit: Screenshot / Joel Cunningham
Moderation tools are among the strongest traits of this social network. Take the Detach Quoted Post feature as an example: If someone quotes your post on Bluesky, you can hit the three-dots button below the post and select Detach Quote to remove the quoted part. Your post will disappear from theirs, and their comment will disappear from your feed. (The other person won't be directly notified you've done this, though if they go back to look at their own feed, they will be able to tell.)
This lets you maintain some control over who quotes your post, and you also have the ability to disable quoting altogether on a per-post basis. To do this, tap Everyone can reply from the post composer to open a menu where you can choose who can reply to a post and completely disable Quote posts if you prefer.
Moderation tools also include the ability to hide any word or hashtag from your feed, which is standard for most social media—but you can also choose to allow those muted words or hashtags from people you follow, while still muting them elsewhere in the app.
There's also a separate Advanced settings menu within Bluesky's Moderation settings where you can select which types of sensitive content you wish to see, be warned about, or hide altogether. This lets you filter out most kinds of triggering content and keep your feed calmer.
A work in progress
Bluesky has been out of beta for less than a year and is still growing and changing rapidly. I'll continue to update this post as new tools and settings come online.
Thursday, November 21, 2024
