Thursday, December 05, 2024
If you're one of the 24 million or so people who have joined Bluesky, the upstart rival to Elon Musk's X that has exploded in popularity since the Nov. 6 election, you may be reveling in all the ways it feels like "old Twitter."
You may also be lamenting some of those similarities, as the current iterations of the still-nascent Bluesky app and web interface lack many of the quality-of-life features of other social media services have added over the years, from post drafts, to bookmarking, to the ability to edit your posts (something that X also took forever to add, to be fair, and then only as a paid feature).
Fortunately, there's a way to solve for almost all of these issues: Switch from the official Bluesky app/website to Skeets for Bluesky, an iPhone, iPad, and Mac app from independent developer Sebastian Vogelsang. There are both free and paid versions, and while a subscription is necessary to access a few of the key features, the cost is fairly reasonable ($1.99/month or $17.99/year) and those key features are pretty impressive.
The free version makes Bluesky more accessible
Even the free version of Skeets adds a ton of functionality to the Bluesky experience, including a helpful feature that pauses your timeline as it refreshes so the posts you're currently reading won't vanish (functionality Instagram only added to its app this year). There's also the addition of trends to the in-app search bar, helpful shortcuts to search within a particular user's posts, in-app translations, an automatic alt-text generator to easily make your images more accessible, and enhanced support for the iPhone's VoiceOver feature, which also makes BlueSky more accessible.
Improving accessibility was a key reason he decided to develop Skeets, Vogelsang told me via email, noting, "[Accessibility] is really important to me. I’m currently getting a lot of feedback from VoiceOver users that if it wasn’t for Skeets, they wouldn’t be able to use Bluesky, and that’s actually what makes me happy the most. One of my most dedicated users is the managing director of the Association for the Blind and Visually Impaired in Hamburg, Germany, who is constantly giving me feedback on how to improve the app."
You can find a complete list of the free features on the App Store page. I particularly like the settings that allow you to curate your Following feed so you can require a reply to have a certain number of likes before you'll see it, or even remove repeated posts from your feed (so if all of your friends repost the same thing, you won't see it 12 times.)
Edit your posts
The free version also gives you access to the feature I most desired while using the former Twitter: The ability to edit your posts after publication. While Facebook launched edits way back in 2012, they didn't come to X until 2023, and then only as a premium feature for "blue check" subscribers. Skeets for Bluesky lets everyone do it for free.
Granted, the implementation is a little wonky, as it's using a complicated workaround to let you do it. As Vogelsang explained it, you're not really editing your original post, but deleting it and replacing it with a new post with the exact same post identifiers; that way, it should carry over the same timestamp and any likes or reposts it has gathered. You've only got a 10-minute window to make changes after publication, though editing will restart another 10-minute window.
The developer shared with me all the complex technical details that make editing possible, but I admittedly only grasped them conceptually (I'm definitely not a programmer). Suffice it to say that he's gone about it thoughtfully: All edited posts will bear a prominent tag that notes the time the edit was made and adds "Edited via @skeetsapp.com." Paid users can choose to remove the @skeetsapp tag but not the editing note itself.
For transparency, the edits are also noted in the post's metadata, which retains the original text; currently you can't easily access the metadata from the app's user interface, but that's planned for a future update. In the meantime, here's an example of how edits appear in the metadata.
I tested out the edit feature in the wake of one of my own frequent typos and found it works pretty well, though you might lose a few likes and reposts if you make an edit to a post while people are actively sharing and hearting it. (My own edited post above shows a few more reposts and likes in my notifications feed than it does in the public view.)
Paid features include drafts, enhanced notifications, and more
Two of Bluesky's most notable missing features include the ability to save drafts of your own posts and a bookmarking feature that lets you track posts that you want to come back to later. Skeets adds both for paid users.
Other paid features include filtering for push notifications (so you can choose to only receive alerts for replies and not likes, for example), the ability to "subscribe" to another user so you'll receive notifications when they post and see all of there posts in a separate tab, options to change the app's appearance, and "Thread Unroll," which makes it easier to follow long, threaded conversations (this feature is free for VoiceOver users).
The Mac app is a work in progress
While Skeets is available on Mac, iPad, and iPhone, the mobile versions are definitely the better experience. The App Store page for the Mac app even notes that it was designed for iPad, and you can tell: The layout is unadorned, stripped down, and less intuitive to use than the iPhone version, or even the Bluesky desktop site.
It's certainly functional, and it gives you access to all of Skeets' features, but it's hardly the bespoke experience of some other desktop Bluesky clients.
About that name
So why is the app called Skeets? Well, if you're late to the Bluesky party, you may have missed the inside joke that proliferated on the platform in its early, invite-only days about what to call messages there. Users jokingly settled on "skeets" (sky + tweets), a term Bluesky CEO Jay Graber doesn't much like, probably because of the sexual connotations (I'll let you google that one yourself).
I personally thought "skeets" was too silly a notion to entertain myself, but then I noticed Skeets for Bluesky gives you the option to change what posts are called from within the app. I switched over to the "Call them Skeets" setting, and I must admit that after repeated exposure, I've realized the word "reskeet" is very funny.
Skeets for Bluesky | iOS
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