November 22, 2024 Technology

A Bluesky Primer

Over the past couple of years, the experience on the social media app formerly known as Twitter has become increasingly unendurable. Lots of people are searching for an alternative, and the hottest one right now is Bluesky. Bluesky is exciting for a lot of reasons. The vibes (at least for now) are good, it’s built on an open-source protocol that offers protection against a hostile takover, and it’s customizable in exciting ways that Twitter/X and Meta’s Threads (and even Mastodon) are not. I’m still learning about all the app’s features and etiquette, and I’m collecting most of what I’ve learned here.

Starter Packs

One of the most difficult parts of joining a new social media app is finding people to follow. Bluesky ameliorates that problem to some extent by offering “Starter Packs,” lists of people or organizations that anyone can put together. Finding starter packs collated by people you trust is a great way to start following accounts. You can scroll through the list and pick accounts to follow if you recognize them or they look interesting, or you can just follow everyone in the starter pack. Here are some helpful starter packs I’ve found:

There’s also a Blueksy account dedicated to collecting starter packs and a third-party directory of starter packs.

Feeds

Bluesky lets you customize the feed you see when you log in. By default you have two feed tabs at the top of the app: Discover and Following. The Discover tab collates posts Bluesky thinks will interest you, based on the accounts you follow and the posts you’ve liked. The Following tab is a reverse-chronological feed of posts from all the accounts you follow (and only those accounts).

The Following feed is awesome. Even before Elon Musk bought Twitter, the app got into some hot water because its feed algorithm tended make weird choices, showing people posts from accounts they didn’t follow that were uninteresting or objectionable. Under Musk’s leadership, X has manipulated users’ feeds to promote Musk’s own posts and right-wing propaganda. Bluesky offers protection from such interference in your experience with the Following feed and by offering custom feeds.

But that’s just the start. You can add, remove, and reorder the feeds to your heart’s content. If you tap the hashtag icon at the top right corner of the app (or open “Feeds” from the app menu), you can add, remove, and reorder feeds. Bluesky will also suggest some other feeds to add, including “Popular With Friends” (posts that have gotten likes from people you follow), “Mutuals” (posts from accounts that follow you back), and several subject-matter feeds (like Science, Art, and so on).

You can also create custom feeds. For example, you could display posts from a certain collection of accounts and/or that include a certain hashtag. I like the News feed curated by Bluesky user @aendra.com, which compiles headlines from verified news organizations. You can search the Feeds section in the Bluesky app or check out the Bluesky Directory to find more lists that can drive your feeds.

Verification

Verification on Twitter was always a tricky issue. Initially, Twitter claimed that verification was only an indication that Twitter had confirmed the account was controlled by the person/organization it claimed to represent. But Twitter only offered verification to certain accounts, typically those with lots of follwers and influence, or well-known public figures or organizations. So verification became a sort of badge of honor and an indication that you’d arrived on Twitter. After Elon Musk took over, Twitter/X started verifying any account that paid them eight bucks a month.

Bluesky doesn’t offer verification in either of these ways. It offers domain verification, meaning that you can switch your Bluesky handle to a domain you own. My Bluesky handle is @danielcassman.com. This does not mean that Bluesky has confirmed the person using the account is who they claim to be. It means only that the user has proved that they control the domain in question.

This can be helpful to identify legitimate accounts, but you have to be careful. For example, the account for National Public Radio is @npr.org, and the account for The New York Times is @nytimes.com. Those are the official websites for those organizations, so the fact that those accounts use the domains as their Bluesky handles shows that the same people who run those websites run the corresponding Bluesky accounts. That’s a pretty good indicator that those Bluesky accounts are official. But you have to confirm that the domain in question is official before trusting the domain verification.

Bluesky explains how to set a domain as your handle on this how-to page.

Moderation

Moderation on social media sites is an insanely complicated issue. There are books, podcasts, and Supreme Court cases about it. Bluesky largely lets you choose your moderation experience. If you go into the app menu and choose Settings > Moderation, you’ll see options to enable or disable adult content, and to show, hide, or warn you about non-sexual nudity. Beneath that, you can select the Bluesky Moderation Service, which lets you tweak Bluesky’s content moderation. There’s a long list of content categories (like sensitive, extremist, illicit, unsafe, etc.), and beneath each one you can choose “Off”, “Warn”, or “Hide”. Off means Bluesky won’t moderate the content—you’ll see it in your feeds by default. Warn means Bluesky will blur or obscure the content but provide a warning about reason it’s hidden; you can click through the warning if you want to see the content. Hide means the content won’t show up in your feeds at all. By default, Bluesky hides most of these categories, but you can choose for yourself whether you want to see them.

Bluesky also offers custom moderation. There are a couple of ways to do this.

Lists

As we discussed above, you can use lists to find people to follow or to create feeds. But you can also use lists to block or mute. For example, the Bluesky account @skywatch.blue maintains lists of trolls and accounts that feature certain hate symbols in their profiles. You can choose to block or mute everyone on the list, and new accounts will be blocked/muted as they’re added to the list. Make sure you trust the accounts whose lists you use, or you might end up blocking/muting accounts you want to see.

Labelers

Bluesky can also block, warn, or label content based on custom settings designed by Bluesky users. Again, you need to be careful with these and make sure you trust your labelers. One example of a labeler is @skywatch.blue. If you click “Subscribe” in the upper righthand part of the profile, you can choose to block, warn, or label several varieties of potentially objectionable content. The website bluesky-labelers.io offers a collection of various labelers.

Third-Party Tools

Bluesky is built on the AT Protocol, an open source, decentralized network for social applications (you can find more about the protocol through the official documentation and Bluesky’s AT Protocol page). That means access to all the public data posted on Bluesky isn’t limited to Bluesky itself; other apps and services can plug into that information as well. This was true of Twitter, too, though Twitter eventually cut off this access because the alternate apps were cutting into Twitter’s advertising revenue. Doing something similar would be trickier for Bluesky due to the open nature of the AT Protocol.

Note: some of the apps and services listed below require you to allow them access to your Bluesky account. NEVER give such an app your primary account password. Instead, create a special password just for that app by going to Settings > Privacy and Security > App Passwords. Create a new password for each app you use. That will allow the app the access to your account it needs (you can choose whether or not it should get access to your direct messages), but it can’t compromise your account (for example, it can’t change your password). And if the app does something sketchy, like spam a bunch of posts on your account, you can cut off its access quickly and easily by deleting the app password.

There are a couple repositories of community Bluesky projects. Some of my favorites are:

deck.blue, similar to the popular TweetDeck app
Sill, an app that combs Bluesky (and Mastodon) for the most popular links shared by the people you follow (sorta like Nuzzel was for Twitter)
Alternate web clients like KlearSky and Skyfeed
Deer.social, a fork of the Bluesky client designed for power users
Graysky, an app for iOS and Android
Bluesky Feed Creator, which helps create custom feeds
Graze another custome feed creator
Heatmap Generator, which creates a heatmap showing you the patterns in posts for any account
A Bluesky count and author stats dashboard
Tracker an app to manage your Bluesky followers
FollowBlue an app designed to expand your presence on Bluesky by intelligently following and unfollowing other users
Atsky a Bluesky client designed to provide additional analytics, data, and insights
Clearsky, which shows information about active and blocked accounts
Websites that will show you information and/or history about AT Protocol accounts, including Sky Zoo and Internect

Conclusion

That’s all for now. I’ll update this post as I discover new things about Bluesky. Please send any cool tips, tricks, and tools my way!

Daniel Cassman