How to get started with Bluesky

LONDON – Looking for a new social media platform because X, Threads and Mastodon just aren’t cutting it? You could try Bluesky.

People looking to avoid chaos, noise and political commotion in the aftermath of the US election are noticing a different mood on the social platform Bluesky, where the atmosphere is seemingly welcoming and there are noticeably fewer trolls.

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

If you’re tempted to check out the new space, here’s a guide to how Bluesky works:

Get started

Maybe you’re not ready to add another social media account yet. No problem: you can still browse Bluesky without logging in, because all posts and profiles are public.

You might get a sense of deja vu because the look and feel of the platform is very similar to that of X. That shouldn’t be a surprise, as Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey was an early Bluesky champion. (Dorsey is no longer involved with Bluesky, which is owned and operated by its management team as a public benefit corporation.)

If you take the step and create an account, you will need a username. You’ll notice that Bluesky handles are a little different, because by default they end in the site’s domain, .bsky.social.

You can personalize your handle to make it more memorable, by using your own website’s domain or by purchasing a custom one through Bluesky. But it may not be something that most new users need or want to do right away.

How do I find interesting people?

Bluesky claims it gives users an “algorithmic choice” to customize the content they see rather than leaving it to the whims of a centralized system.

“Our online experience doesn’t have to depend on billionaires making unilateral decisions about what we see,” the report says.

What it means is that you can follow custom feeds set up by other users, or design your own. If you tap #Feeds in the menu on the left, you’ll see some standard offers like Cat Photos and Gardening. My Bangers is a list of your most popular posts based on likes, and Catch Up shows the site’s most popular posts from the last 24 hours. You can find more by doing a search and tapping the Feeds button.

There’s also the usual ‘Discover’ feed of suggested posts and a chronological feed of accounts you follow.

To help new users get used to it, Bluesky has starter packs with recommended feeds and accounts to follow, which anyone can create and share. They don’t appear in Bluesky search results, but can be found in online directories.

Or someone can share one with you. After I signed up, a colleague pointed me to one of the major news channels. There are tens of thousands of starter packages, ranging from broadly appealing topics such as Taylor Swift to niche interests such as cargo bikes or British comedians. You can follow the entire package or scroll through the list to choose individual accounts.

What about the people you followed on X? There is a browser extension tool called Sky Follower Bridge that allows you to find X users who have migrated to Bluesky. But before you click the follow button, make sure it isn’t another user using the same display name or handle.

How to post

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

You can still @ people by typing in their username, like posts by tapping a heart icon, or use hashtags to highlight a theme. Bluesky has added a menu to hashtags, so when you click on them you’ll get several options to see or mute posts on that topic.

What about trolls?

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

For starters, users can choose whether they want to see replies, reposts, or quoted posts in their feed in their settings menu. Specific words or tags can be muted temporarily or forever, while accounts can be muted or blocked individually or in bulk by adding a moderation list to them. You can even fine-tune the level of adult content shown in your feed.

Bluesky has a team of content moderators who monitor the site for material that is illegal or breaks the rules. But it’s also taking a different approach by open-sourcing its content moderation system in an effort to solve problems with traditional moderation services that it says “lack transparency and user control.”

So individuals or groups can set their own content filters or labelers beyond what Bluesky offers. These labelers 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, such as managing or verifying content.

There are labelers to identify images generated by artificial intelligence or to fact-check news reports. Lists of labeling machines can be found online. After subscribing to an American politics labeler, some posts in my feeds were marked “!Donald Trump” or “!Democratic politician” and hidden unless I clicked Show.

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Follow Kelvin Chan on Bluesky

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Is there a technical challenge you need help sorting out? Write to us at [email protected] with your questions.