Curious about Bluesky? How to get started with the trending social app

Are you looking for a new social media platform because X, Threads and Mastodon just aren’t enough? You could try Bluesky.

The Key Biscayne Independent recently created a presence on the site. You can find us at Bluesky here: https://bsky.app/profile/kbindependent.org

People looking to avoid the chaos, noise and political hubbub following the US elections are noticing a changing mood on the Bluesky social platform, where the atmosphere appears to be welcoming and there are significantly fewer trolls.

“’We’ve seen strong engagement in just a few days,’ said Tony Winton, editor-in-chief of the KBI. “We’re not leaving X, but there’s a different vibe at Bluesky.”

The site said it quickly added more than a million new users in the week following Election Day, becoming one of the fastest-growing competitors to Elon Musk’s X and similar platforms. One counting site showed 23 million users on Black Friday.

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

First steps

You may not be ready to add another social media account yet. No problem – you can still browse Bluesky without logging in as all posts and profiles are public.

You might get a feeling of deja vu because the platform is very similar in appearance to X. This shouldn’t be a surprise since Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey was an early Bluesky champion. (Dorsey no longer has an interest in Bluesky, which is owned by his executive team and operates as a nonprofit corporation.)

If you take the step and open an account, you will need a username. You’ll notice that Bluesky handles are slightly different in that 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 purchasing a custom domain through Bluesky. But it may not be something most newbies need or want to do right away.

How do I find interesting people?

Bluesky boasts of giving users “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,” it says.

This means you can follow custom feeds set up by other users or create your own. If you tap #Feeds in the menu on the left, you’ll see some standard offerings like “Cat Pictures” and “Gardening.” My Bangers is a list of your most popular posts by 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 with suggested posts and a chronological feed with the accounts you follow.
To help new users get started, Bluesky offers starter packs with recommended feeds and accounts that anyone can follow, create and share. They do not appear in Bluesky search results, but can be found in online directories.

Or someone shares one with you. After I signed up, a colleague referred me to one of the major news outlets. There are tens of thousands of starter packs available, ranging from broadly appealing topics like Taylor Swift to niche interests like cargo bikes or British comedians. You can follow the entire package or scroll down the list to select individual accounts.

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. However, before you click the follow button, make sure it is not another user using the same display name or handle.

How to post

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

You can still @ people by entering their username, like posts by tapping a heart icon, or use hashtags to highlight a topic. Bluesky added a menu to the hashtags. So when you click on one, you’ll get different options to view or mute posts on that topic.

What about trolls?

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

First, users can choose whether to display replies, reposts, or quote posts in their feed from their settings menu. Specific words or tags can be muted temporarily or permanently, while accounts can be muted or blocked individually or in bulk by adding them to a moderation list. 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 content that is illegal or against the rules. But the company is also taking a different approach by offering its content moderation system as an open source solution to address problems with traditional moderation services that it says lack “transparency and user control.”

This allows individuals or groups to set up their own content filters or labelers that go beyond what Bluesky offers. These labelers can be used to categorize content or users, which can then be blocked or hidden. But they could also be used for informational or creative purposes, such as curating or reviewing content.

Labelers exist to identify images generated by artificial intelligence or to fact-check news stories. Lists of labelers can be found online. After subscribing to a US politics labeler, some posts in my feeds were labeled “!Donald Trump” or “!Democratic Politician” and hidden unless I click “Show”.