Beginner's Guide to Bluesky (and more!)

How does Bluesky work?

Browsing

There's not really a central algorithm that Governs All Of Bluesky, unless you stick with Bluesky's Discover feed and never explore the others. Which sucks, because custom feeds are fun.

Here's a searchable list of Every Feed Ever. Here's a tool that lets you set up your own feeds. And here's a few general-purpose feeds I like.

Original posts only

Mutuals

Less active posters

Leaflet blog posts

Moderation & Labelling

There are also a lot of tools to help find certain people, and make sure others stay very far away from you. A lot of them are user-generated, so they aren't perfect, but they can be useful.

Labeller accounts can place labels on certain posts or accounts, and people using the labeller can curate what they see based off the labels. Blocklists can be created by any account, and let you mass mute and/or block accounts. Labeller accounts focused on moderation will often have blocklists attached to them for convenience.

Personal recommendations below. I'm subscribed to more personally but this is just to start out with.

Labellers with blocklists:

Blacksky . Not the first time they'll show up here.

Asukafield

Laelaps

Standalone Blocklists:

R-slur users

U.S. Government

Transphobia

Non-Moderation labellers:

Pronouns

Fursona species

Creator labels

Bluesky Staff Sucks/Where's My Community/What If I Wanna Leave?

Good news: You Can Leave, Consequence-Free!

Because of the way Bluesky & its underlying technology works, if you don't like the moderation/rules/vibes, you can move your account to a different PDS (personal data server), and still keep everything associated with your account intact & interact with accounts on different servers. It's not really something you see in traditional social media. Imagine still being able to use Tumblr without having to deal with the transmisogynist staff. Imagine if Black Twitter was actually owned and moderated by black people, but could still interact with Twitter & all its subcommunities.

Bluesky is still very very new as far as social media sites are concerned, but there are a few projects that actually have servers open in some way, and there are sites dedicated to making the move easy .

Blacksky . They're back. They have their own site set up for migration. They're doing a Lot that's kinda outside the scope of this blog post and my tiny brain, but I'm excited. Go give them money if you can.

Eurosky is also notable for being Europe-based (duh) and having so many users.

I'm on the waitlist for Northsky and the queue is taking forever.

What do you mean And More?

Turns out, you can do Basically Whatever with a Bluesky account. I've been calling it a Bluesky Account(tm) for simplicity's sake, but most implementations refer to the AT Protocol more often, for the technology Bluesky is built on that lets all the weird shit from this & the last section work. It also doesn't matter as much if one website shuts down, since your data is stored in your account instead of on a website server. A new project can just pick up where the other left off.

Here's some of my personal favorite Things on the atproto, some of which are still in development:

This website you're reading on! It's a blogging platform!

There's a number of projects in development for direct messaging/Discord-likes/etc, with some not quite stable and others on iPhone only (please come to android. this isn't in your heart. i can fix you).

Blento 's a block-based site builder with a Lot of integrations for other ATProto things. I'd like to personally thank the dev for walking me through signing up because the login page Hates Neocities URLs right now. Again, everything is still in development.

There's a few different options for music tracking like last.fm, too.

Popfeed is an amalgamation of every media tracking website you're currently on.

People have figured out livestreams and it's still insane to me. Come join me in tearing up Streamplace Plays Pokemon.

I also found a system management thingy. I know every single one of these apps is crashing and burning right now, so I'm glad to see one just starting up.

tl;dr I'm annoying about Bluesky for weird technical reasons.