With a lot of people moving over towards Bluesky I decided to write a quick primer to help the newbies get around and along with the platform. Most people seem to be coming from Facebook right now, probably due to the decline of that platform and the changes made by Meta around moderation. Bearing that in mind a lot of these tips are to help get followers and find people as most FB users will have several hundred friends or followers and the tumbleweed effect is often the barrier to getting started. So strap i, this won’t be a long post but just something to push you in the right direction!
So a quick starter about Bluesky. It is more akin to X/Twitter than say FB and is designed to quickly and easily share your posts. You can add video and images and links easily but there are limitations, text can be up to 300 characters, video is limited to 60 seconds and 4 pictures per post. Images over 50mb are downscaled to 1mb. Currently there is NO easy way to add audio unless you link to it – something I believe is a pretty serious oversight. Compared to the fediverse there is really only 1 main bluesky domain/server which makes it a lot easier to get started, and the next thing I have to mention are starter packs. These allow you to easily follow people who you’d probably be interested in. Now you’d have to edit them probably, but you can do that or even start your own starter pack – you can start your own by going to your profile and starter packs are right there! To help you find starter packs there is a nice resource, check out the link below
https://blueskydirectory.com/starter-packs
Starter packs lead me onto the next thing – you have to work at Bluesky, like you did back in the day with the other platforms. It is no good not searching for and following people. With circa 30 million users you’d think that it would be easier than it is to find people, and whilst it IS pretty easy, if you don’t work at it you will see pretty little in engagement. Posting the link to your other social media accounts is a start, but as I am seeing Meta, for example, remove posts or even ban users that do this then it isn’t quite that simple. However an easy way is to check out the feeds feature of Bluesky. Here you will find some nice ways to get started as these feeds then become easily available for you. This helps you stay in touch with your followers for example and is a great way to find or explore. You will find you already have a discover feed available, and this gives you kind of what ye olde X/Twitter did back in the day with interesting posts from those you follow or who follow you. Probably a nice default for many as it gives you a pretty nice feed to scroll through that pretty much should be interesting for you! If you remember when FB showed stuff in chronological order then you can choose the following feed which does just that – who you follow as it happens. Now this is great if you can keep on top of things or want to see what is happening right now! Oh to be like 2010 again….
Now you have started getting some followers and following people I have to just bring it back down to earth. Currently there are no ads on Bluesky, but they will surely come. Might not be bad, but of course it is something to bear in mind. Also it seems pretty friendly right now but you can block, mute or report people easily. Not had to do that yet, so cannot comment on how effective it is! There is a chat function, but you don’t have to allow chats if you don’t want to! I have to also add that the lack of pushing an algorithm is so far pretty good – discover seems pretty fair, though biased towards those with larger follow and following numbers, something that seems fair to me. The numbers are still low though, with only the official Bluesky account and as of today Mark Hamills account having over a million followers. Marks account is worth a follow though, I mean it IS Luke Skywalker!
https://bsky.app/profile/markhamillofficial.bsky.social
So there we have it, my quick Bluesky primer. This is just a quick read to help you get started and is in no way a complete Bluesky cheat sheet. Enjoy it please and I welcome any comments!
*UPDATE* I forgot to add my own Blueskyaccount!
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