Bluesky is great, and it’s really starting to build now: in fact in under two months it has doubled to 12.5 million users [edit - since I wrote this 5 weeks ago it’s doubled again, to 24 million!]. It’s especially good for individuals seeking to rebuild their professional and personal networks away from the toxicity of Twitter. If that’s you, or you’re just new to the platform and wanting to make the best of it, here are ten top tips.
1) Fill out your profile first.
Generic avatars and profiles without bios give off bot vibes and generally won’t be followed - so before you start showing up in people’s notifications feed as you follow them, give them a reason to follow you back. Put in a bio, put in a pic (even if it’s not of you), put in a link if you have a website or another social media profile you’d like to highlight, and ideally write a post or two as well so people know what you’re about.
2) In some ways, it works just like Twitter.
You can post up to 300 characters in one go, you can post videos, images, links, gifs and emojis. You can reply, you can Like, you can repost, you can direct message. It looks just like Twitter too.
3) In this crucial way it does not work like Twitter: there’s no algorithm.
You know how on every other platform, you think: why oh why can’t it just show me posts from the people I follow, in reverse chronological order? Well I have good news for you: that is exactly what Bluesky’s default ‘Following’ feed does. However, it is a complete outlier in this respect: nearly every other popular social media platform does some version of showing you content you’ve not asked to see, and it actually takes a lot of getting used to when that isn’t provided. There’s a slower pace of life than on Twitter or Insta where your feeds have a literally ENDLESS auto-refresh going on - this reduced activity is something I’ve really learned to enjoy. But when you’re new, if you don’t get out there and follow a bunch of people, your feed will be completely dead. So with that in mind…
4) Be proactive: follow people.
For Bluesky to be of any value to you at all, you need to follow people whose posts make your feed interesting and worthwhile. There’s a number of ways you can find people to follow:
Use Skyfollower bridge to follow the same people on Bluesky you used to follow on Twitter: I actually wouldn’t personally recommend doing this but a lot of people find the option very useful
Find people who post content you like, and look at who they follow. I’m a big fan of cannibalising people’s follower lists, it both helps you find people you know and opens up new horizons
Use Starter Packs. These are curated sets of accounts, usually on a theme, which anyone can create. If, like me, you work in the library industry, a Starter Pack like Alice Cann’s UK Library and Information People would be a great way to follow lots of relevant industry people in one go. The MERL have created a pack that includes libraries, museums and galleries too. I’ve now created Starter Packs for Academic Libraries, Public Libraries and Health Libraries.
Make the most of custom feeds - these are curated feeds on a given topic. Unlike a List which is just all the posts from all the people on the list, posts only get added to custom feeds when people use the right emoji and have been added to the feed: so for example the ‘Skybrarians’ feed is a great place for info pros to find each other and share relevant posts. There’s even a custom feed for gifted articles (gift links that bypass journalistic paywalls for e.g. the New York Times). You can also use the ‘Discover’ and ‘Popular with friends’ feeds (both default tabs on your Home screen) to find new people to follow
Simply search for topics you care about, and follow the people posting interesting things about them
Whatever you do, do SOMETHING. There have been people who join Bluesky and simply wait for something to happen. Because of the lack of algorithm, nothing does happen without proactivity, so they say ‘Bluesky is dead’ and then leave. This is a real shame! Cos it’s great.
5) Be proactive. Like, reply, and engage.
All those cliches about how you get out what you put in really apply here. You have to go beyond broadcasting and truly engage: reply to other people’s posts, join in conversations, cultivate discussion. I follow an author and illustrator called Debbie Ridpath Ohi on Bluesky, and she wrote a great post of tips for those new to Bluesky, which I’d recommend you read here. In it she posted this cartoon which sums up the whole thing perfectly. Be the two on the right!
Thank you to Debbie for giving me permission to reproduce this here. Click the pic to go to the blogpost it appears in
6) make the most of the moderation tools.
Good moderation and the ability to control who you interact with has been baked into Bluesky from the start, and it makes such a difference. Unlike on Twiter (even good old days Twitter) when you block someone they are gone completely - if they leave a comment on your post and you block them, you won’t see the comment and no one else will see the comment either. And it’s not just that you can’t see the posts of the person you blocked; they can’t see yours either, or even replies to them. And if someone Quote posts you and you don’t like it, you can detach your post from theirs so they’re no longer associated. Same with Replies. Not only that, you can subscribe to blocklists (e.g. this one) which really do starve problematic groups of the oxygen they need. It’s basically the opposite of Twitter, where, famously, hope goes to die.
7) make your own alt-text mandatory.
We all know it’s essential to add alt-text to images but sometimes you can be too quick to post and forget. Access Bluesky’s Settings, find the Accessibility section, and toggle the switch marked 'Require alt-text before posting’ and you can create accessible content every time. You can also add alt-text (and indeed captions) to videos - finally a social network which offers this! Here’s a great resource on how to write alt-text descriptions, if you want to brush up.
8) A mix of professional and personal is good.
This is by far the most subjective of these tips, so feel free to ignore it completely. But for me I think this kind of social media works well when you use it for professional purposes, but with a little personal thrown in too. If it’s all work, people don’t get to see who you are so you may not build relationships. If it’s all personal, you miss out on that fabulous opportunity for peer-support and ideas and discourse beyond the walls of your office. So, if you feel comfortable doing so, post some stuff about your hobbies as well as your job!
9) give it time.
You will not get instant results on Bluesky, but it’s worth the wait. It really feels a lot like Twitter before it went bad. Don’t give up too early; it takes to rebuild a community and spending two desultory months here and then two more distracted months on Mastodon and then giving Threads a half-hearted go is really the long way round…
10) enjoy it while it lasts!
I don’t want to end on a negative but listen: enshittification comes for us all. To quote Wikipedia:
Enshittification (alternately, crapification and platform decay) is a pattern in which online products and services decline in quality. Initially, vendors create high-quality offerings to attract users, then they degrade those offerings to better serve business customers, and finally degrade their services to users and business customers to maximize profits for shareholders.
Right now Bluesky is in the ‘creating high-quality offerings to attract users’ stage, and they genuinely seem to care about things like moderation and protecting us all, and it’s a great place to be a part of. The more popular it becomes, the more expensive it will be to run, and we may start to move down the curve marked ‘enshitify’ - so let’s make the most of this phase. We’ve probably got a good few years, and the community is worth your time. Let’s do this.
Notes:
as always I’ve love this post to become more useful by other people contributing ideas. If you have more Bluesky tips, leave them in a comment!
this is about using Bluesky as an individual - I’ve since written a few other guides for different audiences. Here’s the Researcher’s Guide to Bluesky on my library’s blog, here’s Getting Started On Academic Bluesky for the LSE Impact Blog, and here’s the Library Guide To Bluesky (aimed at institutions) on this site
the particular blue sky at the top of this blogpost was captured by me in the Pentland Hills near Penicuik, a town in Scotland, where the landscape is beautiful and the sheep look quite angelic when backlit