How to Get Started With Bluesky, the X Competitor Everyone’s Craving For

As more people abandon Elon Musk’s X , Bluesky appears to be among the networks that many of these social media refugees are flocking to. As of this writing, the decentralized social network has nearly 17 million users—a huge increase considering it celebrated reaching 10 million users just two months ago . If you are among those who have recently left X and are looking for another place to connect with people online, I am here to help you get started with Bluesky.

Create an account

Setting up a Bluesky account is quite simple. You can go to the Bluesky website and click on “Sign Up” to start the process. Enter your email address, set a password, add your date of birth and click Next . You can select a handle, which is essentially your username, and enter a code. Congratulations! Your Bluesky account is now set up. The process is similar if you download the Bluesky iPhone or Android apps.

Your Bluesky username will look something like this: @prawnay.bsky.social. However, you can replace the Bluesky domain name with your own domain. Follow these steps to use your own domain in your Bluesky handle. If you are changing your handle to your own domain, please be aware that your old handle may be claimed by others.

Transferring your subscribers and data from X

It’s hard to start over on a new social media platform, but you don’t have to if you’re switching from X to Bluesky. My colleague Joel Cunningham wrote about two great apps that let you transfer your posts and followers from X to Bluesky.

• If you’re looking for someone to follow, you can use the Sky Follower Bridge to easily find your former X followers (and people you follow) on Bluesky . There are some restrictions, but as long as a person uses the same nickname or display name, or has their Bluesky handle in their Twitter bio, you will be able to track them.

• To move old messages from X to Bluesky , you can use a Chrome extension called Porto . It imports most of your tweets, but excludes retweets and quoted tweets. This is probably enough for most people.

Publishing on Bluesky

You can use the Bluesky apps or website to start posting to the social network. By clicking the New Message button, you will see that you can add up to 300 characters to your message and attach photos, videos, and pictures. There is another button called “Anyone can interact” and you should click it to select the audience for your posts. This allows you to choose whether you want people to quote your post, and whether you want to limit replies to your followers, mentioned accounts, or disable replies altogether.

Alt text is an important feature if you want your messages to be accessible to users with low vision. This is a separate text field that you can use to describe attached images, and adding it whenever you share media along with a post is good etiquette. In a draft message, simply look for the “+ALT” icon in the top left corner and enter text (alt text does not affect the character count of your message). If you want to be reminded to add alt text every time you share an image, click the gear icon in the left sidebar, then select Accessibility and turn on the Require alt text before sharing option.

Bluesky Feed Customization

When you start using Bluesky, the service asks you what topics you’re interested in and builds the feed you see in the app based on that. If you want to use Bluesky’s algorithmic channel as your primary option, you can like multiple posts to train the algorithm. Once you like 10 posts, your feed will be customized to suit your tastes. However, the most interesting thing is setting up your own channels. To do this, you can tap the # button at the top of the website or app, tap the three-line menu in the top left corner, and select Channels .

You can now browse available channels or search for specific topics and subscribe to them. You’ll find channels grouped by topics such as cat photography (is it worth joining a social network if you don’t have cat photos?), art, gardening, and so on. You’ll also find other useful channels like OnlyPosts, which removes reposts and replies from people you follow.

Once you subscribe to multiple channels, they will appear in separate tabs at the top of your Bluesky homepage. You can go to the Feeds page and change the order of these feeds to set your preferred one as the default. This means that unlike Threads, Bluesky doesn’t force you to use the default algorithmic channel. I took this opportunity to put cat photos front and center on Bluesky and I don’t regret it.

Use starter packs to find people to follow

On a site without an algorithm, it is very important to find interesting people to follow. To that end, the Bluesky community has created some great “starter packs” of people you can follow, grouped by areas of interest. You can visit this page to find many useful starter packs and follow many interesting accounts with just one click. Additionally, you can search for starter packs directly in the app using relevant keywords – just click the Channels tab in the search results.

Use advanced search features

The Bluesky team has made it easier to search the app for messages from a specific user or by a specific keyword, but you need to know the right tags to get the most out of them.

You’ll want to use advanced search operators to focus on the content you’re looking for. For example, you can put your search term in double quotes to find those exact words, or you can use the mention:username operator to find posts that mention a specific person on Bluesky. A complete list of advanced search operators is available on this page .

Add more languages ​​to your feed

If you are bilingual, you should set Bluesky to display messages in multiple languages. By default, the service uses English and hides posts in other languages ​​from your feed. You can go to Bluesky’s language settings page to change this. In the application, this page is located in the three-line menu > Settings > Languages . Select Content Languages ​​and add all the languages ​​you speak.

Don’t let trolls and trash appear in your Bluesky feed

This is the last step in setting up your Bluesky account. This social network has powerful moderation tools built in, and you should use them to prevent your channel from becoming toxic. Bluesky allows you to create lists of shared lists of accounts that you can easily disable or block. I’ve used it to mute any content related to politics and cryptocurrency, and you can block stuff you don’t particularly care about.

Go to Bluesky Settings > Moderation > Moderation Lists to create these lists. Additionally, you can view curated lists such as the anti-NFT/crypto list , content scrapers , etc. While Bluesky allows you to block these accounts with one click, I recommend disabling them instead. If you can’t make sure that every account on the list is posting information that you don’t want to see, you shouldn’t block people en masse, since you might end up blocking someone who was accidentally added to those lists as well.

Control who can reply to or quote your messages.

Moderation tools are one of the greatest strengths of this social network. Let’s take the Unquote Message feature as an example. If someone quotes your post on Bluesky, you can click the three dots button below the post and select Unlink Quote to remove the quoted part. Your post will disappear from their posts and their comments will disappear from your feed. (The other person won’t be directly notified that you did this, but if they go back and look at their feed, they’ll be able to find out.)

This allows you to maintain some control over who quotes your post, and you also have the option to turn off quoting entirely on a per-post basis. To do this, click “Everyone can reply” in the message editor to open a menu where you can choose who can reply to a message and turn off quoting messages entirely if you want.

Moderation tools also include the ability to mute any word or hashtag from your feed, which is standard on most social networks, but you can also allow those muted words or hashtags to be used by people you follow while muting them on others application locations.

Bluesky’s moderation settings also have a separate advanced settings menu where you can choose what types of sensitive content you want to see, receive warnings, or hide altogether. This allows you to filter out most types of triggering content and keep your feed calm.

Work in progress

Bluesky came out of beta less than a year ago and is still growing and changing rapidly. I will continue to update this post as new tools and settings come online.

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