This Bluesky Tool Makes It Easy to Find Accounts You’ll Want to Follow
I may be more than a little obsessed with Bluesky, the new social network that’s taking the internet by storm and serving as a refuge for many former X users fleeing Elon Musk’s increasingly nasty virtual cesspool (I may be editorializing a bit). there are too many here).
I just haven’t had this much fun using social media since I first got on Twitter around 2010. As I’ve written before , Bluesky is reminiscent of early Twitter, which means it feels vibrant, welcoming, and filled with lots of interesting people ( about 21 million at the time of writing).
As I ‘ve noted before , the value you get from Bluesky depends entirely on who you follow there, as it’s not really based on an algorithm desperately trying to keep you glued to the feed. No, you’ll have to work a little harder if you want to tap into your latest source of dopamine, and that means filling your feed with posts that you find interesting, provocative and hopefully not infuriating (but that’s exactly what it is ” nuclear block”). “ – this is for).
I’ve already written about Sky Follower Bridge , an extension that helps you keep track of people you once followed on X, and Bluesky Directory, which offers a searchable index of over 80,000 “starter packs” of people to follow. subscribe based on your interests. . Now I want to tell you about another tool based on them: Bluesky Network Analyzer .
Easily find people to follow on Bluesky based on who’s in your extended network.
Bluesky Network Analyzer from independent developer Theo Sanderson is another third-party app that helps you find people to follow, but it has a unique twist: Instead of finding potentially relevant accounts based on your past social media activity or even your interests . , it extrapolates them based on who the people you already follow follow.
If that’s not clear, here’s a simpler explanation: once you give the tool access to the list of people you follow, it will do a quick search and highlight accounts you don’t follow that are very popular among the accounts you follow .
Using it is as simple as entering your Bluesky username on the Bluesky Network Analyzer website. If you want to be able to follow people directly from the tool, you can also enter your Bluesky password, but this is not necessary. (The fine print indicates that your password is not sent to the site and is only stored locally, but if you’d rather play it safe, you can also generate an app-specific password within Bluesky itself.)
The tool will import a list of accounts you already follow and then get to work analyzing them to see how many followers they have in common. The search takes a while—and will obviously take longer if you follow a ton of people—but once it’s completed, you’ll see a list of results ranked by how many mutual contacts they share among the people you already follow . To give you some idea of who they are, you’ll also see an account avatar and bio if they’ve entered one.
Of course, it might not be all that helpful to see that 202 people you follow also follow the Washington Post. If you’d rather find less basic results, click the switch and select Sort by Proportion (prefers niche accounts) , which will move accounts with fewer followers to the top of the list. And scrolling through this list will take time: I follow about 700 people, and my list of recommended follows stretches across 1,500 different accounts.
Why is this a useful way to find subscribers?
I like this tool because I feel like I’ve done a pretty good job of building a list of people I follow, so I can assume that if there are accounts that a lot of them follow, they’re probably worth following. my own results contained accounts of famous people I recognized (including some journalists and former Film Twitter employees) but had not yet found on Bluesky, so I was able to follow some of them with a few clicks. Moreover, I also noticed some people I used to follow on X who had not yet switched to Bluesky before the last time I used the Sky Follower Bridge.
If you wanted, I suppose you could go into Bluesky and find each person’s username (unfortunately they don’t have hyperlinks in the tool), but mostly I found it to be a good way to jog my memory. Considering how many of my former online friends have left social media sites like Facebook and X in recent years, it was nice to be reminded that they exist.