This App for IPhone and Mac Allows You to Edit Bluesky Publications
If you’re one of the roughly 24 million people who have joined Bluesky , the upstart rival to Elon Musk’s X that has skyrocketed in popularity since the Nov. 6 election, you might be enjoying the whole “old Twitter” feel. “ You may also lament some of these similarities, as current versions of Bluesky’s still-nascent app and web interface lack many of the quality-of-life features that other social networks have added in recent years, from message drafts to bookmarks to the ability to edit your messages (to be honest, this X also took forever to add, and only as a paid feature).
Luckily, there is a way to solve almost all of these problems: switch from the official Bluesky app/website to Skeets for Bluesky , an app for iPhone, iPad and Mac from indie developerSebastian Vogelsang . There are both free and paid versions, and although a subscription is required to access some key features, the cost is quite reasonable ($1.99 per month or $17.99 per year) and these key features are quite impressive.
The free version makes Bluesky more accessible.
Even the free version of Skeets adds a ton of functionality to Bluesky, including a useful feature that pauses your feed when it refreshes so that the posts you’re currently reading don’t disappear (a functionality Instagram only added to its app this year ). . Also added are trends to the in-app search bar, useful shortcuts for searching a specific user’s posts, in-app translations, an automatic alt text generator that makes it easy to make your images more accessible, and expanded support for VoiceOver on iPhone. a feature that also makes BlueSky more accessible.
Improving accessibility was the main reason he decided to develop Skeets, Vogelsang told me via email, noting, “[Accessibility] is really important to me. I’m currently getting a lot of feedback from VoiceOver users that if it weren’t for Skeets, they wouldn’t be able to use Bluesky, which is actually what I’m most excited about. One of my most loyal users is the Managing Director of the Association of the Blind and Visually Impaired. Hamburg, Germany, who constantly gives me feedback on how to improve the application.”
You can find a full list of free features on the App Store page . I especially like the settings that allow you to manage your following feed so you can require a reply to get a certain number of likes before you see it, or even remove duplicate posts from your feed (so if all your friends are reposting the same thing , you won’t see it 12 times.)
Edit your messages
The free version also gives you access to the feature I wanted most when using ex-Twitter: the ability to edit your posts after they’ve been published. Although Facebook launched the changes back in 2012, they didn’t arrive in X until 2023 , and then only as a premium feature for blue-check subscribers. Skeets for Bluesky allows anyone to do this for free. Of course the implementation is a bit wonky as it uses a complex workaround. As Vogelsang explained, you’re not actually editing the original message, but rather deleting it and replacing it with a new message with exactly the same message IDs; so it should keep the same timestamp and all the likes or shares collected. You only have a 10-minute window to make changes after publishing, however editing will restart another 10-minute window.
The developer shared with me all the complex technical details that make editing possible, but I admittedly only understood them conceptually (I’m definitely not a programmer). Suffice to say, he’s been thoughtful about this: All edited posts will have a prominent tag indicating when the edit was made and adding “Edited via @ skeetsapp.com .” Paid users can remove the @skeetsapp tag, but not the edit note itself.
For transparency, changes are also noted in the publication’s metadata, which preserves the original text; Currently you can’t easily access metadata from the app’s UI, but that’s planned for a future update. In the meantime, here’s an example of how changes are reflected in metadata .
I tried out the edit feature after one of my frequent typos and found that it worked quite well, although you may lose a few likes and shares if you make an edit to a post when people are actively sharing and liking it. (My own edited post above shows slightly more shares and likes in the notification feed than the public view.)
Paid features include drafts, enhanced notifications, and more.
Bluesky’s two most notable missing features include the ability to save drafts of your own messages and a bookmarking feature that lets you keep track of messages you want to return to later. Skeets adds both for paid users.
Other paid features include filtering push notifications (for example, you can only receive alerts for replies, not likes), the ability to “follow” another user to be notified when they post, and see everything there. messages in a separate tab, the ability to change the app’s appearance, and “Expand Thread,” which makes it easier to keep track of long conversation threads (this feature is free for VoiceOver users).
Mac app is under development
Although Skeets is available on Mac, iPad, and iPhone, the mobile versions are definitely more convenient. The Mac app’s App Store page even notes that it was designed for the iPad, and you can tell: The layout is unadorned, stripped down, and less intuitive to use than the iPhone version or even Bluesky’s desktop site. It’s certainly functional. , and it gives you access to all of Skeets’ features, but that’s hardly the unique experience of some of Bluesky’s other desktop clients .
About this name
So why is the app called Skeets? Well, if you’re late to the Bluesky party, you may have missed a joke that made the rounds on the invite-only platform in its early days about what to name posts there. Users jokingly settled on “skits” (sky + tweets), a term that Bluesky CEO Jay Graber doesn’t particularly like, likely due to its sexual connotations (I’ll let you Google it yourself).
Personally, I thought “Skeets” was too silly a concept to entertain myself with, but then I noticed that Skeets for Bluesky gives you the ability to change the name of messages right from the app. I switched to the “Call them skits” setting and I have to admit that after repeated exposure, I realized that the word “skit” is very funny.
Skits for Bluesky | iOS