I’ve written several posts about how much social media sucks these days, they are turning into propaganda sites, especially X but all the Meta based ones too, and the Meta sites (facebook, Instagram, Threads) are never in chronological order and filled with “suggestions” you didn’t ask for in order to improve “engagement”, and purposely suppress posts with external links or videos, so they can sell how well their sites are doing to investors, because fuck what the actual users want.

Well at least for now, Blue Sky feels like a classic social media site that hasn’t been ruined by corporate demands. Sort by chronological or popularity if you want, block whoever you want instantly, post links, pictures, videos, whatever you want.

No scraping for AI, and no AI prompts to be found. Not sure how long that will last, but I’m in it for a while at least. It’s social media 2010 style again!

Here are some cool stuff to know about Blue Sky if you move over.

Making Your Profile

Above is my profile header. You will have a “handle” which consists of “a-name-of-some-sorts.bsky.social” with an at symbol in front. Or if you own a domain name you can add a special TXT tag to your DNS file, and make your domain name your handle like I did. 99% go the bsky.social route which is fine, but domain names are a form of instant verification.

Yo can then add an introductory paragraph. Use as many “keywords” as you can so you will show up in search results. I describe what I do so that fellow people that do what I do can find me, I include my company name and website for people specifically looking for me, and my patreon handle. I invited all my patreon supporters and the patreons I personally follow, about half aren’t on Blue Sky yet. I’ll wait.

Finding People to Follow

Besides keyword searches you can also find people you know or like via “Starter Packs” a huge list of which can be found at https://blueskydirectory.com/starter-packs/all Went there and found other visual novel writers, and solo developers to follow. Whatever you find useful.

I subscribe to The Atlantic and Wired and follow all the writers listed via starter packs. I also try to follow You Tube Channels I subscribe to.

Note these are often maintained by users, and if the creator leaves Blue Sky so do their stater packs. You might find some dead ones.

Finding Topics to Follow

This is where you can get stuff to look at. “Discover” is the section that works like “suggestions” on Meta pages, showing things you probably will like based on algorithms, but not clicking on discover hides suggestions. The freedom of feeds is liberating.

“Following” is where you find posts of people you follow who are not following you back (celebrities, reporters, etc.) and see what they are posting. Reporters from media I subscribe to, and Patreons I follow go here too.

“Mutuals” is where you find posts of people you follow who are also following you, friends, family, group members, etc. Having these separate is nice!

“Popular With Friends” are posts the people you follow and follow you back liked. This one is filled for me by odd memes, because that’s the kind of friends I have.

Aside from that you can add more feeds. They work like subreddits and you can add your own posts to the feeds with tagging. So far I have 7 I use, looking to add more. Feeds are maintained by moderators, and can suddenly disappear for no reason. I was excited for an “Art” feed only to find it blank, but found an “Art: What’s Hot” one that isn’t.

Finding people to NOT follow

One of my favorite features is the NOT follow list. Moderation lists are lists of accounts you have zero interest in and people on these lists are completely blocked. You won’t see their posts, their responses, their troll attempts, nothing.

This is something Facebook desperately needs as every group on the platform inevitably gets invaded by trolls.

These moderation lists are constantly updated. This feature is keeping the X trolls off Blue Sky because they can’t “oWn dUh LIbz” if the people you are trying to troll can’t see your troll attempts.

One could make the case this is bad from a “community conversation” perspective as it creates filter bubbles, but these conversation have become so toxic and anxiety inducing, it is why I left X over a year ago, and Threads is getting less and less interesting every time I visit due to the lack of “self moderation”.

So yes, there are arguments you can make that this is a bad idea, but I have grown so tired of the toxicity, I stopped caring about it. You can find these at https://blueskydirectory.com/

You can also block and mute individuals. If you see a toxic person saying or posting stuff you don’t like, click on their name to see info, then click their name AGAIN to go to their profile. Next to the Follow button in the profile there will be three dots, click there and select mute or block. Confirm the choice and you’ll never see or hear from them again.

I’ve come to the conclusion that the age of social media being the “public town square” is essentially over. If your a reporter or study society or politics you need to see both sides, but those of us that are not, are done with the toxicity, and prefer to block it all when we see it. The other side HATES it, but I find it cathartic.

You control your own moderation

Going into “Settings” then “Moderation”, you can make up your own rules for what you see. Hide words, hide tags, hide posts you don’t want to see, decide how you want to deal with NSFW content (which is fully allowed, just needs to be tagged).

The future of social media?

These things go in cycles, I’ve seen so many once great social media sites come and go it’s getting old. Blue Sky is doing really well, over 20 Million users already and growing. It’s starting to struggle with the rapid growth, which is expected. It currently doesn’t have advertisers, but that will change eventually.

It has looked around at the other social media sites and replicated the good stuff and got rid of the bad stuff, and stands at the cutting edge of good social media. No doubt things will change, but I’m willing to stick around while it’s still good.

Further reading: ‘A place of joy’: why scientists are joining the rush to Bluesky
‘I’m Going to Bluesky’ Is the New ‘I’m Moving to Canada’