A BlueSky Starter Guide
Making the leap from Twitter
Just a few weeks ago, I finally decided to leave “X” for good. In my opinion, any public person with an ounce of self-respect ought to do the same; given its owner and his role in the Trump campaign, the platform is going to effectively become an extension of the new administration. That is only the most salient reason to leave right now.
But I’m not here to persuade you to leave. I’m here to persuade you to give BlueSky a try as a truly great replacement.
I joined BlueSky in April of last year. At the time, it had an energy and a sense of humor I associated with Twitter back in 2007-2012 or so. I decided to invest a great deal of energy in building up Liberal Currents there relative to other Twitter alternatives that had cropped up. We’re on everything, but I’ve focused more time and attention to BlueSky. It has paid off; the quality of conversations I can have there are better than any other platform I’m on short of the Liberal Currents Discord server itself.
Of course, not everyone’s experience of BlueSky is like that. There are unpleasant corners of it, just like any social media platform. But the bigger problem for newcomers is building up a feed that has much activity at all.
There are two main tools BlueSky offers to surmount this initial hurdle: Starter Packs and Custom Feeds.
Custom feeds
As BlueSky explains:
Bluesky is one of the first social media companies that has made algorithmic choice a reality. On Bluesky, anyone can create a feed — cat lovers, coffee aficionados, Swifties, NBA fans, and more. As a user, you’re given a few default feeds to start out with as you get settled into the app, but you can easily swap them out for one of the many feeds that others have created
The default feeds aren’t that great for getting you started; “Discover” is modestly helpful but also draws a lot of its signals from choices you make in the platform, so to begin with it is not very customized.
One problem with custom feeds is that because they are so easy to make, many of them are very low volume because of the parameters their creators chose. Here is a decent list for getting started.
Morning walk is also a nice wholesome one that draws broadly.
Starter Packs
Something that has really facilitated adoption recently are Starter Packs. Every account can create one right from their profile page. They can be a list of other accounts, custom feeds, or both. When you look at one, you can pick and choose which person or feed to follow, or—most importantly—you can simply click “follow all.”
When I started on BlueSky, I would do the tedious work of going to someone who I liked following, look at who they were following, and picking and choosing which of them to follow myself. There was briefly a moment where there were tools that checked to see if anyone you followed on Twitter had moved to BlueSky, but then Twitter shut down its API for such things.
What I would do if I were starting now is simply check everyone I already knew about who I wanted to follow to see if they created a Starter Pack. If they did, I would follow all and move on.
Liberal Currents has created a Starter Pack which I highly recommend. It includes our writers, editors, and patrons. It has been wonderful to be able to share our success on the platform with our community; one of our patrons recently shared with me that over half of their followers have found them through our Starter Pack. You’re guaranteed to have a good BlueSky experience if you start off with us!
BlueSky Directory has indexed thousands of Starter Packs that you can search from.
Mike Masnick has a good Starter Pack if your interest is primarily in tech.
Kevin Erdmann has a good one with more of an economics focus.
Jacob Grier has just a generally good list without a particular topical focus.
I will update this post with others as I find them; these I’m aware of just because I know the people. But I highly recommend you browse the BlueSky Directory to find ones that suit you personally.
I hope to see you over there!