Bluesky
Getting Started on Bluesky.
Bluesky is like Twitter, Threads and pretty much all other well-known Micro-blogging sites, however it's open-source, & "decentralised". I put the word decentralised in speech marks, because it's not really "decentralised" the way Mastodon is. But the point is all your data is stored on a PDS (Personal Data Server), this will hold your posts, etc.. by default this is owned by Bluesky, however they cannot directly see your password & private information. The benefit of this is, you can easily setup your own PDS and host your own data. I'm not going to go into too much detail since this is a beginner's guide, but you can read Mike Masnick's paper about Protocols, which in the long run has half inspired the ATProtocol (Authenticated Transfer Protocol), which is the Protocol Bluesky runs on (the set way that computers talk to each other!)
Below, I have some videos which I have created (E1-4) for Getting Started on Bluesky visually, so you don't have to see so much overwhelming text, it's really quite easy!
I have also created a custom Bluesky feed, which I will try to add more tips to in future, you can follow this along here.
Custom Feeds
Custom feeds are a great way to find content you love on Bluesky. You can code one yourself, or use an online, graphical tool to create one, such as SkyFeed or BlueskyFeedCreator.
Here are some of the top feeds I have created:
Other feeds I recommend
Here are some feeds which I recommend:
Discover - Official feed from Bluesky, which is meant to be similar to a 'For You' feed which you may find on X and Threads. In the embedded Post, Samuel (Bluesky developer) mentions how it works.
Mutuals - Posts from users who follow you back
News - Headlines from verified news organisations.
Liked by Follows - Posts liked in the last 10 hours by people you follow. Likes are worth less the more posts someone liked!
My Nebula+ - Experimental algorithmic feed based on community detection. Works similarly to the Official Discover feed.
Other Apps/Tools
Bluesky has a completely free API which you can read about here. This means that you can build your own tools for Bluesky, for example, you can see your Bluesky closest friends or use third party clients, such as a free TweetDeck replacement like Deck Blue. These are just two examples, but the developer community on Bluesky is actively growing! Expect more fun things soon!
However, you can easily search for them yourself, or, one of my favourite methods of doing this, is checking Bluesky's official Showcase page where you can view community projects built on the ATProtocol. Developers can submit their tools/projects here and we can filter through them to find fun things to do!
For example, you can use the ATProtocol in Python if you wish! I found this on the image on the right!
Skeets for iOS
Skeets is a Bluesky client natively written for iOS and iPadOS (macOS coming at some point in the future). As of writing this, Bluesky's Official mobile client doesn't work well on iPad, and it just shows as a small iPhone screen in the center of the iPad, which is horrible to use. Skeets solves this by implementing all of the basic features of Bluesky and some extra custom features, such as searching a user's profile for posts, or extracting text from an image to use for Alt-text.
Skeets offer a Pro subscription for £1.99 per month, here in the UK. This offers other features such as iCloud bookmarks, Mute words, Drafts, Push Notifications & other features in the future.
I'd recommend it for any user on iOS, as a Pro user myself. And no, I am not being paid to say this, this is just from my experience.
Learn more
I'd recommend checking out Kuba Suder's Bluesky page on his website which has many Bluesky tools such as Skythread (thread opener/viewer), Daily post stats, Handle Directory, and more. He has also written in depth about Bluesky here, which I recommend reading as it has answers to many of the questions newer people ask.
You can also learn about it here:
What is Bluesky Social? -- Creative Boom
Bluesky -- everything you need to know about this Twitter alternative -- Tom's guide