Bluesky tips: How to use the popular X alternative

Elon Musk, billionaire and owner of X, formerly known as Twitter, saw his relationship with Donald Trump grow since he is used his personal fortune to help him get elected.

He has since become a prominent figure in the incoming Trump administration, with the president-elect appointing Musk to lead his new (and unofficial) “Department of Government Efficiency.” Reportedly, neither does Musk saw at the meetings that Trump holds at Mar-a-Lago. He “happy to be the first friend” to the future president, but for those who oppose Trump fascist, racial views, staying on X — and thus supporting Musk’s ownership — became an untenable prospect.

According to evaluations According to Similarweb, which tracks website traffic, X had its highest number of US visitors in a year on the day after the election, as well as the highest number of account deactivations since Musk took over the social media platform, with more than 115,000 US visitors deactivating their accounts .

Behind the X Exodus is a non-billionaire social media platform that is seeing record numbers this month — Bluesky. In September, the application had about 8 million users; it is now reports 16 millionwith more than a million those who will come during the week after the election. Bluesky also just became the top free app in the US Apple app store, ahead of Meta’s Threads and OpenAI’s ChatGPT.

Bluesky is quickly becoming the new social network that liberal politicians, celebrities, and news junkies are jumping on board, while dormant accounts on the app are finally being used.

On Monday, the representative of New York Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez placed the first time in a year that a Democrat declared, “God, it’s so nice to be in a digital space with other real people.” And on Wednesday, Abbott Elementary star Quinta Brunson started writing again: humorous writing“Oh wow. People are actually into this bitch!” New celebrities arrive every day; singer Dione Warwick shared access her first post—a short and sweet “I’m here”—this week immediately received more than 13,000 likes.

For those unfamiliar, here is a brief history of Bluesky. It was originally launched as an invite-only app in 2023, but is now open to everyone. He was also endorsed by Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey, but he left company board this year.

What sets Bluesky apart is its public nature. It is a decentralized social networking platform built on AT protocola set of open source tools that others can use to build their own social media platforms. According to the Bluesky websiteThe AT protocol “creates a standard format for user identification, subscriptions and data in social applications, allowing applications to interact and users to move freely between them,” enabling Bluesky to “develop without being controlled by a single company. »

Although Bluesky said it would be “always” to be free to use, it is exploring a subscription model for features such as higher quality video downloads. The company also has no plans to sell ads, which sets it apart from Mark Zuckerberg’s X and Threads, a similar social media platform that reportedly plans to start advertising next year.

Creating a Bluesky account can take just a few minutes. You can join from your web browser at bsky.app or through the mobile application at Android or iOS. To join, you must provide your date of birth to confirm that you are at least 13 years oldand you will be prompted to provide an email address and create a password.

Once you’re signed in, the account will look familiar to anyone who’s used X. There’s a “discover” feed, which is an algorithmically generated feed that “mixes a global view of what’s trending online with posts from accounts you follow , and posts from accounts near your social timeline,” according to the Bluesky website. There’s also a “following” feed, which will show the posts of people you follow in reverse chronological order.

And if you’re a developer, you can to create own own channel that people follow. One interesting example is “cry quietly” which shows the posts of quiet social people who post less often.

But in addition to understanding the different time frames to get up to speed with Bluesky, you’ll want to follow these tips as a beginner:

Two-factor authentication with email is a quick way to secure your account and make sure it can’t be easily hacked. Don’t ignore this feature.

Go to “settings”, then scroll down to “two-factor authentication”. From there, you can enable the feature that requires an email code to sign in to your account.

Bluesky is designed to be a public social network, but you can make your posts more private by enabling the “visibility after logging out” feature. Once enabled, your profile and posts will not be visible to logged out users, limiting who can see you while using Bluesky. You can find this option by going to ‘settings’, then ‘moderation’ and scrolling down.

Displaying alt text in your posts is an inclusive way to make what you share understandable to everyone. Go to “settings” then “accessibility” and enable the “require alt text before publishing” feature. When you use it, you’ll be prompted to provide a brief description of the image before you share it.

For more tips, read Bluesky user Gregory Rosmaita leadership on how to create useful image descriptions for people who use screen readers or Braille.

What also makes Bluesky great is its array of reliable moderation and “antitoxicity» features that help you control what ends up on your timeline. Is there a word or phrase you don’t want to see in your feed? You can ignore the words for a certain period of time.

And unlike X, if you don’t like the attention your post is getting, you are may “disconnect” (remove) your post from the responses to the citations, so they cannot be used as a starting point for harassment.

Also, if you want to limit the reach of people you don’t want to see, Bluesky has an option to subscribe to “moderation lists”, which are public directories of people who can be blocked en masse.

To enable these features, go to “settings” and then “moderation”. From there, you can enable muted words and tags, moderation lists, or content filters for mature content.

It can be extremely difficult to find your community in a new social network. You can use curated lists created by people you trust or admire to build your channels and list of followers. There is also a guide list can be used to search for your interest.

If you are a long-time X user, you can also use the Sky Follower Bridge extension available at Chrome, Firefox or Githubwhich will create a list of people you follow on X who have matching Bluesky accounts. From there, you can “select all” from the list or choose who you want to follow on Bluesky.

If you liked TweetDeck, here’s one too log. blue layout option, which is a software engineer and developer generated. It can display your home feed, notifications, and individual feeds in the multi-column format that made TweetDeck popular.

Ultimately, what set X apart was his irreverent jokes from users, as well as his ability to follow the news in real time. It is not known whether Bluesky will be able to gain more followers than its competitors. For example, he still has time to catch up with Threads, which said this month it reached 275 million monthly active users.

However, there is a growing group of Bluesky users who are doing their best to help it grow, breathing new life into the platform. Like writer John Paul Brammer with humor Bluesky said in a recent post: “I will repost something that I don’t even like, but consider necessary for the development of culture here. How to introduce wolves to a new environment.”