bluesky

How to: Make Bluesky more manageable

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A screenshot of Blueksy's moderation settings

This is the latest in an occasional series of how to get the most out of Bluesky, my preferred social network. In previous blog posts, I’ve talked about using labellers, displaying your pronouns, following Mastodon accounts using Bridgy Fed and importing contacts from Twitter/X, and today, I’m going to write about how I ensure that Bluesky isn’t too overwhelming for me.

Custom feeds

By default, new users to Bluesky get three feeds: Following, Discover and Popular with Friends. Following is the default, and shows you everything posted by the user accounts that you follow. It’s the feed that most people use. But one unique feature to Bluesky is what was known as ‘choose your own algorithm‘ in the form of Custom Feeds.

At the time of writing, I follow 220 accounts on Bluesky. Sure, some post more than others, but if I’m particularly busy, it can be a lot of content to catch up on. I therefore use a custom feed called OnlyPosts, which hides replies and reposts – in other words, it only shows regular posts and quote posts from your Following feed. If I don’t have a lot of time to catch up on activity on Bluesky, then the OnlyPosts feed means I can get up-to-date more quickly.

There’s another custom feed from the same user called Mutuals, which only shows posts from the users you follow who also follow you back. Whilst this may reinforce an echo chamber, it makes Bluesky a little more like the Friends feed on Facebook where there’s a reciprocal relationship with the people you’re following.

To follow a custom feed, follow the link, and then click the ‘+ Follow’ button on the profile. It’ll then appear as a tab on your Blueksy home page.

Moderation lists

I follow around 20 moderation lists. These are lists curated by other users, allowing you to mute or block people en masse. This gets rid of some of the noise from people that you’re never going to agree with, making it a more pleasant experience. Using block lists like this used to be possible on Twitter, using tools like Block Together, and so it’s good to have this on Bluesky as well.

I won’t list all of the lists that I use, but here are some key ones:

You can either block or mute all accounts on these lists.

Muting hashtags and keywords

I currently have words like ‘Trump’, ‘Vance’ and ‘Musk’ muted, so even if people I follow post about them, they won’t show up in my feeds. I’ve also muted a number of sport-related hashtags as such things don’t interest me, and keywords for several TV shows that I don’t watch. Most social networks have such a feature, but it’s worth a reminder that Bluesky has it too.

Muting using labels

You can also use labels to hide posts. For example, I follow the Engagement Hacks Labeler, but rather than simply adding a label to posts, I just hide them altogether.

By using all of the above tools, I have a more curated Bluesky experience that isn’t just endless doomscrolling, or posts that don’t interest me.

How to use Bluesky Labellers

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Last year, I wrote about how to view and share pronouns on Bluesky. Bluesky is the social network that I spend the most time on nowadays and, as I write this, recently surpassed 30 million users.

The Pronouns Labeller uses an interesting feature of Bluesky called labels, which can be applied to individual posts (or skeets) and whole accounts. They can be used in a positive way, such as sharing pronouns, but can also be applied as a potential warning to other users. Today, I’m listing some of the labellers that I use – all of these are listed on the (unofficial) Bluesky Labellers page, which ranks them by popularity.

To use these, you’ll first need to subscribe to the labeller whilst logged in to Bluesky – there’ll be a big ‘Subscribe to labeller’ button on their profile. Once subscribed, you can configure which labels you want to see, and optionally hide all posts with a certain label (or all posts from users with that label).

If you want to apply a label to your own account, then there may be additional steps, usually detailed on a pinned post on the profile.

  • TTRPG Class Identifier. It’s somewhat telling that this is the most popular labeller on Bluesky. Once you follow, you’ll be given a class from a table-top role-playing game (such as Dungeons and Dragons) which will display as a label on your profile. There are commands that you can send to re-roll your class, and you can choose your race too. More details available here.
  • Nations. Allows you to add your country’s flag as a label, and see others’ flags. You can also add the standard pride flag emoji, and/or the trans pride emoji to your account too.
  • Sorting Hat. I have my issues with the author of the Harry Potter books, due to her views about trans people, but this lets you tell the world which Hogwarts house you would belong to, and see others.
  • XBlock Screenshot Labeller. Labels posts containing screenshots from other social networks, so that you can have them labelled and optionally hidden.
  • Developer Labels. Show off what programming languages you know on your posts.
  • Private School and Landlord labeller. Subscribing to this will reveal which private (fee-paying) school various (mainly UK) users attended, so you can see who benefitted from a paid-for education. Nepo Baby Labeller works in a similar way.
  • Birthdays. Will show you if it’s a user’s birthday.
  • Profile Labeller. Warns you about potential bots, and people whose posts are bridged in from other social networks.

Anyone can make a label, and there’s a Label Starter Kit on GitHub if you want to make your own. If I had the time and the skills, I would consider writing a labeller which allows users to show which British university they graduated from, for example.

Labels are one thing that I particularly like about Bluesky – especially as users can contribute their own. It’s quite a unique feature – I’m not aware that others have anything similar. Sometimes, a bit of extra context on each post is welcome.

Croissant, a social media cross-posting app

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A screenshot of the Croissant app on an iPhone 13 Mini

If you cast your minds back around three years, there was just one major public-facing text-based social media platform: Twitter. Now that Twitter is called X, and only Nazis and grifters seem to be left there, we’ve ended up with some people on Bluesky, some on Threads and others on Mastodon. And so Croissant makes it easy to cross-post to all three at once.

Although I mainly post on Bluesky these days, I try to keep my accounts on Threads and Mastodon active as well.

Once you have linked your accounts to Croissant, you get a nice big space to write your post, and a character count. Whilst Threads doesn’t seem to impose a maximum character limit, it’s 300 characters on Bluesky, and 500 on most Mastodon instances.

Below, there are buttons to @mention someone (which includes a search tool on Mastodon and Bluesky), add hashtags and add images. What I particularly like about Croissant is that, when you add an image, there’s a really clear prompt to add an alt text description of the image. Draft posts can be saved, and you can set how visible the post will be on Mastodon and Threads (public, unlisted etc.). You can also add content warnings if posting to Mastodon.

Although Croissant is free to download, to unlock most features you’ll need to pay an annual subscription of £20. Also, it’s only available for iOS 18 and macOS 15 (Sequoia) or later; my elderly sixth generation iPad can only manage iOS 17 so I’m only able to run it on my iPhone.

How to: view and share pronouns on Bluesky

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A screenshot of a skeet that I posted recently on Bluesky, which displays my pronouns (he/him) under my name. The skeet says 'Huh, accidentally pressed Alt+D whilst Spotify (desktop version) was open, and opened a hidden Chrome menu. None of the options seem to do anything, but yes, it seems like just about everything is based on Chromium nowadays.'

If you want to share your pronouns on Bluesky, and/or want to be able to see others’ pronouns, then you can use the Pronouns labeller to show these in the Bluesky app. In the screenshot above, you can see that, under my username, it shows my he/him pronouns.

Step 1: Viewing pronouns

If you want to be able to view others pronouns, go to the Pronouns labeller profile, and click the ‘Subscribe’ button. Now, you’ll be able to view the pronouns of other Bluesky users, where they’ve elected to share them, as a label attached their posts and on their profiles.

Step 2: Sharing your pronouns

So now that you can see the pronouns of other users, you can also share your own pronouns. There’s a search tool available; select the pronouns that most apply to you, and then ‘like’ the corresponding Bluesky post. For example, I liked this post because my pronouns are he/him.

Within a minute or two, those pronouns will appear as a label on your profile. You can select up to four pronouns to share.

If you make a mistake, you can ‘like’ this post, and all of your pronouns will be removed. Once this takes effect, you can then start again.

Just a note that you can’t complete this step in isolation. In other words, you must have the labeller turned on and showing the pronouns of others, before you can share yours.

It’s all opt-in

Whilst I’m a member of the LGBTQ+ community, I think it’s important to share your pronouns regardless. As well as showing that you’re an ally, it normalises the act of sharing pronouns when you introduce yourself, and makes LGBTQ+ people like myself feel more included. At work, our standard email signature template includes a pronouns section, and it’s used at all levels including senior management to set a good example.

This doesn’t mean that you can’t share your pronouns manually in your Bluesky bio. This profile labeller is opt-in, and, as yet, Bluesky doesn’t have a great way of letting users discover profile labellers. In my experience, it tends to be the early adopters of Bluesky who use the pronouns profile labeller; recent arrivals haven’t found it yet.

Bridgy Fed – linking Bluesky with the Fediverse

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Screenshot of the Bridgy Fed home page

As I’ve mentioned a few times recently, Bluesky is my preferred social media site; I’ve quit Twitter/X and I’m not spending so much time on Mastodon or Threads at present. This means that I can’t easily follow users on those platforms – unless they’re using Bridgy Fed.

Bridgy Fed is a bridge between Bluesky’s Atmosphere network, and ActivityPub, which is used by Mastodon and other Fediverse clients, including Threads if you enable that option. I’ve set it up to work both ways with my Bluesky and Mastodon accounts, as follows:

ServiceMy Fediverse profile URLMy Bluesky profile URL
Mastodonhttps://mastodonapp.uk/@neilturner (original)https://bsky.app/profile/neilturner.mastodonapp.uk.ap.brid.gy (Bridged)
Blueskyhttps://fed.brid.gy/bsky/neilturner.me.uk (Bridged)https://bsky.app/profile/neilturner.me.uk (original)

How to enable Bridgy Fed

To enable it for your account, all you have to do is follow @bsky.brid.gy@bsky.brid.gy on Mastodon (or another Fediverse service that supports ActivityPub), or follow @ap.brid.gy on Bluesky. It’s opt-in – Bridgy Fed will not create a bridge username for you unless you follow it.

It works reasonably well, within the various limits of each service. Bluesky, for example, has a 300 character limit for posts (or skeets) whereas Mastodon has a 500 character limit for posts (or toots). Indeed, some other Fediverse clients don’t have character limits at all. What this means is that any posts from the Fediverse that are bridged into Bluesky which are over 300 characters will get truncated by Bridgy Fed when cross-posted. You’ll get the first 260 characters or so, and then a link back to the original Fediverse post.

Re-skeeting and re-tooting will also work, if you’re re-skeeting or re-tooting someone else who uses Bridgy Fed, which is quite cool. Otherwise, Reskeets won’t be shared on the Fediverse and Retoots won’t be shared on Bluesky. Remember, Bridgy Fed is opt-in so people who haven’t consented to use it won’t find their skeets or toots being broadcast elsewhere.

As for Threads? Threads users who share their post to the Fediverse can be followed by Mastodon users, but it’s not fully integrated. I don’t think it’s possible, at the time of writing, for Threads users to follow other Fediverse users, and so it presumably isn’t possible to use Bridgy Fed with Threads. I haven’t tried however; whilst I post to Threads occasionally, I’m not a significant user.

Skeets, an iOS client for Bluesky

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A screenshot of the Skeets app on an iPhone

Bluesky is probably now my main social media client. However, the official app doesn’t work natively on an iPad, and so I’m also using the Skeets app to take advantage of my iPad’s bigger screen.

Okay, so the provided screenshot is from my iPhone, but I principally use it on my iPad. It seems to work well – it’s fast, even on my now rather elderly sixth generation iPad which can’t be upgraded to iOS 18. Compared with the official client, it also gives you more control over how your feeds are displayed, allowing you to hide quote posts, or only show replies with a certain minimum number of likes.

The app is free, but you can pay a subscription to unlock Skeets Pro, which adds extra features. These include draft posts, bookmarks, being able to mute words, more control over notifications and rich media in notifications. Currently it costs £2 per month or £18 per year, with a two week free trial.

Skeets is also updated regularly; usually whenever a new feature is added to the official app, it appears in Skeets within a week or two. That said, I don’t feel as polished as, for example, Ivory which is my preferred Mastodon client. Its support for threads also isn’t great – you can read them but posts tend to get duplicated.

Sky Follower Bridge

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A screenshot of the Sky Follower Bridge home page

Last week, the social network Bluesky surpassed 14 million users. Users seem to come over from Twitter/X in waves – essentially whenever its excessively wealthy and over-impulsive owner does something to make it even worse. If you’re setting yourself up on Bluesky, and want to find the people that you were previously following on Twitter, then Sky Follower Bridge can help you.

Unlike some tools that were around a couple of years ago for finding people on Mastodon, Sky Follower Bridge is a browser extension. This means that it doesn’t use Twitter’s API, as such apps have generally been shut down pretty quickly, and is a clever way of side-stepping this issue. That does, however, mean that you’ll need to use a desktop browser to find your followers. Extensions are available for Chrome and Firefox; I used the Firefox version, but the Chrome extension has been updated more recently.

Finding your follows

Once the extension is installed, you’ll need to go to the page on Twitter/X that lists the accounts you follow, and then you activate the extension by clicking its toolbar button. It’ll then analyse who you are following to see if it can find a corresponding Bluesky account.

Some people will have put their Bluesky usernames in their Twitter/X bios, so Sky Follower Bridge should detect these. It’ll also look for matching names and usernames and suggest Bluesky users on this basis. This does mean that, if you follow someone with quite a common name, such as, oh, I don’t know, ‘Neil Turner’, it may suggest a different user on Bluesky with the same name.

Although I’ve been on Bluesky for just over a year, Sky Follower Bridge found 18 accounts that I used to follow on Twitter who are also on Bluesky. However, not all are active; it seems like quite a few signed up, tried it and then haven’t returned. Still, if you’re making the move off Twitter and want to stay connected with your previous followers, this is a good tool to use. And if you’re not already following me on Bluesky, here’s my profile link.

Joining all the Brits and Brazilians on Bluesky

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The tl;dr version of this post is that I’m now considering Bluesky to be my primary public social media presence, with Mastodon a close second and Threads a distant third, and here are the links to my profiles:

Last month, Elon Musk basically tried to incite civil war in the UK on Twitter (which he calls ‘X’). This seems to have been the last straw for many Brits who were still active over there and who don’t consider themselves to be right-wing, and so there’s been another exodus. This time, Bluesky seems to have been the main destination, and so I’m now reconnecting with lots of people that I used to follow on Twitter before I basically quit almost two years ago in November 2022. Since then I’ve been mostly hanging out on Mastodon.

Now, I like Mastodon; especially its decentralised nature and that many servers are run by the community with donations. It’s also got some good and mature third-party clients like Ivory, which I use. But it still feels like a niche social network that attracts a more technical audience. And it’s notable that, given the choice between Mastodon, Bluesky and Threads, most Brits leaving Twitter haven’t chosen Mastodon.

The Brazilian Twitter exodus

Over the past couple of days, there’s been another mass exodus from Twitter, this time in Brazil. However, this is because Twitter is now blocked in Brazil. In a nutshell: Brazil’s previous right-wing president, Jair Balsonaro, was ousted in an election; there was an attempted coup by his supporters, and then a Brazilian Supreme Court judge demanded that Twitter suspend the accounts of those suspected of being involved in the coup whilst they were under investigation. Instead of complying, or even challenging the court order, Elon Musk closed Twitter’s office in Brazil and sacked its staff. So, the supreme court judge gave Twitter an ultimatum to appoint a representative in Brazil; Twitter refused, and so it’s now blocked. As in, the whole web site is inaccessible from within Brazil.

Consequently, Twitter users in Brazil have been looking for a new home, and most seem to have landed on Bluesky (although some have gone to Mastodon too).

If these statistics from Statista are right, then Brazil made up the sixth biggest audience on Twitter, just behind the UK. Which means that Elon has alienated two of his top ten biggest markets in the space of a month.

Oh, and it gets worse. It turns out that Brazil was home to many large fan accounts on Twitter; many of these posted in English and so it wasn’t immediately obvious that they were based there. So they’re gone from Twitter too. At this rate, Twitter is going to become like the alt-right social network Gab, just with some brands wondering where all their engagement has gone.

Galaxy brain

Before his purchase of Twitter, Elon Musk had a reputation for being a forward-thinking successful entrepreneur. Tesla was a pioneer in all-electric cars, SpaceX has contracts with NASA, and his Starlink network allowed people living in remote areas to access satellite broadband internet.

But he’s completely ruined Twitter. I’m not sure whether it’s some kind of galaxy-brained scheme that mere mortals like myself are unable to comprehend, or whether he’s actually not that intelligent but has lots of money to throw around to see what sticks. Or somewhere in the middle. Either way, he seems to keep making unforced errors that seems to make no kind of sense business-wise. It’s worth noting that, despite being probably one of the world’s richest people, he took on a lot of debt to buy Twitter, and those loans will be accruing interest. It can’t be long before Twitter goes bankrupt, can it?

As for my Twitter profile? It still exists, mainly so that I don’t lose my username. But my profile is private, and I’ve deleted my avatar and background. I haven’t had the Twitter app on my phone for over 18 months now.

Business models

My only worry about Bluesky is its business model. In the long term, how is it going to make money? Are we going to start to see adverts, like on most other social media? Will there be a premium tier?

On Mastodon, I pay small monthly contributions via Patreon and Ko-Fi to the overall project and server owner respectively, and that suits me well. And Threads is part of Meta. I’m assuming Blueksy is backed by venture capital money, but at some point it’s got to be able to make money on its own terms. I just hope it’s done in a way that won’t massively alienate its user base.

Cross-posting on socials

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An AI-generated image using Microsoft Copilot showing a stack with the WordPress logo surrounded by smaller stacks with social media logos on them

I’ve recently updated the Feeds page to list ways other ways that you can follow this blog, besides subscribing to the RSS feed. To summarise:

  • There’s the weekly email
  • Any Fediverse app (e.g. Mastodon, Friendica) can follow the blog directly using ‘@nrturner’
  • There’s now a dedicated Facebook page
  • I’m automatically cross-posting links to new blog posts to X/Twitter, Mastodon and Bluesky

The Facebook and X/Twitter integration is being done via Buffer and the WP to Buffer plugin. This is because Buffer is one of the few services that still has write access to the X/Twitter API. It also means that I am using my X/Twitter account again, but only to link to my own blog posts. I’m not logging in to interact with other users or post anything there that isn’t a link out to something I host. At least, not until Elon Musk inevitably gets bored, bankrupt or both and sells X/Twitter to someone better.

I think I used to have a dedicated Facebook page for this blog in the past, but I must’ve deleted it at some point. Anyway, there’s a new one which has been around for a couple of weeks and has had basically zero interactions in that time. If you want to very occasionally see my blog posts on your news feed, when the Facebook algorithm deems me worthy, feel free to give it a ‘Like’. I won’t be incorporating any of Meta’s cookies or adtech into this web site, don’t worry.

To cross-post to Mastodon, I’m using the Share on Mastodon plugin. It’s simple but configurable, and does the job well. For Bluesky, I’m using Neznam Atproto Share, which is also simple but configurable. I quite like relatively simple WordPress plugins that just do one or two things, and don’t try to take over your dashboard.

Whilst I have a Threads account, Meta hasn’t opened an API for it yet, so no auto-posts there. Mastodon remains my primary public social media presence, but I do scroll through Bluesky regularly too.

Being more or less social

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A screenshot of my profile on the Bluesky social network.

Good grief, has it really been almost 6 months since my last blog post?

I mostly dropped by to link out to a couple of additional social media profiles that you can follow, should you wish to. I appreciate that many people are leaving Twitter/X/whatever Elon Musk decides it’s called this week, and not everyone is leaving in the same direction.

Firstly, I’ve just signed up to Bluesky. It’s invite only at the moment, so I doff my cap to a work colleague who gave me her first invite. I’ve just made the one post there and I’ll see how I get on with it.

I managed to – eventually – get my account verified there, which is how I show as ‘@neilturner.me.uk’ and not a bsky.social address. It should have been straightforward, but over the years my DNS settings have seemingly got out of sync, and this has required some fixing. Hopefully everything works now.

And I’m on Meta’s Threads, which I joined on launch day back in August. Again, I’ve just made the one post there. It doesn’t look like many people that I followed on Instagram are active on Threads – my feed seems to basically be the same 5 people.

My primary social media presence is still on Mastodon. So, if you want to hear from me in between my massive gaps in blogging, that’s probably your best bet. I joined Mastodon back in November 2022, and I feel most-settled there.

Perhaps if Bluesky and/or Threads open up a bit more, I might cross-post things, but we’ll see.