Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

The Supreme Court cannot be allowed to become the ultimate, unaccountable arbiter of everything.

A sufficient plurality of insane, greedy people can tank any democratic system ever devised, apparently.

Second rate reporter says what?

People really shouldn’t expect the government to help after they watched the GOP drown it in a bathtub.

Never give a known liar the benefit of the doubt.

“In the future, this lab will be a museum. do not touch it.”

It may be funny to you motherfucker, but it’s not funny to me.

Hey Washington Post, “Democracy Dies in Darkness” was supposed to be a warning, not a mission statement.

They want us to be overwhelmed and exhausted. Focus. Resist. Oppose.

GOP baffled that ‘we don’t care if you die’ is not a winning slogan.

Democracy cannot function without a free press.

Of course you can have champagne before noon. That’s why orange juice was invented.

An almost top 10,000 blog!

Also, are you sure you want people to rate your comments?

“Until such time as the world ends, we will act as though it intends to spin on.”

Every reporter and pundit should have to declare if they ever vacationed with a billionaire.

Republicans seem to think life begins at the candlelight dinner the night before.

How any woman could possibly vote for this smug smarmy piece of misogynistic crap is beyond understanding.

No Kings: Americans standing in the way of bad history saying “Oh, Fuck No!”

Fundamental belief of white supremacy: white people are presumed innocent, minorities are presumed guilty.

Let the trolls come, and then ignore them. that’s the worst thing you can do to a troll.

How stupid are these people?

We can’t confuse what’s necessary to win elections with the policies that we want to implement when we do.

It is not hopeless, and we are not helpless.

You are here: Home / Science & Technology / Bluesky is now open! Sign up today! (A guide to getting started)

Bluesky is now open! Sign up today! (A guide to getting started)

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Bluesky is now open! Sign up today!I’ve been writing posts keeping track of Bluesky development for you all. If you haven’t been following along, Bluesky is a social network, roughly in the style of Twitter. It was hip and new last year. Maybe it will be hip and new again now! Why? Because you can finally sign up without an invite. While it lacks some of the features that more mature services have, like video uploads, it is also not thoroughly saturated with nazis and crypto scam bots, and does not promote the posts by the biggest dumbasses in the world everywhere you go. I think that’s an acceptable trade-off.

More importantly, it has what I think is a true killer feature–custom feeds. Anybody can make one, and you can subscribe to them and have them live natively in the app, and have their posts inserted into your chronological feed. At their most basic they’re just posts from a list of users, but more advanced ones surface content via hashtag or emoji, or an AI recognizing pictures of cats or flowers, etc. There are even several good algorithmic recommendation feeds to choose from, in addition to the default one run by Bluesky itself.

It’s also allegedly going to open to federation this month; click the link at the top of this post for details on how that will work.

There’s a lot more great stuff in the pipeline. Composability will be the name of the game–choose your algorithms, choose your moderation services, choose your host, choose whatever you want. Here’s what WaPo has to say:

That system is a work in progress. So far, Bluesky is the only social network using its protocol. But it already has some features that set it apart. […] For instance, users can subscribe to feeds where algorithms prioritize the most popular posts overall or the posts most popular among the people they follow. There are also options for feeds geared to their specific areas of interest, such as science or art. And users can toggle personal moderation settings that either “hide,” “warn” or “show” categories of content such as nudity, violence, spam and hate-group iconography.

Along with today’s public launch of Bluesky, the company said it will roll out in the coming weeks a step toward its broader vision, inviting some outside developers to host servers that plug in to the main Bluesky network. It also announced a new feature that will let users and organizations begin todevelop their own content moderation services, which other users can then subscribe to. For instance, a fact-checking organization could apply “false” or “misleading” labels to certain posts, which would then be seen by users who opt in to seeing them.

With that out of the way…

A guide to getting started at Bluesky

  1. Sign up at bsky.app!
  2. Give yourself a profile picture and bio. Anything will do, really; it helps set you apart from other users and makes you more approachable.
  3. Find some custom feeds. It’s in the left column on desktop, or the hashtag icon on the bottom on mobile. I recommend:
  4. Under Moderation -> Content Filtering, you can set your preferences for showing/warning/hiding NSFW stuff, hate group iconography, gore, etc.
    1. Note that they’re still working out the, ah, kinks, and you might see some NSFW stuff slip through the filters.
    2. If you signed up on iOS, all mature content is removed from your feed by default; this cannot be changed from your iPhone. Log in at bsky.app and change your preferences there.
  5. Speaking of changing your preferences: I recommend this at Settings -> Basics -> Home Feed Preferences. It will show all posts by people you follow, including when they’re replying to somebody. The one at the bottom is important too–it inserts select posts from your feeds into your chronological following timeline. I also recommend Threaded Mode at Settings -> Basics -> Thread Preferences.Bluesky is now open! Sign up today! 1
  6. Almost everything you do is public on Bluesky, but you can set it so that people have to be logged in to see your posts under Moderation (not in preferences) -> Logged-out visibility, which includes some important caveats in the description.
  7. I maintain a large moderation list of authoritarian communists, Russia simps, etc. I recommend subscribing to it, which will block or mute everybody on it.
  8. Post, post, post! And reply to people, politely of course. It’s the recommended way to get noticed.

You can find me at @thearchduke.bsky.social. Many other jackals are there, please share in the comments. Plus:

Happy posting!

Reader Interactions

63Comments

  1. 1.

    Tenar Arha

    Hey hi. I’m datenar.bsky.social

    Yeah there’s a Jackals feed by jasiglar.bsky.social on there I follow too

  3. 3.

    Betty Cracker

    This is good news — thanks for posting about it.

    Do you know if a video upload feature is in the works and maybe an embedding feature to make it easier to share posts on platforms like this?

  8. 8.

    Downpuppy

    A basic step is to go to Moderation->Content filtering & set your preferences.

    There’s 7, from nudity to frauds, and you pick Hide, Warn, or Show for each.

  9. 9.

    TaMara

    If you follow me and I don’t follow you back, please tag me in a post, so I see it again. I’m trying to follow back as fast as I can. 😘

  11. 11.

    Betty

    I don’t see a way to share posts with other social media sites. It’s something I use pretty often as my family and friends do very limited social media.

  15. 15.

    Joy in FL

    I just signed up for Bluesky a few days ago. Now I have some cool people to follow.

    Thank you for this post. Bookmarking it to come back to later when I can give it better attention.

  21. 21.

    cain

    I’ll stick to mastodon for now. It feels like home. Ya’ll enjoy! :) Glad you found a home away from Elron

    ETA Maybe y’all can read me if there is a connection to the fediverse.

  22. 22.

    Jertian

    I just got an invite from bsky last week.  I suppose if they let me in, they will let anyone in.

  23. 23.

    Jacel

    I’m on there as jclangdell.bsky.social. I’ve been reading the site more in recent weeks. I might even post an original message some time.

  25. 25.

    Major Major Major Major

    @cain: the two protocols aren’t super duper compatible, but I’ve seen some proof of concept bridges. I know there are some grumblings on fediblock sometimes about never allowing ATProto to federate with activitypub, for some reason, but I doubt that will be a common admin sentiment at the end of the day.

  27. 27.

    Betty Cracker

    I am sorry to hear video uploads won’t be available anytime soon. Video news clips were a huge part of what made Twitter useful for me. I also enjoyed being able to share nature videos I made online, and posting them on Twitter and then embedding them here (rather than uploading it to YouTube, which is clunky) made it simple.

    Still rooting for Bluesky to be the Twitter killer, but it’s hard to see how they pull it off without video. But maybe that’s the wrong way to look at it anyway; perhaps no one was going to straight-up inherit the users Musk displaced and different platforms will evolve to serve various purposes. Shruggies!

  28. 28.

    Baud

    Maybe this will get me to actually post something on Bluesky.

    @baud20xx.bsky.social

     

    Congrats, M^4

  31. 31.

    NotMax

    Why do I suddenly feel like The Far Side’s Ginger the dog after perusing this post?

    You kids have fun, don’t jump up and down on the furniture, and put any dirtied dishes in the sink when you’re finished, ‘k?.
    ;)

  32. 32.

    Elizabelle

    Am on bluesky under the Elizabelle name.  Have never checked in since the day I signed up.

    The Juice is enough of a time sink for me, and you all provide lots of good links and comments.

  35. 35.

    Ken

    I feel I should forward this from Popehat on Bluesky:

    /22….which is why Bluesky’s unique interface and terms of service distinguish it, leaving posters vulnerable to lawsuits in Utah, Arizona, and Kentucky under their particular laws despite Section 230 and normal defamation law.

    Anyway, welcome to all the new users, it will be fine.

    EDIT: Yes, I know it’s a joke.

  36. 36.

    Ken

    @Downpuppy: Those must all default to Hide for non-members, explaining some of the things I’ve (not) been seeing on Bluesky. Hmm, do I want to sign up just to see the occasional image or post linked by one of the few people I read…

  37. 37.

    MattF

    Dumb problem with the BlueSky app— the icon on the lower left that immediately scrolls you to the top is in a bad place if you’re left-handed. I hit it accidentally a lot.
    More generally, the app seems buggy and unresponsive to me. Hitting the various icons sometimes has no effect, so it’s hard to say what is the desired effect. It’s OK for scrolling, but you have to have that much for minimal Twitter-ish functionality.

    I can imagine how custom feeds could lead to various kinds of monetization— is that the plan? Again, custom feeds work, but with minimal functionality.
    Maybe the point I’m getting to is that ‘minimal functionality’ appears to be a theme here. A lot of undeveloped potential and a rather primitive (if not actually buggy) UI.

  38. 38.

    oklahomo

    @Betty Cracker:  And, unless I’m doing something wrong, links to YouTube videos just sit there as a link, with no preview graphic.  Mine is @recliningbuddhacat.bsky.social but it’s just cat stuff, nothing serious.

  39. 39.

    Major Major Major Major

    @oklahomo: See what you have set in settings -> privacy -> external media preferences? By default they’re all disabled.

    @Betty Cracker:

    Still rooting for Bluesky to be the Twitter killer, but it’s hard to see how they pull it off without video. But maybe that’s the wrong way to look at it anyway; perhaps no one was going to straight-up inherit the users Musk displaced and different platforms will evolve to serve various purposes. Shruggies!

    The thing a lot of people have forgotten is that Twitter was absolute garbage for like eight years, it didn’t even have video. Video is extremely difficult to do right, given the potential for abuse vs. images, and the hosting costs. But I agree that it would be nice and I miss it. The nice thing about an extensible protocol is that other implementations can add it.

    You hit the nail on the head, though, at the end. It’s impossible to come out with a mature twitter-killer that has everything twitter spent eighteen years, tens of thousands of engineers, and billions of dollars building. Given the way things are trending, I think we’re heading towards a ‘decomposed’ web, where each thing serves its purpose. It’s less convenient, but also less susceptible to being completely ruined by 1-2 petulant man-babies.

  42. 42.

    oklahomo

    Also, a very nice feature is the ability to set it so you have to supply alt text to post a picture.  I try to do that for all pictures but this lets me not forget when I’m in a hurry and sometimes not really thinking.

  46. 46.

    Betty Cracker

    @Major Major Major Major: Imperviousness to petulant man-baby whims is important! I didn’t realize how complex native video is, and in retrospect, I think I assumed if Threads could do it, Bluesky could too. But of course Threads piggybacks on the Insta platform. Duh!

  56. 56.

    Ron

    Bluesky is no better than twitter. Youre only helping make a slightly less odious billionaire richer. The billionaire that let trump rule twitter until jan 6 and the billionaire that is supporting RFK for president. The true alternative is Mastodon. For the life of me I don’t know why this site is endorsing bluesky over it. People always bitch about horrible things then jump right on the next horrible thing (in the name of convenience?) instead of use the better alternative.

  57. 57.

    Librarian

    I’m in the process of signing up, and I thought that it’s important to point out that they require your birthday and phone number, for anybody who might have problems with that.

  59. 59.

    Major Major Major Major

    @Ron: I do not understand the reflexive need of people in the ATProto and ActivityPub communities to shit on each other. We should all be hoping for a world with many interoperable protocols and account portability. I hope they both succeed, especially since they’re tackling completely different problems.

  60. 60.

    Mousebumples

    Late to the thread, but I’m @mousebumples.bsky.social

    If anyone needs an invite, I also have some – though they’ve been sent to other Front Pagers if there’s a wider need or interest.

  62. 62.

    TooManyJens

    @Ron: ​

    Jack doesn’t own Bluesky.

    Your post is a good example of the kind of snotty attitude toward users of other social media that made me leave Mastodon/Fediverse.

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