FAQ: Getting started with Bluesky

What is Bluesky?

Bluesky is a “microblogging” social media network similar to X (formerly Twitter), where people can publish posts with a maximum of 300 characters, as well as follow others, create lists, like posts, and so on. “Similar to Twitter” makes sense, because Bluesky was originally a project within Twitter to develop a more open and decentralized social network. Bluesky’s AT Protocol is open source.

Bluesky started as an invitation-only network last year and opened to the public in early 2024.

Why Bluesky?

The Bluesky network’s recent mainstream prominence is due largely to users leaving X over decisions by owner Elon Musk. But there’s a lot more to Bluesky than US politics.

Bluesky has a mix of technical and general discussions, with accounts like the Linux Foundation, Hugging Face, and xkcd comic creator Randall Munro, along with more mainstream organizations such as CNN, the Financial Times, and The Onion. I’ve even found some local TV meteorologists.

The platform’s appeal includes user-created “starter packs” that make it easy to find and follow people by topic, robust moderation tools, and the option to view posts either chronologically or via built-in or user-generated feeds.

These features have encouraged creation of communities-within-communities like Blacksky, launched by technologist Rudy Fraser. That project aims to offer content “created by and for Black users” as well as moderation tools designed to preemptively block online harassment that many Black users often experience.

Two of the chief complaints against X are the difficulty many users had in seeing content they actually wanted and the inability to control online harassment. Stopping harassment and hate speech remains imperfect at Bluesky, too, but Bluesky gives users more control over both — without making them do all the blocking and reporting themselves. Instead, users can subscribe to block lists and labeling tools created by others whom they trust.

“Shoutout to @blacksky.app,” one user posted recently. “A racist account just tried to interact with me, the content was blocked by Blacksky. I didn’t even have to see it. I feel safe for the first time in a long time online.”

How do I get started as a user?

One of Bluesky’s advantages compared to Mastodon, another decentralized open-source option, is its easy onboarding. Simply head to https://bsky.app and sign up. (Mastodon users need to choose a server, which can be a deal-breaker for those who don’t want to research server advantages before joining a network.)

You can choose a username at the default bsky.social domain, such as my @smachlis.bsky.social. Or, you can use a web domain you control as your Bluesky user name, such as @linuxfoundation.org. See “How to verify your Bluesky account” for instructions.

How can I find people to follow?

Besides the slow, manual way of searching for accounts you follow elsewhere or scrolling the Discover feed to see accounts of interest, some tools can help.

User-created started packs, mentioned above, will let you find people based on various topics. You can use Bluesky’s search to look for phrases such as Rstats starter pack or Python starter pack. Or, there are third-party searchable starter pack listings such as Bluesky Directory’s. You can subscribe to all users in a starter pack with one click or decide whether to follow each account individually.

If you were previously on X, there’s a Chrome extension called Sky Follower Bridge that lets you search for people you followed there to follow on Bluesky.

Feeds are another way to find content by topic. Third-party tools such as Bluesky Feeds have been a bit fragile recently as usage soars, but they may still be worth a try. Another way to find feeds is to look at the Feeds tab on a user’s profile page to see if they have any of interest. For example, I built a Fave data hashtags feed that looks for #RStats, #QuartoPub, #RLadies, or #PyLadies as well as the non-hashtag DuckDB. It uses the free Skyfeed Builder (and can be slow to load).

As with most social networks, you can also view posts with a specific hashtag. I just bookmark these in my browser, such as https://bsky.app/hashtag/rstats for rstats (case doesn’t matter).

There are a lot more Bluesky tools listed at the GitHub repo Awesome Bluesky.

But don’t discount the Discover feed, which is somewhat customizable. As you scroll that feed, you can click the three dots on a post to see an additional menu that includes options to “Show more like this” or “Show less like this.”

How do I subscribe to moderation and labeling lists?

Once you find a labeler, it’s a simple matter of clicking the subscribe button. Once you do, you can choose to hide, be warned, or disable each label’s posts. Moderation lists let you report a post to the list’s moderation, not relying solely on Bluesky’s main team.

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The third-party BlueSky Labelers site has a directory of some labelers. Some of these are used for moderation and others for matters of interest, such as verifying Microsoft employees or labeling GitHub repositories you contribute to.

Who owns Bluesky?

Bluesky spun off from Twitter in 2021 and is currently a Public Benefit Corporation (similar to Posit, formerly RStudio), which means it can legally take the interests of its user community into account and not only its owners. The Bluesky site says the company is owned by “[CEO] Jay Graber and the Bluesky team,” although it has also announced investments from companies including Blockchain Capital (it says it is not getting involved in crypto).

Bluesky executives have said that since its underlying protocol is open source, if something were to happen to its ownership, another entity could spin up infrastructure and allow people to port their accounts to another server. However, Mastodon advocates argue that the same single server and ownership team that make Bluesky easier to use, also increase the risk of the service being sold as Twitter was.

How does Bluesky make money?

Bluesky doesn’t run ads. The company says it has raised $15 million in Series A financing and has plans for a premium user subscription service. Paying subscribers won’t get any kind of algorithm boost, but they could get additional features such as posting higher-quality videos or customized profiles.

How can I build something around Bluesky?

For those of us who like to code, there’s a free API. “Bluesky is an open ecosystem with an API that is guaranteed to always be open to developers,” CEO Jay Graber posted. Bluesky’s underlying protocol is open source under the MIT or Apache Version 2.0 license. (Twitter started charging for its API in February 2023.)

You can code your own custom feeds to use and share or use third-party tools like SkyFeed, which author @redsolver.dev says will be open-sourced “soon.”

Bluesky has starter templates for building bots, custom feeds, and client apps.

For R users, there are two packages, atrrr and bskyr, not currently listed on the official SDK page. See my companion article on using atrrr to create a searchable collection of Bluesky bookmarks. Check the Bluesky documentation to see options in TypeScript, Python, Dart, and Go.

How big is Bluesky?

While still tiny in total users compared to alternatives like X or Threads, Bluesky is growing. The platform jumped from around 12 million registered users in mid-October to more than 24 million today. Total visits to the bsky.app website, which excludes mobile apps and other third-party tools, soared to 122.7 million in November vs. 75.8 million in October.

Some in the media say they’re getting more engagement on the platform than sites that are larger. “Traffic from Bluesky to @bostonglobe.com is already 3x that of Threads, and we are seeing 4.5x the conversions to paying digital subscribers,” posted Matt Karolian, vice president of platforms and R&D at the Boston Globe.