A complete guide to Bluesky 🦋 – mackuba.eu

Another Bluesky guide with "the tips & tricks that I often give to friends when I send them an invite code", including a brief but informative history lesson.

Of particular interest to me
in early November 2024:

• "they promise they won’t “enshittify” the service in future... [are] explicitly building the network to be “billionaire-proof”", although not everyone agrees (eg Cory Doctorow)
• "third party developers building various apps, tools and experimenting with the protocol" - examples provided
• you can customise the main Discover feed via "“Show more like this” or “Show less like this” [options] ... on each post"
• "mute someone if you find them annoying... mute words, phrases or hashtags
• blocking "is pretty aggressive... hides all previous interactions between the two users *for everyone*"
• "“moderation lists” for muting or blocking ... [many] people at once... can be shared with others
• "stackable moderation” ... many layers – from server operators ... various tools and services provided by other companies" and finally each user can personalize their experience.

While I knew that "anyone with a server and some knowledge of coding" can build and share custom feeds, I didnt know there were already ~40k by early 2024 (~85% hosted on Skyfeed), nor how they work:

• "reads all new posts ... decide which of them to keep and how to arrange them (...a shared feed... or personalized. ... different to each user).
• Most feeds match posts by keywords ... phrases, hashtags, sometimes emojis...
• [some] use AI "to match some specific kinds of photos"
• plus others which are based on "some specific idea: posts from your mutual follows, from people who follow you, posts with photos only..."

All these feeds are "built by third party developers who just had an idea and implemented it, without having to register or apply anywhere or ask anyone for permission."

Another service which can be provided by third parties are "“labellers”... third-party moderation services... assigning a set of labels/tags (manually or automatically) to accounts and posts" - by a manual moderator, an algorithm or through users' reports, as "users can send moderation reports to any set of these services", as well as subscribe to and configure them: "for any label type, they can choose if the user/post marked with such label should be hidden ... [or] marked".

Labellers therefore help shape the communities of their subscribers - easy to see how a community could form around their own labeller: "This system allows different communities to handle moderation in their own way... Bluesky as a company doesn’t have to try to satisfy everyone... or pick a side".

There's "a rough list on this page... &Label Scanner tool where you can find all labels assigned to a given account from any labeller."

ATProto "is extremely open. Anyone who knows how to code can write an app or tool that can read practically any data about anyone, without having to ask anyone for permission... [so] everything you do is very public... even ... the list of people you block (!)". Things which are not public relate mainly to muting and private info like email address, language prefs, etc.

This means, inter alia, that anyone can use your data for reasons as diverse as sentiment analysis and AI training. Even "blocking someone ... can’t completely prevent them from seeing your post... most of this is or was always the case on other social networks too", but it's easier.

Portability: "your account ... [has] a unique ... “DID” (Decentralized Identifier)", to which you can assign a handle: any domain name you own*, and you can change anytime, with "contacts, references and connections will (mostly) stay intact".

(*) a good way for organisations to prove that their staff are who they say they are - ie, verified accounts.

Note: "if you change your handle from ***.bsky.social to a custom domain, that old handle becomes available for others again".

Federation: the aim is "a network ... of many, many servers run by a lot of different companies, organizations and people" - people can now migrate their accounts to self-hosted servers".

While Bluesky and Mastodon use different protocols, " third party “bridge” called Bridgy ... “mirrors” Mastodon accounts and their posts to Bluesky or Bluesky accounts to Mastodon ... possible to create whole threads where some replies are made by Mastodon accounts and some by Bluesky accounts, all of them being visible in both places."

You can search everything, plus "add “from:some.handle” to find only posts from a given user, or “from:me” to search within your own posts", and more - see “Tips and Tricks for Bluesky Search". And "click on a hashtag ... to search for all posts with this hashtag, only posts from the given person, or to mute that hashtag."

While many people want it, Groups - where "you only share with some people but not others" - will take time. And DMs are still primitive - "the team wants ... a more full-featured, decentralized and private version of DMs (which may involve integrating with some existing private messages standard)", but this will take time.

Gifs: "For Giphy gifs... paste a direct link to the image, and for Tenor gifs, a link to the page... [in] the gif search dialog only Tenor is supported".

Post length: they're copying Twitter, but we may one day see "other “apps” implemented on the AT Protocol that aren’t a part of Bluesky that will allow longer posts... somehow integrated into Bluesky in the future".

The post ends with a list of useful tools and guides, as well as a changelog.