How to Bluesky.

An interesting starterguide to Bluesky, written when it was "still in beta... though the application has recently passed 1 million downloads". Some interesting points:

• culture: "early adopters tended to be people from marginalized communities who were fleeing outright persecution" on other platforms; they all got invite codes "When Elon Musk misunderstood the Latin prefix “cis” and erroneously declared it a “slur”"
• the "glorious but broken thing called the hellthread... glitch that sent notifications to everyone who responded"
• "reply to a post without alt text with @alt-text.bsky.social, a bot will try to retrieve the alt text for you"
• The Following feed shows posts from users you're following but "not their replies, if they haven’t received enough likes" - change this in settings (this seems to be no longer the case - it's now binary on/off)
• crucially, "There is no default algorithm that will push ads or people you aren’t following"
• multilingualism: "set which languages you communicate in and would like to see"
• "add and/or create feeds based on your interests... the most popular appear on Bluesky’s Discover Feeds page... [where] Liking a feed helps to increase its visibility"
• "interactions circles... at wolfgang.raios.xyz"
• "Jaz’s Atlas groups users idiosyncratically into various clusters" - it's now here: https://bsky.jazco.dev/atlas, but I can't get it to work. All his experiments here
• Moderation: If you want, "AI that will filter out [certain] posts for you... You can hide, warn, or show any of the following image categories: explicit sexual, other nudity, sexually suggestive, violent/bloody, and hate group iconograph"
• "create mute lists to hide anyone you’re not interested in seeing, or block them outright... find out who has blocked you via Thieflord.dev and which mute lists you’re on via Twexit.nl... mute lists can also be used to generate a feed... [some] Bluesky users maintain mute lists ... that any user can subscribe to"
• Advanced features: "set your own domain as your handle and experiment more with creating your own feeds with SkyFeed."