Bluesky Starter Guide Script
Disclaimers: This is a script taken from a video guide of Bluesky. It is imperfect, I have yet to taken the time to adapt all my sources into the text as I am locking down twitter this week. I will add a handful of more experienced people than I at the beginning of this post if you want to drill down, and will be properly citing and even adding pictures later.
I am also not talking about atproto in this video/script. that’s a whole other can of worms and I have decided to make that a separate video
A handful of important links:
Chris Titus’s video on getting started
Jglypt’s gettign started guide Jglypt’s guide on skyfeed (since I talk about feeds in this video/script)
Rudy Fraser’s Moderation explanation
The script:
Can things just stop exploding for 5 minutes?! Like Damn! I feel like a new issue I care about pops up every week and I just can't cover it all! Don't they realize I work a full time job and I'm a very... very tired man.
The issue this time... is that twitter decided to make block useless, AND Solidify it's AI scraper. Have I mentioned I hate this site, and its owner. Except I kept it because of friends and moots. Especially when I really got into a proportional representation and Canadian politics rabbit hole. I am regretful of the latter fact.
Luckily, Friends are at least going to one of the two alternatives that I have semi-regularly use, Bluesky. Making the need to be on Twitter way less. But what is the deal with Bluesky, and what makes it different than twitter?
Well in this guide I hope to demystify some stuff about
Getting Started
Account
First you'll need an account. Head over to bsky.app and click sign up. Add in your email, password, and birth date. Don't worry about your hosting provider, Bluesky is what 99% of you are going to use, unless you're nerd. And nerder than me.
Then Make your handle, this is how people will find you on the site. The full handle will be what you type in plus your host's domain, unless you add a custom domain after you make your account.
Once you make all your stuff and confirm your email.
Starter Packs and Sky Follower Bridge
So you're in Bluesky... Who to follow? Well if you're coming from twitter, there's this thing call Sky Follower Bridge which allows you to see who on twitter you follow also has a bluesky account. Just login to the extention with your bluesky account details or with a onetime password while on the following screen and just follow who you want follow from there.
Or if you want to start fresh Users can create these Starter Packs that they can send to new users. Thinking of them like recommendations from users for users. from there you can view profiles from the lists, follow them individually or all together. I've went ahead and made a handful of starter packs of people I think are neat. But there's about starter packs for everything if you go searching through keywords or feeds.
Lets go into what makes this similar to twitter. Not hard as Twitter has been THE Microblogging platform for years so lets start with posts:
Posts
When making posts you have a 300 character limit. as of the time of writing you can add emojis, up to 4 images, gif support and recently video support up to 50MB, 1 minute videos limited to 25 videos per day apparently. Also adding links will actually show to a preview of a card if it supports it such as for youtube videos which was more reliable than twitter ever was, you can even remove the link once the card is created. And discord supports most bluesky embeds of posts without having to add extra letters with the exception of videos at the moment. For videos posted to the site, use cbsky.app when sending the link
These post can set there reply settings by everyone, mentioned users, followed users, users in select lists, or nobody, and can even turn off Quotes.
Posts are the bread and butter of twitter likes, and Bluesky does these posts in spades. the only thing it's missing right now is polls, but I personally don't mind that so much.
Lists
Lists take 3 forms. We've mentioned starter packs, but there's also follow lists, and moderation lists. Follow lists might be what you know in twitter as lists. These are a subsection users that you add to a list for filtered experience, that you can pin to your home like I do with my vibes list. Moderation lists are public lists of people that you don't vibe with and either want to mute or block. These lists can then be subscribed to by others. A very popular one that people pass around is the Anti/AI/Crypto Shill List. I kind of wish there was away to review followers part of those lists and double check if you want those exempted, or to remix your own block/mute list.
BTW since we're on the topic of blocking
Moderation options
Muted words and tags filters out posts with words and tags that you add. This can be for a certain duration, for text and tags or just tags only. These rules can be ignored by post of those you follow. This can be useful in trying to avoid certain topics, nasty words, and even spoiler from your favorite manga and/or anime!
Mutes prevents you from seeing any notifications or top-level posts from an account. If they reply to a thread, you’ll see a section that says ‘Post from an account you muted’ with an option to show the post. The account will not know that they have been muted.”
Blocks are so strong here that it not only removes all interactions and prevents future interactions such as likes, replies, mentions, DMs or follows and their posts are hidden form you.
Moderation lists can be viewed under moderation as well. As mentioned, Moderations lists are good for mass blocking or muting.
Bluesky Content Filters are filters for content on the network that is labeled under certain filters such as adult content, impersonation, and scams. You can be as stick or about as lax about these filters as you want. We'll talk more about labelers and their role on bluesky in depth later.
A note on blocks and 3rd party apps
Something I need to mentioned and is that blocks are publicly viewable via the Api. This is part of maintaining that Bluesky is an Open and Public network. There is this third party app called Clearsky that shows you who a user is blocking, who they're blocked by, and what lists they're on. Now I know some people have issues with this, others say it's not a big deal. I don't think I can comment! I just know it's important to mention.
There's also Blockenheimer that lets you mass block who have reposted, liked a post, followers an account or what an account is following. You can either add these to a list, or just mass block from the app. Useful if you come across nasty people and probably don't want to deal with their following either. Just keep in mind that this is a nuclear option. hence the name.
Note that two use these third party apps such as Blockenheimer or Skyfeed, you will need to generate a 1 time “App Password” to use to login. Just a security precaution.
DMs / Chat
A more recent feature. You have the ability to allow messages from Everyone, Users I follow, and even no one. Blocked users are not able to dm you, but muted users are. Eventually it's suppose to get End-to-End Encryption, media in Dms, and Group DMs. Its still a work in progress, but it does work if you need it to.
Okay now that we're done with all the similarities to Twitter now lets get into the user facing things that make Bluesky stand out:
Feeds
You might have heard that bluesky has no Algorithm. This is... Technically true... but it's about as helpful as saying mastodon and the fediverse is like email. It's more accurate to say that Bluesky does not have a centralized, singular Big-A Algorithm like most social media, but a butch of user curated feeds with different algorithmic preferences that people can subscribe to, and pin to home like you would with your lists.
Anyone can make a feed either through either using a service such as skyfeed, or bluesky feed creator or even manually coding and hosting their own if you know what you're doing.
Many of these are topic focused feeds that filter down to certain topics via hashtags, keywords, people (via lists or single users) in a chronological order but this can get very granular such as displaying only certain types of media, only your mentions, or push pins. The sky's the limit. And your understanding of variables, and coding of course.
Some of my favourites include:
Quiet Poster: For those that follow people that maybe post once in a blue moon, but want to still see what they're up to.
Mutuals: because it always nice keeping up with moots moot
Everything Ps2: Please take a guess, I wonder why I might follow that one.
Popular with friends: Shows you all the popular content from accounts you follow and what they like. Good for new comers if you have a lot of people you follow that you trust.
The Gram: shows only the posts contanting pictures from those you follow. Helpful for those that follow a lot of artists.
Pushpin emoji: because there's no bookmarks on the offical app and it's useful for finding old post.
OverheardBsky: for when you're in a late night tumblr posting kind of mood, and want to read some unhinged.
I also took the time as of writing this to use Skyfeed's built-in feed builder to create a few feeds. Most of them are to filter out update posts or videos I post or share. Other Feeds I've made that's less narcissistic is a Rumbleverse Feed that filters the rumbleverse supporter's feed but Rumbleverse warrior only when there's a rumbleverse post. And just a general curation of artist I think are neat.
I think what nice about having these custom feeds curated by users for users is that it makes community a bit more fluid than a fediverse instance, but less of a toxic hazard than twitter. You don't have to worry about taking psychic damage from Twitter's algorithm, or be worried that you're not able to reach certain people beyond your Mastodon instance. What Feeds you follow, are ultimately up to you, and paired with mutes, blocks and labelers make for ultimately a better curated user experience. It's like going to your community center or library and living a little instead of just working and going home.
Did I just call myself out?
Oh wait I still got to talk about labelers
Labelers
Labelers are effectively Content Filters you can subscribe to that allows you to filter out or label content and users via certain parameters to either Warn the user of the post, hide that content or user all together, or simply add a badge next on the post or poster. These also can be turned off if there's some labels part of the labeler you don't care to see on the site.
These filters can used for something as nasty as racism, Sexism, homophobia, transphobia, to simply filtering out pictures of say pictures of spiders, or AI images, or even just giving badge for something a bit more fun like TTRPG Labeller. I'm a halfling magus. I'm lil that casts the pew pews.
The key example for a moderation style labeler is Bluesky's “main” Moderation Filter that is used for most sexual or graphic content to name a few things.
A lot of this is done to a reporting system, or a reply forum like the Pronouns Labeler. however, some labelers have some sort of automation bots attached to them like the aforementioned TTRPG Labeler.
What's nice about the labelers is I think this is better than relying on the Tumblr etiquette of say relying on proper tagging, and “anti-” tagging. It's cool if you still want to do that, but you always have people who don't follow those rules.
One weakness of the Labelers is that these are hosted services that run independent from the network. This means that this service can go offline and removed. Now this means that these services can go offline without disrupting the whole network, but that means if the labeler goes offline then those that are labelled that you are using to warn or hide no longer has those applied to them.
This was seen when one of the high profile labelers basically imploded after some “drama” that I'm not going to get into because it's in the past, I don't know the whole story, and it's beyond the scope of this video. Just trust me when I say some vibes were off, and that's a gross understatement.
But I think it does bring up important questions about relying on these mostly community supported services, Backing up any important work, not trying to do too much, and the importance of verifying moderators. That again is beyond the scope of this video, I even feel unequipped to deal with that, but is still like massively important to at least mention for a social platform.
Generally, I still think Labelers are good concept in this two part “Opinionated Services” but I think only time will tell how well these can actually work as the network matures.
And Yeah that's about it for the network, but I wanted to include one more thing before we end things off.
Following people from the Fediverse and through RSS Because I have no better place to put this.
Something I wanted to add that I don't have really any other place to put this. So lets say you have someone you want to follow on bluesky but you're on mastodon, or vis versa. interoperability is super important for these kinds of socials. While there is a 3rd partyy too that will help with this. Bridgy,fed is a decentralized social network bridge. This can be used to follow people on and from bluesky, fediverse, and even from some websites if the admin has added that functionality.
But we only really care about Bluesky and mastodon in this example.
If you are on bluesky you need to follow [@ap.brid.gy](https://bsky.app/profile/ap.brid.gy) on Bluesky. Accept its follow to make sure your fediverse posts get sent the bridge and make it into Bluesky. After a some time, you will appear in the fediverse as `@[handle]@bsky.brid.gy` so in my case @nemescontent@bsky.brid.gy the you should be able to search for other Fediverse addresses in searchbar. To search for poeple on the fediverse, you will need their full address, and search under people.
If you are on mastodon or other fediverse account, search for and follow `@bsky.brid.gy@bsky.brid.gy` That account will then follow you back. Accept its follow to make sure your fediverse posts get sent the bridge and make it into Bluesky. On Blue sky your account will appear as: `[user].[instance].ap.brid.gy` so as an example: @NemesContent.mstdn.ca.ap.brid.gy
For more information, take a look at the documentation that I'll link in the pinned comment. Bridgyfed
You can also follow people via rss on bluesky by putting /rss at the end of the profile url, but it's only so helpful. you only see the text of the post and media. This how it works on mastodon as well, but it is disappointing.
Conclusion or is it?
And that's about big main things to let you all know about. The network is still in development with a bunch features promised, but trust me this is way more improved than when it was back in the invite stage. Psst thanks marideerie... you guys should like... follower her or something.
I think Bluesky has some potential. it being more focused on user curation and simplifying some processes that Mastodon. It's actually something I wanted that I mentioned in a write as blog I have, rambled well written, where the user should have this kind of control.
That being said. I have been researching, and using bluesky for... a while now. And Through that Research I have learned... Deeper knowledge. And burdened with said knowledge, I need to get it out of my system. You need to understand this script is the 3rd script of me trying to make this damn video, and I'm in too deep now. IT's skunk cost falasy so if I had spend a good few months of my life to learn this information just so I can understand what the hell firehose and why it's hooked up to a relay to populate feeds on Data Sever is you're going to fucking SIT THERE- AND IM'!
A Nemes Content Blog 2022.
