A different kind of post, for once. With everything going on on Xitter, I figured it would be nice to make a blog about BlueSky, how to have a good time on it, why joining it instead of X etc...
So today let's talk BlueSky!
1 - Why Leaving Xitter :
Little back story time : I joined Twitter in 2018 or 2017, I don't properly remember. I already had an account but I didn't use it, I was into Facebook before that.
I started using Twitter because of the (now dead) mobile game Avengers Academy (AvAc for short), because I was tired of the toxicity of comments under each of their post on Facebook and believe it or not but Twitter was that place back then. Maybe because it was less popular than now.
You had four huge block back then, you had instagram, Facebook (mostly Facebook), Tumblr and Twitter.
Then Facebook started losing popularity through its "boomer" reputation so people started going to Twitter instead, 'cause instagram isn't really "message" friendly. Then it was Tumblr's turn, it collapsed and so people went on Twitter instead. As its popularity grew so did its toxicity but it didn't really matter, it was still easy to make a clean timeline and have fun through blocking and ignoring. Until it became X.
It's no secret how Elon Fuck is trying to turn X into an alt right propaganda weapon, pushing fake news and hatred through so-called "speech freedom" while highly reducing the visibility of minorities through deboosted key words. Lots of people make fun of Elon, thinking he's a dumbass who don't know how to properly "rule" his new place and you're all wrong. You're all wrong 'cause Elon is a dumb fuck indeed but he's a rich one, meaning he's way more dangerous than everyone else 'cause he has the money to buy people smart enough to make his lunatic hatred ideas a reality, at least on X.
He didn't buy X to make it more successful than Twitter, he bought X to create a place to spread his own nauseous ideas and it's working damn well. X is not a social media to him, it's a propaganda weapons, that's why it wants to make you see msg from people you blocked, so you have to see their propaganda.
And while we're at it, please, for fuck sake, STOP calling it "Twitter", you're not being rebellious or smartass, you're playing along. Y'know all these people who watch reality tv show and say "I'm looking to make fun of these idiots, I don't really like it"? Yeah, well, it's exactly the same. When you call X "Twitter" you're only convincing yourself and people that Twitter still exist, to make you stay here, to use the deep affection you had for Twitter to make you stay on a place you NEVER signed for. 'Cause let's face it, most of us wouldn't make a X account if we found out about that place now. That's why. You encourage a toxic relationship hoping it will go back to good I'll days. It's pure marketing and everytime you think you're bothering Elon really you're just encouraging him.
You gotta understand that posting on X is supporting it, it's accepting its rules.
It doesn't matter how fucking stupid you think Elon is or how angry each of his decisions made you feel, 'cause in the end you're still here, posting as if nothing happened. So why would he stop? It doesn't matter how much fun you make of him, in the end you're still his tool, you're still bending to his will, you're still bringing him engagement and through engagement money so who's the dumbest?
And I understand if you need X for work, if you're a creative for exemple. I, too, still need it. But you can still highly reduce what you do there, stick to work post only and nothing else, I've been doing this for a year and it worked out pretty well for me. If anything I even had more followers than before so you see, you're not losing everything.
X is only getting worst and worst and now is the final moment to leave, because you can still make it "smooth". Leaving a place with so much memories is hard, changing your habits is hard, I know that. That's why we're not telling you to delete your account but rather learn to slowly go somewhere else while keeping your account up and BlueSky is the best place for that because it's "old Twitter with control" and I'll go back to that through everything you can do with it and how much you can push a personalized journey but first I'll talk about how I went from X (to which I was kinda addicted even if I was in deny) to Bluesky and learn to have a cleaner healthier experience with social media.
'Cause not only is X addictive, but it also twists your mind. How many time a day you feel upset on X 'cause you saw something incredibly upsetting? How many time do you feel the need to quote someone you don't even care about to tell them their racist shit is racist? How many time do you have to fight over an harmless opinion such as "I like this movie/I don't"?
If you can't completly leave X, you can at least limit yourself to the bare minimum. "But why? It's the same, you still post", no it's not, X works through engagement, if you barely post and don't answer to anything it's not the same as posting daily, it's already a good enough thing to do. You can read whatever you need to read, share whatever you need to share, while reducting the amount of money and energy you bring to X.
2 - Leaving Xitter, a journey :
As I said, it's not easy to leave "Twitter" when you have so much memories on it. It gave me friends, a plateform to talk about what I love, a career even. I'm disabled and I've been stuck in my bed for a decade, so social media was one of my few windows to the World.
I always thought that I needed to be as present as possible, for me but also for Sam. As odd as it is, Sam is part of my life, it's important to me to boost his popularity.
I thought I needed to post daily, not for me but for engagement, for my job so I understand why some of you feel stuck here. And, honestly, the first month on BlueSky felt hard. People had their own habits already so I felt ignored, you're here, alone, nobody to enjoy what you do, to listen to you. I get that. It takes time to build something but now I have a lot of interactions and I'm very happy everytime I login, I took my time and I give it a real chance, not a few days but months, to prove itself.
And having such a hard time staying away from X (not even leaving it, but staying away from it) made me realized how addicted to it I was. If you feel like you "can't" leave X either, even if you're not making a living out of it, then you are too and you gotta work on it.
- First thing first, as I said stop calling it "Twitter" 'cause it's not. The place I loved, the place where I made my friends and my career is dead and it's never coming back. And it pains me to accept it 'cause of all the memories I have on it, it was a part of my life. But it's dead, let's accept that and move on.
- The first weeks, I deleted X from my phone, I deleted all the Chrome addons I used to turn it into a clean experience, I left it raw, I only go to the "real" X now and how fucking annoying it is. And the more annoying it is, the easier it is to get rid of it.
- I forced myself to login to BlueSky everytime I felt like opening X to post, to discuss with other people. Remember, there's no algorithm on BlueSky so the only way to create a connexion is to make friends and to be friendly, to support other, you cannot be egocentrical and selfish anymore and it's truly refreshing 'cause on X you need to be rude and to hate to get your visibility, on BlueSky it's the other way around. If you're rude you'll get blocked by most people and you won't be able to grow, so you have to play nice and it feels pretty good having people sharing what they LIKE instead of what they HATE, like the old Twitter.
- I spent more time on my hobbies, like, instead of going in X I drew, I read, I played video games, everything I like in fact
- I stayed patient and it's the hardest but most important part. It takes TIME to get used to live without X but trust me once you do you can't help but wonder why it became so important. Why did you silently kinda accept all the dramas and bullshit, you wonder "why the fuck was I even here?"
- I know you're affraid to loose your friends but it's fucking 2024, if you need X, of all place, to keep in touch with them when you have Discord and other social media then they're not your friends, you don't care about each others and just wanna feel "seen" and maybe ask yourself why do you need that.
3 - Welcome to BlueSky
Alright now the most interesting part, how to have fun on BlueSky rather than X.
First of all, you need to know that BlueSky as NO algorithm, so your first days here might be INCREDIBLY empty, that's why people usually leave after a few days. But if you stick to it and invest your time and energy in it, you'll understand that no algorithm gives you total freedom on your experience so give it time. Also keeps in mind that BlueSky is still pretty "new" and there's a lot of stuff missing they add slowly (for exemple we got pinned posts a few days ago)
1 - Custom feeds
In bluesky you can create and follow custom feeds, or "TL" if you will. Here're mine for now :
The "Following" is the main feed, you'll see everything people you follow share (and because there's no algo you'll see ONLY what they share, repost, post etc... Nothing else).
Mutuals shows up post only from your mutuals, so no repost, just what they post and only if you follow each others.
Marvel Comics shows every post with the hashtag #MarvelComics, we'll go back to hasthag 'cause here it's incredibly helpful.
The "OnlyPosts" is a must have, it shows all the post from everybody you follow without the repost and when you follow people like me who repost a lot it's very useful to not miss what they post.
Here's how to find and pin feeds :
You can also create your own feeds but I didn't look into it yet so for now you'll have to rely on others talking about it
2 - HashtagsIt works like every other places of course, as a link to find posts using them
3 - Language Setting
This one is VERY IMPORTANT 'cause by default your BlueSky setting shows up only YOUR native language posts in different feeds, you need to allow it to show more. Here's how to do that
Under this last section, "content languages" in English, you'll have your native language selected. Unselect everything if you want to be able to see everything.
4 - Hidding or showing 18+ posts
A few people got angry at their post being flagged "mature" because HOW DARE a website put it by defaut to ask for people's consent first (?).
You gotta remember that 18+ posts still needs CONSENT from people so, yeah, of course a huge DICK won't show up in their feed if they didn't allow it to. By default everything is hidden so here's how to allow 18+ (or no) to show up :
As you can see, there's 3 level for each. The first, "show", will put everything in your feeds without warning like any other casual post. The second, "warn", will allow it in your feed HOWEVER you'll have to click it to see it and the third, hide, will of course hide everything and it won't show up at all in your feeds.
That's what the "warn" looks like.
5- DON'T censor words
Unlike other social media you cannot be deboosted when you post a specific keyword and there's not many bots anyway. It allows two things, people can properly mute posts they don't want to see with specific triggers in it, it allows people to find your post when you post about something, so don't censor, ever.
6 - How to add a warning filter to your posts
You put any pictures and you add one of these filters. There's more filters the moderation might add but you can't by yourself put gore for exemple atm.
Also while we're at it don't forget to add alt. In your setting you can force yourself to remember it through an option that unable the possibility to post a pic without alt text.
It's useful for people who can't properly see and the words used in your alt are taken into consideration in the search option it seems (I'm not sure but I think it is 'cause some of my posts showed up when I was looking for certain things even if I didn't put the key words in my posts directly).
6 - Custom your moderation
In BlueSky, you can custom pretty much everything, even what you want to automatically block or hide through lists, or hide some kind of posts by subscribing to profiles. It's kinda similar to lists on X except you have an option to block or mute any person on that list.
For that you need to find them, they look like average BlueSky accounts, except they have a "subscribe" button instead of follow
You subscribe and then it works like the 18+ fonction above, warn, hide.
Here are the ones needed for a clean experience (there's more of course, it's up to you to find them) :
BlueSky Moderation Service : to hide hateful posts, bigots etc... It's really a must have
Profile Labeller : not really a most have but it will show you new users etc... And can be handy to detect trolls and stalkers
AI imagery Labeler : if you want to avoid AI users
Please remember, like everything relying to bots, it's not perfect so they might be wrong when they flag something, thus the reason I mostly use "warn" except for any kind of hateful discourse that might anger me.
Alright, as I said you can mass block/mute through lists. If you subscribe to this kind of list, it will automatically hide/block people for you as the list gets updated, like this :
I don't really know how to find them honestly, I usually randomly come across but you can check people's profil to see if they created lists.
7 - Deck.blue
Deck.Blue is basically a "better" BlueSky. It's trustful and allowed by BlueSky so don't worry.
You login to your account through it and you'll have a shit tons of new options. I haven't fully explored and customized it yet so I can't really help you more than that with it but here's a few things I do through it.
Customized links :
Not only does it look cleaner and more professional, but it also saves A LOT of characters in a post (because the limit won't take the full link into consideration in your limit, only the linked word).
To do that you start a new post through Deck.Blue
And then you put your text like this [text](url)
If the word you put in [ ] is blue then it's all good, you can post, if it's not you forgot something and it won't work
This one doesn't work
This one does
You can also choose what shows up in your notification feed :
deck.blue is basically a more complicated but more complete BlueSky that you should start using only once you're more familiar with BlueSky but it will change your life lol
That's pretty much all I have in mind right now, I'll leave you with the last BlueSky rules.
On BlueSky there's no "farming engagement", it doesn't exist. There's no quoting people you don't like or disagree with (in fact if someone tries to be rude by quoting you, you can remove their post from your quote), Hell, in BlueSky you can choose to unable quotes on your posts just like you can limit who answer. If you mask a post, it won't show up on top of your post like X, it will be below, below, below.
Because there's no algro the only way to survive is through engagement. Through people who answer you, who share you. You get it? If you find a bigot and block them right away without answering them, they cannot exist on BlueSky, that's why they hate it.
There's no such a thing as a clean social media, 'cause it's people who are rotten, not social medias. But BlueSky is the closest you'll ever get from a clean experience because YOU can personalize everything, it's YOUR experience, you don't bend to someone's will, you bend the social media to YOURS.
Take some time to learn to get used to it, explore everything, make friends, give it a few months and you'll see you won't need X ever again (unless it's a workplace too but you can limit your time there as well, as I already explained).
It's all about patience and time. It took me 1-2 months to start using BlueSky as my main place and to stop posting more than arts on X, it will take time for you too, you might also go back to X a few time before you totally cut it off from your life, it's ok. It's the same kind of mecanism it is with a toxic relationship, you're not staying to have fun, you're staying 'cause you feel like you owe and need this place and once you understand that it's easier to leave for good. So everytime you feel like posting on X take the habits to go to BlueSky instead and post here and push your friends to join 'cause that's how you'll get your engagement back as well and if they don't want to migrate then so be it, make new friends.
And if you think it's boring 'cause you can't randomly quote strangers to hate on them or whatever they like I beg you to put down your phone, reconsider your life choices, go outside instead of going to any social media.
Enjoy~
