Here's my list of bluesky tips for newbies! Heck, you might even learn something from it if you've been there a while. Putting it here on my blog since it's an easy place to do Formatting™ and stuff.

11/15/2024: Bluesky updated with new features! My body updated with THE FLU this week so I can't update the guide right now but here's a link to the new features thread.

A disclaimer before we start:
• I am not affiliated with Bluesky staff. I'm just some lady. I'm not trying to claim ultimate authority or anything here.
• This guide kinda assumes you're coming over from twitter, but it might still be useful if you aren't.
• It's also very artist-focused, because I'm an artist... but it might still be useful if you aren't.
• I mostly use Bluesky on a PC, because using mobile apps a lot is ouch oof hurty on my hands. You might have to extrapolate some stuff yourself on mobile.
• Pleeeeeease understand I can't provide individual tech support/troubleshooting. I'm very very busy and I have carpal tunnel syndrome. Please check out Bluesky's help pages for more.

🤖 First things first: try to look like a people.
There is already a bot/scammer problem on bluesky, the same as there has been on twitter for ages. It's one of those annoying little signs of a thriving social media platform (well... formerly thriving in twitter's case lol). Before you start interacting with people I really recommend doing a couple of things real quick so you don't look sus:

• Upload a profile pic. This is the absolute bare minimum to not look like a potential scammer or bot.
• Put something in your profile.
• Make an introductory post of some sort. Introduce yourself. Tell us what you're here to do. It doesn't have to be fancy.

⚽ Bluesky is very active, but your Following feed will need a push to get rolling.
• Sky Follower Bridge (a Chrome/Firefox extension) can help you find people you followed on twitter! Failing that, over on twitter, search "bluesky" or "bsky", sort the search to "people i follow", and start lookin'. Maybe do this over a few days. Find a few people whenever you compulsively check twitter.
• Now that you've followed some people, go through your following list and see who they're following, or look and see if they have lists or starter packs. This is an easy way to find more cool people to follow.
• Other social media has probably made you allergic to anything labeled "Discover" or "For You"/"Popular With Friends". You can let down your guard a little here! It's worth looking once in a while, especially once you follow more people, you have your dis-interests muted, and it can triangulate what might be interesting to you a little better. Contrary to the oft-advertised notion that Bluesky "doesn't have algorithms," it does... it's just that your following feed is chronological, and other feeds are more algorithmic for specific purposes.

It'll take a little effort to get your feed active, but you'll get there.

🌐 If you have your own website/domain, set it up as your user handle.
That's bluesky's form of "verification." It's automated, you don't have to wait for approval, and it lets people know you're you. See how my profile link includes my website domain? https://bsky.app/profile/doodlemancy.com That's relatively easy to set up. Go to settings > change handle, click "I have my own domain," and follow the onscreen instructions. (After doing this, you'll probably have to fix links to your profile on other sites. That's why it's good not to put it off.)

⚙️ Check out your moderation settings.
1. You should go to this page specifically (which is not very clearly linked in moderation settings, unfortunately; hopefully this will change) - and change your individual settings per content label. I personally have pretty much everything set to "warn."
2. Set muted words and tags up too, if you'd like.

PSSSSSSSSSSSSST: The fact that labels exist for certain kinds of content does not necessarily mean they're explicitly allowed. For example, the "Extremist/Intolerance" label can help you avoid unexpectedly seeing, say, journalistic photos of a nazi rally that are both newsworthy and upsetting. Bluesky's ToS prohibits "Promoting hate or extremist conduct that targets people or groups based on their race, gender, religion, ethnicity, nationality, disability, or sexual orientation". This is not to say that Bluesky moderation has been or will be perfect-- it certainly does have many of the same problems even pre-Elon twitter did-- but it's not the free-for-all it's occasionally been misrepresented as with out-of-context screenshots of the filter settings.

⚙️ Some more settings you might want to mess with...
• Who, if anyone, can DM (direct message) you (Settings > Chat Settings)
• Your font, font size, and Dark/Light mode settings (Settings > Appearance)
• You can disable autoplay for video and gifs (Settings > Accessibility > Media)
• How you want posts in threads sorted (Settings > Thread Preferences)
• Whether you want to see reposts, replies, and quote posts in your Following feed (Settings > Following Feed Preferences)
• Unfortunately there is no native way to turn off reposts individually for specific users you follow right now; people have been begging for it, so hopefully soon?! deck.blue allows this though! (thanks Shan for pointing this out!)

📰 Custom feeds are your new best friend.
These rule, because:
• Anyone can set one up and fine-tune it with keywords and stuff, and then others can pin those feeds to their sidebar. Example: the Kawaii Art feed! Check out that description! It tells you exactly how to get into the feed. Search around for more feeds!
• You can put feeds of your posts (ex. just your art posts) on your profile, mitigating that problem of "oh no all my reposts and memes are preventing people from easily seeing my art when they come to my profile!"
• Discoverability! If you find active custom feeds for content you post frequently, you can use their hashtags and reach more people.
• You can set up feeds to sort your timeline into more manageable chunks! There are some good pre-made custom feeds out there. I HIGHLY recommend pinning Mutuals, OnlyPosts, My Bangers, Mentions, 📌, and Quiet Posters-- see their descriptions for further info about why and how they're useful. Several make up for twitter features that aren't quite built-in to bluesky yet.
• You can click the # symbol at the top of your timeline to see your Feeds list. Scroll down to "Discover More Feeds" and you can search for more!
• To grab the direct link to a feed, click the three-dot menu in the feed, hit "share feed," and the link will be copied to your clipboard. When linked in a post, it will make a tidy little preview, as seen here.

Okay, how do I set up my own feed?
Head over to skyfeed.app! Here is a good in-depth tutorial for setting up a feed, and here's another good one. It may look a little intimidating at first, but you'll get there. Give it a shot!

🏷️ Labelers and moderation lists are also your friends.
If you follow a labeler account, it'll show little labels under people's usernames if they've been categorized by that labeler. This can be used for fun and whimsy, or it can be used for feed curation.

You can report things to labelers the same way you report to Bluesky Moderation. Any labelers you subscribe to will appear in the list of Moderation Services you can report stuff to. This means if you follow labelers for fun/cool stuff too, you can report people for being fun and cool and they'll get labeled as fun and cool. ;D You can see labelers you've subscribed to under Settings > Moderation > Advanced.

Here are my favs:

• AI Imagery Labeler: Subscribe to this one and you can filter a lot of AI-generated content out before it ever reaches your eyeballs. You can also use it to just make sure that you're aware that any AI-generated imagery you see is AI-generated. Consistently a trustworthy labeler, in my experience.

• Yard Crow: A popular one. Labels for different types of creatives, and some other stuff.

💬 Interact with people!
• Don't just like, share stuff! Without algorithms pushing stuff around, sharing is the best way to help creatives you like get seen by more people. Custom feeds mitigate the problem of "oh no now nobody can see Just My Posts in my feed.
• Likes are still good though, they aren't useless! Likes help push your posts into the Discover/Popular With Friends feeds for other people.
• Comment on stuff! If you have something nice to say, say it!

🕊️ You don't have to censor words or add your links in replies. It's fine. You're free.
Bluesky doesn't suppress posts with links in them, so your link can be in the main post. You don't have to say p4tr30n. or Pa/treon or k/ofi or l*nk or whatever and you don't have to censor "naughty" words or use euphemisms. (Of course, if there's a specific reason you don't want a post to be searchable, you can still goof up keywords a bit.)

🎨 Artists: some tips to get seen!
• Participate in art shares. A lot of artists will do art shares when they hit a specific follower count, for their birthdays, for seasonal stuff, or just for the heck of it. These are threads where you're encouraged to share your art. Sometimes they're focused on a specific type of art. Remember to follow the rules of the art share and be generous-- don't just drop your stuff and run, share some other people's posts from the thread as well, and share the original post.

• Participate in "art trains". These types of posts were also popular on twitter. Usually these take the form of a long chain of Quote Reposts on a theme, like "Artists, post your purple art". You quote-repost it, you copy-paste the call-to-action phrase, you add your art, boom. May or may not include an encouragement to tag in your friends and peers. Now you've shared someone else's art along with your own and there's an opportunity for artists following you to do the same!

• Keep an eye out for lists and starter packs people are making; if they let you suggest additions, you can wiggle right in.

• Don't be shy, smack that 🔁 button on your art posts sometimes. Some people won't see your posts on the first round, just DO IT! You'll reach people in different time zones! My personal strategy is I 🔁 every 2-3 hours the first day, 🔁 the next day when I wake up and check Bluesky, and then 🔁 just kinda whenever I remember for the next few days. When new notifs on that post start to slow down I leave it alone for a while, to be dug up and 🔁'd again a few weeks or months down the line. ;D

• If you miss having scheduled posts, PostyBirb may be an acceptable stand-in until we get them on-site. This is a good way to queue up a bunch of your art backlog to post without just machine-gunning it the first few days. A slower drip-feed of initial art posts is a good way to net new followers and not overwhelm your current followers' feeds.

• Make a pinned post! This is a post that sits at the top of your profile all the time. Just click the little three-dot menu and hit "pin to your profile." You can only pin one post, but there's no reason you can't turn it into a thread. Here's what I did. (i swear i'm not just trying to self-promote all over this Useful Post, lmao, i just like having examples...)

• Ideally, your profile should say you're an artist, and you should have a link somewhere in your bio or pinned post to a place where people can see your art. Having custom feeds set up is good, but you can't always rely on people to click on Feeds instead of the Media tab, because a lot of people who are newer to bluesky (and a lot of people who have been around for a while) still don't know what they are. Make it as easy and friction-free as possible for people to see what you're about.

Some useful hashtags and things:
#artistsonbluesky and of course #art - good to slap on any ol' art post!
#blueskynightmarket - gets you into the Blue Sky Night Market feed, for creatives selling their crafts and merch.
#ocsky - used by OC (original character) enthusiasts.
See also this list of feeds!

📝 Use alt text on images whenever possible.
This is a good and cool thing to do, because:

• Accessibility: It helps people with visual impairments/visual processing issues make sense of your posts.
• Context: Prevents the all-too-common social media experience of "That looks cool. Sure wish I knew what it was."
• Searchability: Alt text factors into search results on bluesky, making your images more searchable in the future. (But please don't abuse alt text just to shove more hashtags and keywords in there though, imagine being blind and having your screen reader just read you like 50 hashtags in a row, that sucks!!)
• It Feeds The Feeds: Many custom feeds also use keywords from alt text. For example, if you put alt text on your Sailor Moon or Madoka Magica or Precure fan art, even if it's not hashtagged, it'll probably end up in the Magical Girls feed my friend Hika made and reach people that are following that feed.
• More Shares: Bluesky users are more likely to share your post if it has alt text. Users who know they have followers who need alt text are understandably less willing to share things without it.

How do I write good alt text? What's expected here?
For screenshots of text, such as a social media post or an excerpt from a news article, include the text. Image descriptions are more of a creative exercise and people have differing opinions about it. Remember, a screen reader is going to read it aloud to people as they try to navigate their feeds, so I try to keep mine informative but concise.

Further reading:
How To Write Alt Text and Image Descriptions for the Visually Impaired - a good solid guide to how to do the thing!
Against Access by John Lee Clark - essay by a DeafBlind author; highly recommended read. You really should read the whole thing, but I'll include the excerpt that stuck with me the most regarding descriptions of visual stuff:

"I cannot count the times I’ve stopped reading a video transcript because it started with a dense word picture. Even if a description is short and well done, I often wish there were no description at all. Get to the point, already! How ironic that striving after access can actually create a barrier. When I pointed this out during one of my seminars, a participant made us all laugh by doing a parody: “Mary is wearing a green, blue, and red striped shirt; every fourth stripe also has a purple dot the size of a pea in it, and there are forty-seven stripes—”

“You’re killing me,” I said. “I can’t take any more of that!”

Now serious, she said it was clear to her that none of that stuff about Mary’s clothes mattered, at least if her clothes weren’t the point. What mattered most about the image was that Mary was holding her diploma and smiling. “But,” she wondered, “do I say, Mary has a huge smile on her face as she shows her diploma or Mary has an exuberant smile or showing her teeth in a smile and her eyes are crinkled at the edges?”

What if I keep forgetting to add alt text?
In Accessibility Settings, you can toggle on "require alt text before posting," and the website/app won't allow you to post images without adding alt text. (Unfortunately a bit inflexible, but you sure won't forget.)

What if the alt text doesn't fit in the character limit?
Standard practice seems to be to reply to the first post with the same image, say something like "alt text continued," and stick whatever didn't fit into that post.

What if I have a competing disability that makes writing alt text hard for me?
You can tag your images #Alt4Me if you're low spoons and don't have the wherewithal to alt text them yourself, and volunteers will come by to add alt text in a reply in your thread. (The perhaps-obvious caveat here is that random volunteers won't always have the context they need to write correct alt text for your image.)

In the end, if you can't always do it, or you can't do it at all, your disability is not less important than anyone else's. There is unfortunately a small contingent of sighted Crusaders For The Disabled™ (note: this is sarcasm) who have decided anyone who doesn't always use alt text is ableist and must be bullied or scolded; I'm in the competing disability boat and my advice is just to block anyone who does that. (I wrote a longer thread about this once.)

👩‍💻 Did you like tweetdeck? (Or do you want a more advanced feed with columns?)
You may enjoy using deck.blue or tokimeki.blue for a similar multi-column experience. (These services also let you see your exact follower count once it gets over 1000, if you're the kind of person who Has To Know The Number.)

☣️ Clearsky can be useful, but: handle with care.
This tool lets you see some useful but also potentially upsetting information: Lists (including moderation lists) and starter packs you're in, who you're blocking, and who you are blocked by.

Before you search your handle on Clearsky: Are you in a bad mood or feeling emotionally vulnerable? Maybe now isn't the time for a glimpse of how many people have you blocked. If you want to see an example of what it's going to look like without searching yourself, here's what it looks like when you search me. I don't care if you see! (btw, here's why blocks are public. I don't think it's ideal that they are, but keep it in mind. Mutes are private.)

Remember: people block/modlist for all sorts of reasons and it does not necessarily mean they hate you. They may just be on bluesky for something really specific (see: the very funny "Not Porn" list someone is doggedly adding everyone who doesn't post porn to) and blocking anyone whose posts aren't relevant to them. And even if it is for Unfriendliness Reasons, well, I'm on some kinda passive-aggressively-worded "AI haters" mod lists and I don't want to interact with AI bros anyway, so more power to 'em, right?)

Blocking the creator of a list or starter pack will remove you from it. Unfortunately this doesn't work with moderation lists; you'll have to report the moderation list to Bluesky Moderation Service.

⛔ The Nuclear Block (and the gentler-but-useful mute)
Bluesky's block feature is so powerful that people have started calling it the "nuclear block". When you block someone:

☒ They can't see your posts.
☒ You can't see their posts.
☒ Other people can't see their posts in your threads.
☒ Any quote posts of each other from either of you will have "blocked post" and no information anyone can use to dig up who was even being quoted.

This allows you to shut things down and prevent a lot of the type of rubbernecking/pile-ons that twitter was notorious for. An encouragement you will often hear from users on Bluesky is "block, don't engage." I don't think this is always the correct answer in every conflict, but it is a really good idea when you come across people who are just trolling/outrage farming/being a hateful jerk. If someone is being a jerk in a way that violates the Terms of Service, you should definitely report it-- but then you should block them. More reports won't necessarily do anything.

Muting is also nice! From Bluesky's User FAQ: "Muting 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."

🕵️ This isn't normal search... this is... ADVANCED search.
You can search a specific person's posts! add "from:username" to the search (remember, no space after the colon). You need the full user handle in there, and handles differ a bit depending on whether they're tied to a domain or not. Some examples: if you wanted to search for posts where I've said the word "zelda," on my main account, your search terms would be: from:doodlemancy.com zelda. if you wanted to search for posts on my shop account where i've said the word "stickers", your search terms would be from:doodlemancyshop.bsky.social stickers. Click those links to see examples with the searchbar filled out. (Including or not including the @ symbol doesn't seem to matter.)

More handy advanced search terms (I learned them from this post):
from:me - search your own posts
mentions:username - search mentions of a username
mentions:me - search your own mentions
"SEARCH PHRASE" - searches will return the specific phrase within the quotes (those words in that order, instead of just any post that happens to have both words somewhere in it)
domain:DOMAIN.XYZ - search posts that contain a link to a specific website (for example if i typed in domain:nintendo.com, the search would return posts that link to anything on nintendo.com)
since:YYYY-MM-DD - posts from on or after the specified date
until:YYYY-MM-DD - posts from on before the specified date

You can mix and match all of these! So, for example, if I wanted to see my own posts that link to doodlemancy.com, not any older than June 15th 2024 but not any newer than September 1st 2024, I'd type:

from:me domain:doodlemancy.com since:2024-06-15 until:2024-09-01

📌 Some other misc tips/FYIs:

Click hashtags! It's cool and trendy!
If you click a hashtag on a user's post or bio, a menu will pop up that lets you either search that hashtag sitewide, or specifically see posts from that user with that hashtag. If you put your most-used hashtags in your bio or pinned post/thread, it makes it easier for people to find your cool stuff. Example in use: this is in my pinned thread.

Image crop ratios??
Here is the most up-to-date guide I have on hand (as of 10/21/2024).

"Invalid handle"?!
A sign the bluesky servers are all stressed out, probably from high user load. It's not a huge deal and will often resolve itself, but you can also manually fix it.

Bluesky has a feedback page.
It's here! You may not get a super personal or quick response (they're very busy) but staff does seem to respond to feedback if they get a lot of it about the same thing.

You can sign into multiple accounts at once.
Settings > Other Accounts!

PSA: your profile is also an RSS feed!
Just add /rss to the end of any profile URL. ("What's RSS", you say? It's very cool!)

Sometimes settings don't sync quite right between desktop and mobile.
So keep an eye on the important ones, especially muted words and your content filters.

A lot of the time, you'll have to update the mobile app manually.
If things are behaving weirdly, there's probably an update you missed!

If you want to remove yourself from a Quote Repost,
Just click the three-dots menu under it and click "detach quote."

If a post is blowing up your mentions and you just want to stop getting notifs from it,
Click the three dots menu on the OP and hit "mute thread"!

At the time of this writing, you can't send links or images in DMs.
It's kind of annoying. They're more of a private place to ask for each other's discord handles. LOL

Beware of the doppelganger scammers!
A classic twitter scam that's unfortunately been imported to bluesky is making an account with the same profile pic, bio, etc., and then trying to scam people via DMs pretending to be that person. Often done to artists selling commissions or people running gofundmes. You should ALWAYS notify the person who's being impersonated, because they likely won't notice-- usually the impersonator blocks their victim.

If your follower count gets over 1k and you want to see the exact number...
deck.blue and tokimeki.blue will show you!

You can make links in posts prettier with deck.blue!
Please see this guide! (Sky-tan is a good follow for newbies.)

If you follow people that post in other languages,
heads up, choosing a specific content language will filter them out of your feed! If you follow any users who don't post in your native language, you should probably either add their languages or flip that switch to off, or you might not see their posts.

And as with all social media, especially social media that's new and getting a lot of new features:
it's always a good idea to check over your settings once in a while to see if a recent update toggled something in a direction you'd rather it not be toggled in.