A Complete Guide to Bluesky
For the past 10 months, I’ve been a pretty active user of Bluesky. I enjoy it a lot, and I’ve managed to learn a lot about how it works, what works well and what doesn’t, and also what’s likely coming next.
I’ve decided to write down some of the tips & tricks that I often give to friends when I send them an invite code, or the advice and answers that I sometimes give to people that I find in some feed asking about things.
One of the reasons I am enthusiastic about BlueSky is because of the way that it works. So in this post, I am going to lay out some of the design and the principles behind this design, as I understand them.
Today, we’re excited to announce that the Bluesky network is federating and opening up in a way that allows you to host your own data.
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Mastodon is another federated social network built on a protocol called ActivityPub. While Bluesky — built on a protocol called the AT Protocol (atproto) — shares the term “federation” with other networks, the way it works is very different.
On Bluesky, server choice doesn’t affect what content you see. Servers are only one piece of the protocol — when you browse Bluesky, you see posts that are pulled together from many different servers. This is why you can change your server after signing up without losing your username, friends, or posts.
Not terribly impressed by the answers to the third questions in the #Bluesky ‘open social web’ post, which spends an awful lot of time talking about Mastodon in a manner people on Mastodon wouldn’t recognise.
If you’re going to write about a rival service, not misrepresenting it is a better way to engender trust. Spin, not so much.
It’s not clear to me what Bluesky misrepresented.
Previously:
- Bluesky Opens to the Public
- Threads in EU and on ActivityPub
- Post-Twitter Diaspora Options
- Choosing and Switching Mastodon Instances
- Twitter’s Bluesky
Their description of Mastodon seems pretty accurate to me as a user who prefers Mastodon to Bluesky. Maybe this line is a little misleading:
> Your Mastodon timeline is only made up of posts from accounts you follow, and does not pull together posts from the whole network like Bluesky’s custom feeds.
Not true. You can follow hashtags and those will appear in your timeline regardless of whether you follow that user or not, and while those hashtag results may not be "global" they pull from federated timeline results so you get much more extended results beyond your local instance. I find hashtag following a fairly good substitute for global search.
In fact [opinion time now] I like this model more. Bluesky's global search does let you find more content, but in my experience a lot of those results are extremely low quality. Searching something like #Apple on Mastodon returns better results partly because of this federated interlocking nature, where only results from my instance and people followed by my instance return; artificially limiting the results (bad) but limiting them to a sort of de-facto trusted network (good). These searches usually return news articles or more nuanced takes. Searching "apple" on Bluesky (or God forbid, a term related to politics) tends to get me just lots of lesser quality hot takes.