Are you looking for a new social media platform because X, Threads and Mastodon just aren’t enough? You can try Bluesky.

THE Key Biscayne Independent recently created a presence on the site. You can find us at Bluesky here:

People looking to avoid the chaos, noise and political bluster in the wake of the US election are noticing a different vibe on the social platform Bluesky, where the vibe is seemingly welcoming and there are noticeably fewer trolls.

“We saw strong engagement in just a few days,” said Tony Winton, KBI editor-in-chief. “We’re not leaving X, but there’s a different vibe on Bluesky.”

The site announced that it quickly added more than 1 million new users in the week after Election Day and became one of the fastest-growing rivals of Elon’s X Musk and similar platforms. An account site showed 23 million users on Black Friday.

If you’re interested in checking out the new space, here’s a guide to how Bluesky works:

To start

Maybe you’re not ready to commit to adding another social media account. No problem, you can still view Bluesky without registering because all posts and profiles are public.

You might get a sense of déjà vu as the look and feel of the platform is very similar to X. This shouldn’t come as a surprise as Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey was one of the first champions of Bluesky. (Dorsey is no longer involved in Bluesky, which is owned and operated by his management team as a public benefit corporation.)

If you take the plunge and create an account, you will need a username. You’ll notice that Bluesky IDs are a little different because they end with the site domain, .bsky.social, by default.

You can customize your ID to make it more memorable, by using your own website domain or purchasing a custom one through Bluesky. But it may not be something most first-time users need or want to do right away.

How to find interesting people?

Bluesky boasts of giving users “algorithmic choice” to tailor the content presented to them instead of leaving it to the whims of a centralized system.

“Our online experience doesn’t have to depend on billionaires making unilateral decisions about what we see,” he says.

This means you can follow custom feeds created by other users or create your own. If you tap #Feeds in the left menu, you’ll see default offers like Cat Pics and Gardening. My Bangers is a list of your most popular posts by likes and Catch Up displays the most popular posts on the site over the last 24 hours. You can find more by searching and hitting the Feed button.

There’s also the usual “Discover” feed of suggested posts and a timeline feed of accounts you follow.
To help new users get set up, Bluesky offers starter packs of recommended feeds and accounts to follow, which anyone can create and share. They do not appear in Bluesky’s search results but can be found in online directories.

Or someone might share one with you. After I signed up, a colleague pointed me to one for major media outlets. There are tens of thousands of starter packs, ranging from highly engaging topics like Taylor Swift to niche interests like cargo bikes or British comedians. You can follow the entire pack or scroll down to choose individual accounts.

What about the people you followed on X?

There is a browser extension tool called Sky Follower Bridge that will help you find X users who have migrated to Bluesky. But check before clicking the Follow button to make sure it’s not another user using the same display name or username.

How to publish

Ready to join the conversation? You can write messages or reply to others, but keep it short as there is a limit of 300 characters, which is 20 more than on X. You can also upload photos and videos, although videos cannot be longer than of 60 seconds. Of course, GIFs and emojis are also available.

You can still @ people by entering their username, like posts by tapping a heart icon, or use hashtags to highlight a theme. Bluesky added a menu to hashtags, so when you click on one of them you’ll get different options to see or mute posts on that topic.

And the trolls?

Bluesky’s decentralization philosophy extends to the content control options it offers.

To get started, users can choose from their settings menu whether they want to see replies, reposts, or quote posts in their feed. Specific words or tags can be disabled temporarily or forever, while accounts can be disabled or blocked individually, or in bulk by adding a moderation list to them. You can even fine-tune the level of adult content that appears in your feed.

Bluesky has a team of content moderators to monitor the site for illegal or rule-breaking material. But it’s also taking a different approach by open-sourcing its content moderation system in an effort to address issues with traditional moderation services that it says “lack transparency and user control.”

So individuals or groups can configure their own content filters, or taggers, that go beyond what Bluesky offers. These taggers can be used to categorize content or users, which can then be blocked or hidden. But they could also be used for informational or creative purposes, such as curating or verifying content.

There are taggers to identify images generated by artificial intelligence or to verify news articles. You can find lists of label makers online. After subscribing to a US political tagger, some posts in my feeds were marked “!Donald Trump” or “!Democrat politician” and hidden unless I click Show.