THE SHORT PITCH
Twitter is a cesspool and I’m only posting there now to tell people to find me elsewhere. That elsewhere? Bluesky, a new social media site that’s become the best place on the internet for me… and maybe you too?
If you’re not already on social media, congratulations — you should probably stay off! But if you liked the feel and functionality of old Twitter but want an alternative, Bluesky should feel right at home, and there are loads of interesting folks to follow. Below are a few starter packs of great accounts. Just click on a starter pack, make a Bluesky account, follow some folks, come back and follow more folks on more starter packs, and see if you like it! And then please feel free to read on for a more detailed explanation of why Bluesky feels so good to me right now as an independent creator and a human being in 2024.
People Who Get It – folks I follow with solid info, good vibes, or practical thoughts of how to help in troubling times.
Awesome Artists/Creators I’ve Worked With
150 active comics creators!
Another bunch of active comics creators!
150 news outlets / journalists / explainers!
A bunch of local journalists / news sources!
A bunch of AANHPI writers, artists, and creators!
Some analog film photography folks!
Some sharp folks who frequently post practical suggestions of things we can do to make the world better in 2024!
THE LONGER EXPLANATION
You might not be reading this post or even know who I am if not for Twitter. I’ve built much of my career as an independent creator using the internet – from plain old email lists back in the day to making my own website to blogging and embracing social media — and for years, Twitter played a huge role in helping me reach new readers as a comic book writer.
But Twitter is now run by someone who regularly platforms bigotry and transphobia and shares unconscionable lies and conspiracies. The site is also becoming less safe all the time, allowing harassers and even literal neo Nazis to post and, most recently, promising to deprecate its block function. So almost exactly a year ago, I deleted most of my posts and stopped using the site for anything other than pointing folks to other, better sites to use instead.
The best of those alternative sites? I don’t generally love cheerleading for corporations and realize that any product can fall apart at any time. But after a couple of years of trying almost everything, I’m pretty sure the best Twitter alternative for me is Bluesky — by a long shot.
Bluesky is a social media site that on the surface feels pretty much like old Twitter. You follow people, people follow you, and everyone can make short posts of up to 300 characters, which can include images and video. You can like, reshare, and comment on other people’s posts, and vice versa. Your default feed on Bluesky is chronological and features the folks you actually follow instead of a bunch of random people that an algorithm pushes on you, which is absolutely fantastic for an independent creator like me whose posts will often never reach people who have chosen to follow me on Instagram or similar sites.
So far, so great! But a number of other features and services make Bluesky really shine.
The Nuclear Block
Bluesky’s single most valuable feature in terms of safety and community may be its so-called “nuclear block.” When you block someone on Bluesky, all of their posts disappear from your feed and posts and all of your posts disappear from their feed and posts. So if they’ve replied to you and vice versa, once one of you has blocked the other, those arguments disappear from your respective feeds.
That means that trolls and bigots who literally make money on other sites from ginning up fights for public entertainment get stripped of any incentive or ability to monetize their hate on Bluesky. Their posts just… vanish! They can’t hijack threads so they don’t get eyeballs and thus don’t get new followers and clicks on their merch links or whatever else they’re pushing. And they have vastly less power to create online mobs to harass people.
The one drawback to Bluesky’s block feature is that a user’s block lists aren’t private. Through third party apps, you can find lists of everyone anyone’s blocked. That probably won’t bother most people, but it’s a potential issue for those who worry that public block lists could be used perniciously by persistent stalkers or harassers.
Other User-Controlled Moderation Settings
Individual users on Bluesky can also set individual posts to disable quote posting and limit replies and can detach a post from someone else’s quote post, all of which can help decrease harassment. You can also temporarily deactivate your account, which removes it from use and public view but allows you to reactivate it later.
The only missing function is the ability to lock your account or go private as you can on Twitter, which would let you hide your account from non-followers while still posting to folks who already follow you.
Solid Site-Wide Moderation
After a few hitches over the last year and a half, Bluesky’s administrators seem to be doing a pretty solid job of site-wide moderation — never perfect, but vastly better than Twitter’s apparently non-existent efforts.
Any Bluesky user can report suspect accounts to the administrators, and I often see bigots, scammers, and spammers disappear within one to three days of reporting them, a level of responsiveness I almost never saw on Twitter, even before Musk took over.
Bluesky also has a labeling system that tags accounts and individual posts with warnings. The tags include a controversial “Rude” designation, which I’ve worried could be used to hide posts that rightfully criticize politicians or the New York Times, for example. But so far I haven’t seen that happen. I’m keeping an eye open for it, though!
Moderation Lists
Bluesky also allows individual users to create public moderation lists that other users can subscribe to. So if a friend has identified a bunch of bigots or trolls, you can subscribe to their list and automatically block whomever they suggest. That can be great, but it can also lead to conflicts and moderator burnout. Normal people really aren’t generally equipped to handle the incredible pressures of running moderation for a social media site, so it takes a special person to maintain a popular moderation list. Since they’re public, moderation lists could also potentially be used to increase instead of decrease harassment.
So I appreciate the existence of moderation lists, but I use them with due diligence and caution.
Starter Packs, Feeds, and User Lists
A starter pack is just a list of accounts that you like that you can share with other people. This post began with a big list of starter packs I’ve created. Folks can click on a starter pack and follow accounts individually or all at once. Brand new folks can click on a starter pack link on a different site and open a new Bluesky account to follow the folks in that starter pack. It’s a great way to share the love with accounts you like and build community.
A feed is a slightly different creature. Any user can create a feed that includes the posts of certain users or posts that include keywords or hashtags or otherwise match certain criteria. When you “pin” a feed, a new tab shows up on your front page that shows all the posts in that feed. You could think of a feed as a custom algorithm — a way to make sure certain kinds of posts pop up without having to follow specific accounts or search for specific terms. Creating a feed is a bit more complex than making a starter pack. Despite my old school mastery of HTML 2.0 (lol), I don’t have the coding knowledge necessary to use the Bluesky feed generator, so I used a simpler third party app called SkyFeed to make the #DidThisToday feed.
Finally, a user list is a list of accounts that you can share and pin to your home page. Pinning a list to your home page creates another tab that shows all the posts from users on that list, so as I undertand it, a list basically functions like a feed. Lists can also be added to feeds (or starter packs!).
These different options can admittedly get a bit confusing. I personally find starter packs to be the most intuitive, simple, and easy-to-use of all of these features — just sharing a bunch of accounts that other people can follow! But lots of folks get a lot out of lists and feeds, which is great.
Community and Ethos
From the beginning, Bluesky had a lot of users who were LGBTQIA+ and a lot of users who were very wary of Twitter’s collapsing moderation — two heavily overlapping groups, no doubt. One result is that the users of the site established an ethos early on of immediately blocking and reporting harassers and bigots. Combined with the nuclear block, that’s has resulted in less arguing with (and thereby less spreading the reach of) bigots, which is fantastic.
But Bluesky has gotten considerable criticism at key points over the last year and a half for failures in handling anti-Black racism in particular. Rudy Fraser wrote extensively about some of these issues along with a deep dive into his goals and challenges as the creator of the now legendary Blacksky feed in a great post a year ago.
As an Asian American creator, I’ve noticed fewer accounts and posts by AANHPI folks than I saw on Twitter in its heyday, which is one of the reasons I launched the AANHPI Creator Rollcall starter pack.
I think Bluesky’s constantly getting better as its userbase grows and more diverse communities expand, but it’s still a work in progress.
Bluesky has also been criticized as a left wing “echo chamber” by folks I won’t link to here. I’m not particularly bothered by these critiques since they often seem to boil down to thinking that a social media site should allow transphobes and racists to post freely. That’s not what I’m looking for.
Possible Future Issues
It’s a bit telling that I’m around 1500 words into this post before even mentioning the AT Protocol, the big technical dream that the site was created to showcase. As I understand it, the AT Protocol, like the ActivityPub protocol that Mastodon is part of, is designed to federate social media, meaning that anyone can use the underlying code driving Bluesky to create their own social media server that existing Bluesky users could interact with or migrate to, if they desire.
That’s a lot to wrap your head around, isn’t it?
But from years on Mastodon, I internalized this kind of “federation” as a positive thing — it means that your following and follower lists are yours and you can take them with you to another site if, for example, your current site gets bought out and ruined by a billionaire. And I still value that very much conceptually.
But in practice, I’m realizing that what the vast majority of users mostly want on a day-to-day basis is a social media site with good functionality and great moderation where we can post without getting dogpiled by bigots and scammers. That simple ask requires enormous resources to maintain quality moderation and safety, which (again, from years of Mastodon experience) I’m not sure most everyday people can ever deliver without burning out or destroying themselves.
I gather this was a journey the Bluesky developers themselves had to take in public for the last year and a half. My impression is that they launched the site mostly as a demo for what folks could do with the AT Protocol. But instead of creating other sites using the AT Protocol, users really just wanted the Bluesky site itself to be a great place to post. And to their great credit, the developers have been very responsive, adding feature after feature and improving trust and safety to get it to this point.
But in the long term, I don’t know how Bluesky will make its money back. I’m not privy to their plans and it’s not really my business. But I hope that if and when they need to monetize more aggressively, they’ll do so in ways that don’t undermine the remarkable features they’ve already implemented.
COMPARISONS TO OTHER SITES IN A NUTSHELL
Bluesky vs. Twitter
Twitter still presumably has “reach,” with many more users than Bluesky. But even when Bluesky was in its infancy, I’d regularly get more interaction from a couple thousand Bluesky followers than 50,000 Twitter followers. I absolutely understand that many folks, particularly folks from marginalized communities, have friends and networks that only exist on Twitter, and I will never judge them. But aside from that, the algorithm on Twitter is trash and I don’t think “reach” feels like a good excuse.
Bluesky vs. Instagram
Instagram’s algorithms notoriously limit the reach of your posts through mysterious and ever-changing formulas so you never know if anything you throw up there will be seen by the people who chose to follow you. Instagram also notoriously doesn’t allow active links in posts, so folks have to resort to the sad “link in bio” tag.
Bluesky has no overall algorithm and delivers all posts in chronological order, so the people who follow you will get your posts in their feed, and Bluesky allows live links so you can drive traffic to whatever you want.
Instagram also crops images so that the top and bottom of vertical comic book pages and 35mm photographs get chopped off.
Bluesky presents vertical comic book pages and 35mm photos fully, without cropping. (Only REALLY disproportionately vertical images get cropped, and you can still click a button to see those images fully if you want.)
Bluesky vs. Mastodon
Mastodon has many of the positive features of Bluesky, but the interface remains kludgy. The fact that folks are spread over different servers on Mastodon is a feature, but it’s also a bug that can make it hard to follow or see the posts of folks on other servers. Mastodon also does not natively allow or display quote posts, which decreases conversation, and its direct messages have a quirk that sends the message to anyone who’s mentioned in it, which can result in messaging folks when you’re just talking about them behind their back (which no one reading this would ever do, of course, lol).
Bluesky vs. Threads
Threads is constructed like a tiny blogging site, with main posts and comment sections. It’s also driven by a bad algorithm and has a bonus system that pays people for viral posts, so every time I visit there, I see annoying “story time” posts by folks trying to gin up engagement. For me, it’s a feel-bad site that discourages actual conversation in favor of broadcasting. Bluesky feels a place real people are just posting their weird (complimentary) thoughts, which is much more my speed.
CONCLUSION
I hate what Twitter’s become. I dislike what Instagram and Threads are. I like Mastodon but feel limited by the interface. So…
…Bluesky still has work to do, but it’s by far my preferred social media site right now, and if you’re still on social media and everything I’ve written here hasn’t scared you off, I hope you’ll give it a shot!
