Climb Aboard, Newsky

In response to the election and inaugeration day waves of folks coming in to Bluesky Social from other platforms, I’m going to curate some new user resources below…

Welcome to BlueSky where we’re mentally ill, horny on main, and suspiciously low achievers for having been in the gifted and talented class. You got bullied off the cool kids table too? Climb aboard, #newsky, it’s gonna be a hell of a ride.

When I first joined Bluesky this cartoon about being in the placebo group was the viral post of the day and I think it’s always captured the substance of the place. Half the people are sitting around calmly discoursing about science and politics while the other half is butt ass naked and dancing in circles. Bluesky is an experiment in a new way of doing social media, and sometimes you’re feeling the good drugs yourself, while at other times you feel like you’re in the control group wondering what everyone else is on.

Anyways, you found the one #SocialMedia site left that’s not a nazi bar. Let’s try hard to keep it that way. You’ll find below some useful information on how to configure a new bluesky account and how to get the most out of the one that you already have.

• Why I Left Facebook and Twitter
• Using Blocklists and the Nuclear Block
• You are the Algorithm
• Custom Feeds on Bluesky
• Adult Feeds on Bluesky
• How to Enable and Label Adult Content
• How to Mute Terms
• Alternative Moderation services
• Alternative labelers for pronouns and NFL teams
• Alt Text and Accessibility

Leaving Facebook and Twitter

Bluesky is the first social network I’ve belonged to in a long time that doesn’t feel like the algorithm was designed by a cosmic horror to make you encounter your shadow like the way that Facebook’s algorithm was rigged for angry reacts for years and it’s caused the users to become trained to engage in very nasty ways.

I will admit I started looking for alternative social media almost as soon as I heard that Elon Musk was taking over Twitter. I had guessed that the site might become skewed due to his preoccupations, just as Facebook had become skewed in the PsyOp Against America in 2016 but I found myself totally unprepared for the steady drying up of everything I liked about the network in favor of literal nazi propaganda. I quit twitter shortly after the 2024 election because the site had become literal torture.

A lot of people #LeaveTwitter but bring the mentality with them here after they left X. Suprise, Suprise! Getting rid of the bad influence is a NECESSARY condition for curing #SocialMedia brain rot but it is not SUFFICIENT in itself. You still have to do the work of UNLEARNING bad habits here.

Using the Nuclear Block

The first trick to unlearning your bad habits from X is to realize that unlike other social media, the block function actually works here on Bluesky. From the beginning we have had a culture of suffocating the trolls through universal blocking; block early and often without engagement.

This is why we suffocate the trolls 🧌 here on BlueSky. Too many #LGBTQ spaces get invaded By straight people who then complain about us “forcing our views” on em. Thanks to the nuclear block they’ll never see your views at all if they’re on your blocklist.

Block Lists

When Bluesky was brand new blocklists were thought of as the best tool to fight trolls. A way of keeping MAGA, Trolls, etc. off of your feed. @Lists-to-block.bsky.social keeps a selection of decent ones and John Rademacher’s Hate blocklist is one that I’ve used personally. This isn’t as trendy as it once was since the trolls have gone back to X quite some months ago and there just isn’t a lot of maga trolling on Bluesky anymore. Fair warning that the topical blocklists like “Bareback Brotherhood” are often exclusive of many porn accounts; as is gabagooner.dad’s “Mr Steal Your Nudes” list. Blocklists have been going out of fashion lately largely because people have had trouble finding good ones because such things are frequently reshared.

One of the biggest and most reliable repositories of block lists on Bluesky is Arkangel.Network which has accumulated right wing labels from several older alternative moderation lists.

On Bluesky You are the Algorithm

After all that we’ve all been through on X and Facebook, it might feel like a relief to some that Bluesky has no algorithm at all on your following feed, simply presenting but the people you follow in a strict most-recent-first sorting with nothing omitted or inserted. That way you can be sure that there’s at least one place where there’s no one radicalizing you except you. You curate the following list and you are empowered to determine how its presented to you. Unfortunately this most-recent-first default leaves gaps in your social media experience by making it easy to drown out the quiet people or discover what’s popular in your network; but fortunately Bluesky already has an answer to this: feeds.

Custom Feeds on Bluesky

Folks were worried “I hope bsky doesn’t fall into the trap of just being twitter2 – not even ideologically, literally in terms of function. aspire for more” Said Jockout.bsky.social “like the feeds function and other stuff like it but they could def be expanded to make it more interest-hub.” but I personally think Feeds themselves already ARE a killer feature his turns us into a much more Reddit-like interests centered community already with feeds and starter packs replacing the groups/subreddits type of function.

With a large enough following list this can be sufficient in itself; but one of the most useful things you can do to improve your Bluesky experience is to customize the other feeds: Eliminate the “Discover” tab and replace it with “Quiet Posters” and “Popular with Friends” to have a better browsing experience by not losing your less frequently posting friends and being able to keep up with what’s popular in your own personal social network.

Conceptually, each feed is its own customizable way of seeing Bluesky’s content by placing some simple pre-packaged algorithm that some other user selected for you into the other columns of your app. The potential applications are endless from replacing the mentions and bookmark functions on other social networks with the 📌Pin Feed to checking on which of your posts are hits with the “My Bangers” feed. I personally recommend you add “Gift Links” and “BlueSky Radio” to customize but there’s a huge list of SFW interests from BookSky to WrestleSky to the Weed Feed.

Adult Bluesky feeds

Adult users may be flummoxed by the fact that there’s no algorithm on BlueSky, you can’t actually train it to feed your #goon but here’s a thread of my favorite adult filters…

Adult feeds that i personally created and maintain include: Bareback, Vintage Gay, NSFW 666 feed, and Gay Pigs. Each of these feeds provides a feed of content sorted by a custom algorithm which curated the content. For example Gay Pigs curates hashtags containing the word pig like #GayPig #StinkPig #CumPig #PissPig #ScatPig #PigTop #PigBottom and the like, 666 curates a list of demons and occult terms, etc.

Adult feeds that I don’t create or maintain, but which I personally use and can reccomend: FFun (fisting), Hypno Posting, Jock Xchange, Prince Albert feed, BDSMsky, Leather Lovers feed, Gay Gloryhole and the Goon Captions feed. Of course, in order to see all that porn you’re going to have to learn to enable it:

How to Allow Adult Content on Bluesky

Those of us who were Facebook users have some righteous trauma about how horribly inconsistent their community guidelines enforcement has been over the years. I personally left Facebook for good when the tightening grip of community standards made it impossible to predict which pictures I could post without getting the ban hammer as exemplified by the image below which got a month of Facebook jail despite having been downloaded off their own platform.

So it’s a relief to know that Bluesky has had a thriving adult content community since its inception and has always welcomed outright porn with open arms as long as that content is accurately labeled. Be sure to label your adult content correctly. Use Adult for nudes, Suggestive for non nude NSFW and graphic for blood and violence.

Unfortunately this particular setting is not available on iPhone or Android. So, you’ll need to go log in to the desktop version of Bluesky and click on the SETTINGS gear, and click on MODERATION and switch the content filters from their HIDE defaults to be SHOW (or WARN) as you prefer.

Unfortunately the nudity selection is functionally useless. artsy classic stuff that is literally passing 1950s censorship standards routinely gets flagged as “adult” wrongly. Fortunately there’s no consequences whatsoever to over-labeling your adult content and if you just mark all the nudes “adult” everyone is happy.

Alternative Moderation

If you think the default platform-level standards on Bluesky aren’t strict enough for your particular identy, you’re free to subscribe to a special purpose community moderation service like Asuka’s Anti-Transphobia Field, the Blacksky Moderation App that’s dedicated to “Creating a safe space for Black community building” or Skywatch.Blue (The original Alti-Alf Aktion group) for a more opinionated and stricter moderation that allows you to avoid anything from reply guys to AI Art to images of Alf’s dong.

Community moderation has a mixed and controversial history on Bluesky, with several moderation services like Taurus Shield (whose lists became part of Arkangel.network when the founder quit) coming and going over the time I’ve been there. I will admit that I’ve already had to edit this page because the disinformation expert that I had previously recommended turned out to be fake. IMO Skywatch.blue is probably your best bet for an alternative that sticks; but the beauty of custom moderation is that you’re free to try out any of them for as long as they last.

How to Mute Words

The moderation page is also where you can find the MUTE function– I will own the fact that I have a fairly extensive blocklist of terms that “I don’t want to see by accident” and then go looking for those things in safer spaces that I know to be therapeutic. If you’re triggered by words, block them with the built in function.

Please be aware that Managing triggers is more than just avoidance, it is necessary for some subjects. If you type out terms like “anorexia” or “eating disorder” instead of censoring them people can successfully block those terms entirely. This saves us from the insane content warning culture on Mastodon where The CW culture is so bad that people have to put trigger warnings on things like food or butterflies leading to Mastodon’s well deserved reputation as a “Homeowners association for Linux users”

Bluesky’s overall culture towards triggers and content warnings is much less accomodating than Mastodon’s is. You’re expected to manage your own triggers by knowing how to block and filter rather than expecting everyone else to pussy-foot around your idiosyncratic sensitivities.

Alternative Labelers

Ever wish you could make politicians wear sponsor labels like NASCAR? Bluesky has a labeler for that! Simply subscribe to the US Government Contributors to see labels of whose money is powering the politicians whose skeets you’re reading.

I promise you the political statements will always hit different after this labeler.

NFL, NBA, and HOCKEY team labelers.

NFL.sickos and its related labelers will let you label your favorite football, basketball, or hockey team on your account just like the pronouns labeler below will let you label your gender.

Pronouns Labeler

One of the other really cool things about community moderation is the existence of labelers that allow people to self-label things like their pronouns. Go to @Pronouns.diy on Bluesky and follow to get the pronoun labels on other people’s accounts

Alt Text and Accessibility

BlueSky has a tradition of accessibility. Please use #alttext to accommodate the blind and visually impaired this also improves other people’s ability to search and filter your posts. After all, how would you like it if you had to watch all the porn in your feed with your eyes closed and no descriptions.

[Actual image says “Imagine your feed from a blind man’s perspective” alt tag in browser describes the image I would otherwise have posted to draw attention. ]

Looking for a good example alt text to emulate? Look below the image for one that’s both funny and descriptive of the image besides.

Screenshot: Ad for ‘sexy Santa’ Xmas tree decoration from a company called Catesby’s. A slim, muscular white guy sits mounted atop a stack of presents, covering his virile Santa parts with a red mug held in his hand. He sports a neat white beard and ‘tache, plus a Santa hat to which attaches the little widget you string thread through to hang it from the festive bough. He’s cast from what looks like plastic, sprayed so his pecs and Santa six-pack are lightly iridescent.

Too lazy to write alt text yourself?

@coolhand.bsky.social has built an ethical AI model to label it for you at Acvtually Usefull AI.