I told myself I would only post on Mondays, but I also told myself I would put together a brief intro to Bluesky for a friend. Images are from the Android app, the desktop version is mostly the same.
SO. After you’ve registered your Bluesky account and logged in for the first time, you’re met with a Discover feed and a Following feed. Discover will be a curated feed as far as I know, with popular posts from the community. Do you want to keep it around? Up to you. But we’re going to get rid of it for now.
Hit that hashtag in the upper right corner, and we’re looking at different available feeds. Because Bluesky has no real algorithm, members of the community will make feeds that users can access and follow to meet people and view content more related to their interests. I’ve made a new account for this, so I’m going to add some craft and crochet related feeds.
On this page, you can see your current feeds: Discover and Following. Tap on Discover and it will open into the actual feed, where you can choose to unpin it (remove it from your home screen) or remove it completely by hitting those three dots in the top right.
Now that Discover is out of the way, we can go back to the page with all the feeds listed, and search for new feeds with Discover New Feeds. I’m interested in crafts, so let’s check out their craft options in the search bar.
The first option is Craftiverse, which is pretty popular and followed by 358 users. A user doesn’t need to be following a feed to appear in it. I’m going to hit the + to the right of the feed title and add it to my feeds. I’m also going to scroll through a bit to add more feeds (I also searched for crochet and added a few feeds there).
So now that I have a few feeds, I might want to reorganize their order so that I can swipe a few less times on my front page to look at what I want. Hit the edit button at the top and you can view and adjust feed order.
Feeds function by finding key words in posts. The creator sets those key words, and some feeds will state the directions to be featured in the feed. Some feeds are curated. Some feeds will feature content based on a combination of views, keywords, hashtags, and emoji. The crochet feed below works based on keywords and emoji – you have to use crochet-related language in the post or alt text AND include the yarn emoji (🧶) for the feed to pick up posts.
Once you’ve added feeds, you can return to the main page and swipe through the feeds you’ve selected to view their content.
One thing to note on Bluesky (if you’re not already doing it): alt text is huge. Many people will refuse to engage with content lacking alt text. There is an option in settings to remind you to use alt text in every photo post if it’s something you’re interested in.
I may update this later to link some of my recommended feeds, but for now, I hope this was a helpful look at Bluesky.
