Bluesky (Bsky) is a microblogging, social networking service that began as an initiative,¹⁾²⁾ appointed to Jay Graber,³⁾ which had launched its invite-only beta on April 12, 2023⁴⁾ and eventually went public on February 6, 2024.⁵⁾⁶⁾ It plans to decentralize with the AT Protocol.⁷⁾

The service revolves around short-form posts, which users can attach media and content warnings to, and has a significant focus on feeds and filtering options. As usual, users can like posts, share posts, leave a reply if willing, and follow or unfollow accounts to change up their timeline. Since the website is relatively new, more features (e.g. trending topics)⁸⁾ and a less intrusive subscription service⁹⁾¹⁰⁾ are planned.

Once the platform went public on February 6, 2024,¹¹⁾ it had a handful of Japanese users willing to try it out. Then on April 12, 2024, the Brazilian president Lula joins¹²⁾¹³⁾ since Twitter didn't want to comply with a court order to remove accounts tied to a failed far-right coup, so you had a stream of Brazilian users which surged in the month-long Twitter block from August 31, 2024 to October 8, 2024.

Around October 16, 2024, it was announced that Twitter would let blocked users see accounts they've been blocked from,¹⁴⁾¹⁵⁾ effective on November 4, 2024,¹⁶⁾ and pushed a privacy policy update that allows third parties to train AI models on its data, effective on November 15, 2024.¹⁷⁾ This trickled¹⁸⁾¹⁹⁾ into a boom as the change arrived,²⁰⁾ while the media undermines it by misattributing it to Statesian politics.^21)22)23)

• Go to Moderation, toggle the 'content filters' if you would like to see adult content.
  • Go to Bluesky Moderation Service, review the list of labels and feel free to toggle the ones you don't mind being exposed to. This includes 'Sexually Suggestive (Cartoon)', by the way.
• Go to Language Settings, clear out 'content languages' if you want to see posts in any language.
• If you're uploading adult content, please be aware that a 'label' button will appear once you've uploaded the file(s) and you have to click it to attach a content warning. Otherwise, users can report it for 'unwanted sexual content', then the Bluesky Moderation Service may slap a label onto it.
• You will not get any notifications for users interacting with posts you share (reposts) on your account, only for the posts that you make. Please keep this in mind if you manage a repost-heavy account.
• Occasionally, the servers will go down and that will result in an 'Invalid Handle' error. Just wait it out, unless you're trying to troubleshoot domain handles which is an entirely different thing.²⁴⁾

• The company, Bluesky PBC, is a public benefit corporation²⁵⁾ that relies on seed fundraising.²⁶⁾²⁷⁾
• Despite their origins,²⁸⁾²⁹⁾ Twitter only held a vague 'advisory seat' with Bluesky since they chose to entrust the up-and-coming initiative to then-cryptocurrency junior developer Jay Graber.³⁰⁾
  • Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey briefly joined Bluesky,³¹⁾ but quickly left³²⁾ as the project didn't fit into his idea of 'decentralization' and loves praising Nostr for capturing his weird vision.³³⁾
• Before the platform went public, it underwent a few changes in the months leading up to it:
  • Every account was under “bsky.social” until November 2023, which is when they had decided to migrate to personal data servers whose hosts were formatted as “*.*.host.bsky.network”.³⁴⁾
  • The platform used a literal blue sky as its temporary logo until they finally announced a new logo on December 21, 2023, which turns out to be a minimalist, blue social butterfly.³⁵⁾
• I made a Bluesky account during the invite-only beta on October 18, 2023, user #1586918.
• Every user's block list is technically public³⁶⁾ as it was meant to be part of a safety and privacy feature where blocks are meant to be respected across the network.³⁷⁾ I'll let your morals be the judge.
• In the Japanese language, Bluesky is “BurūSukai” (ブルースカイ) and has the clipped compound of “BuruSuka” (ブルスカ), but it has also been rendered as “Aosora” (青空, lit. “blue sky”).

• Fediverse (Mastodon, Misskey, etc.)

• Bluesky - The front page of Bluesky.
  • @bsky.app, @atproto.com on Bluesky - General updates and the developer team.
  • Bluesky Debug - The server status page. You can find all the host names here.
• Community Showcase - A collection of third-party clients and projects.
• Clearsky - A tool for finding out which Bluesky users blocks who. Just don't drown in the tea.
  • @clearsky.app on Bluesky
• Firesky - This visualizes an endless stream of Bluesky posts.