These days there are almost too many social media platforms to choose between—and certainly too many to easily juggle all of them. Lately, though, I’ve found myself spending far more time on Bluesky thanks to a lot of refinements and features.
Bluesky Had a Rough Start
Early days Bluesky was admittedly pretty bare-bones. The platform—which is different from Twitter despite initial appearances—was initially invite-only, with users earning invite codes over time that could then be shared with friends, family, or anyone else they wanted to pass them along to, really.
This resulted in a pretty small user base that grew very slowly (not necessarily a bad thing for a brand-new platform) and felt relatively empty. But more than that, a lot of features people had come to expect in their social media simply weren’t there. Direct messages weren’t supported, users couldn’t share movie clips that would play in the timeline, and animated GIFs didn’t work—it was definitely a functional downgrade from other preexisting services. It didn’t even have an official smartphone app for a while.
However, that was back around 2022 to 2023. Bluesky has since opened publicly in early 2024 (dropping the need for invite codes), and most of those core features that were missing are now fully implemented, along with five standouts that have turned the temporary escape from what used to be Twitter into my social media platform of choice.
1 Better Feed Curation
Lots of social media sites offer a multitude of feeds you can follow or curate, but none of the ones I’ve used are as malleable and extensive as Bluesky. Sure, you can start with the relatively typical options like “Following” and “Popular With Friends,” and you can manually mute specific words and hashtags, but Bluesky offers an alternate approach.
If you don’t want to see all the replies the people you follow make, their resposts, or their quoted posts, you can simply toggle any (or all) of them off. Thread settings can be adjusted to prioritize accounts you follow, sorted by Oldest, Newest, Most Liked, or even Random.
Video control (now that video is supported) is also fairly nuanced, letting you decide what—if any—media players are allowed to appear in your feed. Don’t want to see YouTube Shorts, Flickr photos, or Spotify tracks? Just turn them off! There’s even a setting for “Non-sexual Nudity” that can be set to Show, Warn, or automatically Hide images that are tagged as such.
A wide variety of optional feeds you can search through (from Art and Birds to Game Development and Writing), or create yourself, are also available. And once you save some of them, they can be pinned to the Homepage where you can tab through them whenever you like.
2 Blocking Actually Works
Being able to block accounts I don’t want to interact with is extremely important to me, and thus far Bluesky does it best by a mile.
Elsewhere, blocked accounts won’t show up in your feed, and you can’t view your posts, but past interactions remain. On Bluesky, if an account responds to one of your posts and you block them, they’re gone. Those replies won’t just be blocked from your view but from anyone else who might view the thread. Like dousing a fire by sucking all the oxygen out of the space around it. It’s like a “Thanos snap.”
Similarly, Bluesky offers tools to deal with quoted posts as well (a common form of social media harassment). If an account quotes and reposts something you’ve posted, you can manually detach your own post from the quote. This doesn’t impact screenshots, unfortunately, but it does curtail direct quoting, at least.
3 Useful Privacy Options
Much like with blocking, privacy is also a big deal for me. Allowing any random stranger on the internet to send a direct message might be fine with some folks (no judgment), but it’s decidedly not fine with me. Fortunately, Bluesky does have the expected options to shut off DMs entirely, allow everyone to get in touch, or limit potential contacts to only the accounts you follow.
It goes further than that, of course. There’s also a setting that can be toggled on to limit whether or not the Bluesky website or app will show your profile or posts to users who aren’t logged in. It doesn’t necessarily apply to other apps and websites, but it’s something that at least feels like it may cut back on possible automated bot nonsense or data scraping.
4 Lists are Amazing
For as much as I value Bluesky’s blocking functionality, I absolutely adore lists. Unlike Feeds, which help you curate accounts to follow, Lists make it effortlessly easy to mass-mute or block them.
You can make and share your own or subscribe to ones made by other users. Then, once you subscribe to a list, you can choose to either mute or block all of the accounts that are on it. Dozens, if not hundreds, of possible bots, spammers, scammers, image scrapers, and other undesirable elements can be dealt with in moments.
The best part is that Lists update pretty much immediately. This means that, for example, if you subscribe to and block a list full of known scam accounts, every time a new account is added, it’ll automatically be blocked for you.
5 No Suppressed Keywords
Solid proof tends to be lacking when it comes to accusations of social media platforms filtering certain words and phrases. But if there’s a list of words you can’t say on TikTok, it’s not a stretch to think that other services would do the same.
In particular, users have accused some sites of throttling or otherwise intentionally reducing the visibility of posts containing certain kinds of content that don’t actually go against the Terms of Service. Including Patreon links, TikTok, YouTube videos, OnlyFans pages, and more.
By contrast, Bluesky posts about those same subjects or sharing those same links don’t appear to have any tougher of a time reaching users’ feeds. Which means you won’t have to create a regular post that avoids any particular words or links (so that it’s shared regularly), then reply to that same post with the actual links and whatnot.
Users can, of course, mute specific words and hashtags that may overlap with this particular concept for their individual feeds, but Bluesky as a platform doesn’t seem to be repressing Patreon posts and the like.
Whether or not Bluesky is “the best” modern social media platform is a subjective matter, and it currently doesn’t share the same level of reach as many others that have been around for much longer. But as someone who’s gotten quite tired of the state of social media throughout the 2020s, it’s undeniably my favorite.
