How to Use Bluesky: A Beginner’s Guide

KELVIN CHAN, business writer

LONDON (AP) — Looking for a new social media platform because X, Threads and Mastodon just don’t support it? You can try Bluesky.

People seeking to escape the chaos, noise and political bravado of the US election are noticing a different mood on social media platform Bluesky, where the atmosphere seems welcoming and there are noticeably fewer trolls.

The site announced that it quickly added more than a million new users in the week after Election Day, becoming one of the fastest-growing competitors to Elon Musk’s X and similar platforms.

If you’re interested in checking out the new space, here’s a guide to how Bluesky works:

Starting

You may not be ready to add another social media account. No problem – you can still browse Bluesky without registering as all posts and profiles are public.

You might get a sense of déjà vu because the platform’s look and feel is very similar to X. This shouldn’t come as a surprise since Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey was one of Bluesky’s early champions. (Dorsey is no longer affiliated with Bluesky, which is owned and operated by its executive team as a public benefit corporation.)

If you take the plunge and create an account, you’ll need a username. You’ll notice that Bluesky’s handles are slightly different, as by default they end in the site domain .bsky.social.

You can personalize your handle to make it more memorable by using your own website domain or purchasing your own through Bluesky. But this may not be what most first-time users need or want to do right now.

How to find interesting people?

Bluesky boasts that it gives users “algorithmic choice” to tailor the content they see, rather than leaving it up to a centralized system.

“Our online experience should not be dependent on billionaires unilaterally making decisions about what we see,” it says.