Bluesky is continuing to blow up. The Twitter-like service and alternative to Elon Musk’s X, has now surpassed 16 million users after seeing rapid growth in the days following the U.S. presidential election. While many are leaving X over the service’s increasing right-wing leanings and Musk’s campaigning for Trump, others are unhappy with other changes Musk has made — like how blocks work or how their content on X will be used to train AI.

Despite those issues, X is still the leader in the space in terms of monthly active users, while Threads is quickly catching up. Meta announced on Thursday that Threads grew by over 15 million users in November alone, for instance. Earlier this month, Threads said it had 275 million monthly active users.

But if Threads is the Big Tech threat to X, Bluesky is the indie effort. It’s already bigger than Mastodon, another decentralized X competitor that now has 7.6 million users, less than a million of whom log in monthly. (The wider fediverse built on the ActivityPub protocol, however, has over 10.8 million users.)

If Bluesky’s growth continues, it may begin to affect X. According to analytics provider Similarweb, X has now seen the largest number of account deactivations since Musk acquired the company, previously known as Twitter.

The firm based its findings on the number of visits to the confirmation webpage that appears after users indicate they want to deactivate their X accounts.

On Wednesday, X saw more than 115,000 U.S. web visitors deactivating their accounts, Similarweb found — more than any other day during Musk’s tenure. Previously, the peak had been around 65,000 on December 15, 2023, after Musk had restored the account of conspiracy theorist Alex Jones. (The tracking firm is not able to track the number of X users who deactivate their accounts via the X mobile app, indicating the true number is much higher.)

A Twitter clone? Not exactly!

While on the surface Bluesky looks and feels a lot like X, its underpinnings are quite different.

The app offers a familiar feature set, including the ability to create and share short text posts that can include accompanying media like photos, videos, GIFs, and links. As on X, these posts can be liked, reposted, replied to, or shared via direct messages. There are also standard blocking and reporting tools, plus tools for muting threads, words, and hashtags. Users can send private messages to others, too, and create lists.

But Bluesky’s promise is that of a social network that puts its users in control. Designed to be decentralized, the company has begun offering federation, meaning anyone can host their own data. The idea is similar to the decentralized X alternative Mastodon but involves a different protocol (the AT protocol instead of ActivityPub). Unlike Mastodon, server choice on Bluesky won’t affect the content you see, the company explains.

How to sign up for Bluesky

To sign up for Bluesky, you can create a new account via the web at bsky.app or download the mobile app for iOS or Android. After creating your username and password and providing some basic information like your email and birthday, you can begin to interact with other Bluesky users and follow feeds of interest to find your community.

By default, Bluesky users will create usernames that end in Bluesky’s domain, bsky.social. But the AT Protocol powering the service lets you use your own domain name as your handle, if you choose.

The company is also offering a site that helps you find a custom domain to use for your handle, which helps generate revenue for its otherwise free social networking platform.

Bluesky’s third-party apps

If you want to venture beyond the official Bluesky app, third-party apps are available like Skeets, Graysky, and those that also cross-post to other networks, like Croissant, Openvibe, and SoraSNS.

If you prefer a more TweetDeck (X Pro) or column-based type of interface, the web app Skyfeed is an option.

How to find your favorite Bluesky feeds

Users on Bluesky also have more control over their individual feeds and algorithms than on X and other X competitors, like Meta’s Threads. While Bluesky operates its own app and provides its own feeds, users can customize their experience further based on the feeds and accounts they follow.

Anyone can build their own feed, and there are over 40,000 to now choose from. That means if you don’t like the feeds Bluesky offers, you can search for others and follow them, or even build your own.

You can find new feeds to follow by clicking on the “Feeds” link in the left-side navigation bar on the web or by tapping the hashtag (#) button on the top-right of the Bluesky mobile app’s home screen. Here, you’ll find the feeds you already follow, like Bluesky’s Discover feed, and can search for or scroll through other popular feeds you might like to add.

Some popular feeds include those that let you track your Mutuals or the posts Popular With Friends; those focused on a topic, like Science, News, Art, or even something silly like Cat Pics; and those that help you find a particular community. In the latter group, there’s Blacksky, which is working to bring the Black Twitter community to Bluesky, plus groups for certain geographies, like Brazil and Japan, and many more.

Customize your Bluesky following feed

Another fun feature to explore in Bluesky’s Settings is the set of options you can configure around the content you see in your Following Feed.

Here, you can decide if you want to see Replies, Reposts, Quote Posts, and other content in your feed by toggling these options on or off.

Using “Starter Packs”

Another area where Bluesky shines is how it approaches the so-called “cold start” problem — that is, it addresses the issue where new users on a service don’t know who to follow. Instead of leaving it up to the users, Meta’s Threads jumpstarted its X competitor by tying its user accounts to Instagram, allowing it to quickly build Threads’ user base off of an Instagram user’s existing social graph.

Bluesky lacks that built-in advantage so it instead came up with a tool for creating “Starter Packs.”

These packs allow anyone to create a list of interesting accounts they recommend, similar to X’s Suggested User List. Other people can follow accounts individually from the Starter Pack or can follow everyone on the Starter Pack with a click.

For example, there’s a TechCrunch Starter Pack here.

A third-party site, Bluesky Directory, has also begun to organize the Starter Packs that others have created and track their adoption. Today, there are packs focused on politics, journalists, developers, technologists, academia, sports, AI, health, and various other fan groups and communities. As Bluesky grows, more will become available.

Finding your X friends on Bluesky

While there’s no official feature or service that allows you to easily import your followers or following from X, there are some third-party services that can help.

At present, the best option seems to be Sky Follower Bridge, a Chrome web extension that helps you identify, find, and follow the same users on Bluesky that you previously followed on X, or those who followed you.

After installing the extension, you’ll head to your X Following or Followers page, then click the toolbar icon to launch the Sky Follower Bridge. You’ll need to then authenticate with Bluesky by entering your username and password.

However, instead of using your main password, you can and should create an individual “app password” to log in. This can be done from Bluesky’s Settings (under Advanced).

Once authenticated, you’ll press the “Find Bluesky Users” button. The service will scan the page and detect those X users who are on Bluesky, something it determines by comparing factors like the display name, handle, and more, or by looking for their Bluesky handle in their X profile’s description.

When the utility first launched, you had to follow users one by one, but a more recent version of Sky Follower Bridge offers a handy “Follow All” button that saves a ton of time. The developer warns you that you may end up with false positives, though, because this sort of detection is not perfect.

Sky Follower Bridge is free to use and donation-supported.

It can also be used on your List members pages and block lists on X, we should note.

What to know about Bluesky moderation

In addition, Bluesky introduces a different take on moderation. Moderation on X and Threads is centralized, meaning the company makes the final decision. But Bluesky lets users tackle moderation as they see fit. They can mute and block users, create or subscribe to mute and block lists, subscribe to independent moderation services, or even self-host their own data on their own server.

Mute and block lists

While X is dialing back the power of the block, Bluesky users can block individual users or subscribe to mute or block lists.

There’s not a central directory of block or mute lists, but lists a user has created are available on their profile under the Lists tab. From there, you can subscribe to any list that looks like a fit for you. This is also where you’ll find any customer feeds the user has built. If something is a mute/block list, it won’t offer the “Pin to Home” button that lets you set the list as one of your default feeds.

To find block lists of bad actors and others, a search for “block list” will usually turn up some posts from people who are sharing their favorites. The influx of former X users is currently making block lists of far-right and MAGA groups more popular for newcomers trying to escape Musk’s politics.

Independent moderation services

Developers and communities can also choose to create their own independent moderation services using Bluesky’s tooling called Ozone. Once these alternative moderation services are built, other Bluesky users can subscribe to them to extend moderation beyond Bluesky’s own set of options.

To seed the ecosystem, Bluesky funded a few efforts focused on building independent labeling (moderation) services. Users can subscribe to these services’ filters by visiting the labelers’ page and clicking the subscribe button.

For instance, the XBlock Screenshot Labeller will let you hide screenshots — including those from X if you really want a clean break from Musk’s app. News Detective is another labeler that aims to fact-check Bluesky posts through a community of volunteers. (Users who subscribe will be able to see explanations and sources, and be able to request checks on questionable posts.)

A larger list of labelers is here.

Self-hosting or running your own Bluesky community

Most users become members of Bluesky’s community and server for now, which means Bluesky’s own Community Guidelines apply. However, the ability to self-host became available earlier in 2024, for developers and other technical users who’d prefer to run their own community and host their own data. To do so, you’ll need to be comfortable running a Personal Data Server (PDS) in a federated environment. (Digital Ocean and Vultr are popular cloud providers for those who want to self-host.)

You don’t have to get involved with self-hosting, building moderation services, or blocklists, if you’re not technically inclined. You can simply engage with the tools built by the community or the Bluesky team, which are found in the Bluesky app’s Settings. (Go to Settings > Moderation > Bluesky Moderation Service to configure your options.)

Getting engagement on Bluesky

Gaining traction on Bluesky is not much different from other social networks, though, so far, the service’s vibe tends to favor more regular posters — or even sh**posters, who tend to be more exuberant, carefree, and uncensored.

Adult content is also permitted but can be labeled as such. Meanwhile, users get to control what level of NSFW content they’ll see by configuring their choices in the moderation settings. Here, they can also set how Bluesky should handle other types of sensitive or harmful content, like misinformation, scams, spam, extremist content, threats, intolerance, rude content, self-harm, impersonation, and much more, allowing people to build a feed they feel comfortable with. Plus, you can choose to “Hide,” “Warn,” or turn a filter off entirely, depending on your preferences.

This solution addresses an issue that has long plagued X: Everyone has different thresholds when it comes to the type of content they want to see in their feeds. Some prefer the uncensored firehose, however horrific it may be at times, while some want the opposite: heavy-handed moderation. Others want more control based over what type of content is displayed, hidden, or blocked.

After finding your community and preferred vibe, you should stop lurking and begin to interact. To generate engagement, Bluesky CEO Jay Graber suggests the following: “Post into some relevant feeds, comment on other people’s posts, find mutuals in feeds or elsewhere, use hashtags.”

Unlike Threads, which redesigned the way hashtags work (they’re links but don’t include the hash symbol itself), Bluesky embraced the traditional hashtag. That means you can search for topics, interests, or communities much like you do on X, like #Neuroscience or #BlackSky or #TechNews or anything else.

No trends!

Bluesky does not yet have a trending topics page, like X and Threads, which may make it feel a bit less like a real-time information hub. But it doesn’t make it hard to escape its algorithmic feeds, if you prefer something else — like a feed that’s centered around political news or updates from media publishers, for instance. And while Threads is no longer recommending political content to users — an editorial decision many disagree with, including creators — Bluesky leaves that choice up to each end user.

To stay in touch with what’s new, users can also follow accounts or (unofficial) feeds focused on what’s trending, like Now Breezing, a bot that updates “on the :10s”, or Catch Up, which highlights the most popular posts from the last 24 hours.