How To Grow on Bluesky & Why It's Worth A Shot!

why?

Three years on from Elon's 2022 purchase of Twitter and there are many many Twitter alternatives out there. Threads, Mastodon, Nostr, Farcaster, and last but (definitely) not least, Bluesky! I'm not gonna dive deep into each social network, but this post is focusing on Bluesky.

I've told my Twitter moots (mutuals!) to start posting on Bluesky many many times, yet I notice they start posting and get little engagement. This instantly (and rightly so) makes them think of it as a "dead" site. The issue is exactly what I said, they just start posting their content on Bluesky. It's a one-way "relationship" with the platform. You can't just blindly crosspost and hope for the best, there are some ways to go about it!

what's wrong with x?

I'm going to compare and contrast X + Bluesky here:

x:

Centralised control (Elon makes all decisions from head down)

Proprietary, black-box algorithm

Limited data portability (can only export raw Tweets as .json)

Ad-driven and tracks users

Limited user control, even more so in recent years

bluesky:

Built on an open protocol

Choice of algorithms, or make your own!

Full data portability, with the ability to self host your own account

More user choice with moderation

Own your content

In the above screenshot, you can see that I self-host my own Personal Data Server for my account. This gives me total control over my content!

Now that you can see why Bluesky is actually different to X, I want to move on to the actual point of this post, how to grow. I'm going to split this into little subtopics below.

engage with other users

This may sound extremely basic, but you are going to want to reply to other users' posts as well. You can't just post out there, because how are people going to follow you? I'd recommend using the custom feeds filter and searching for topics you are interested in. This will help you find some feeds with (hopefully) relevant posts. Starter packs are also a great way to start! Find someone you know on Bluesky, and check their profile for any starter packs.

If you find one that interests you, you can press the "Follow All" button, and pin the feeds in there. This will help you start off with less manual labour involved. For those of you that already know me, you can check out my Tech Twitter pack (perhaps badly named, it's just the area of Twitter I'm in + accounts I think they will like.)

To prove this is largely what I did, I ran a script that counted how many of my posts were posts vs replies (ignore the Reposts in this, it's a little broken):

25,386 replies! That's insane! ~73.6% of my "Posts" are actually replies.

You can check yours too with this code

alt text

Many people have heard of alt text, but may not realise how it works, so here's Google's definition:

What's the use? Well, firstly it helps people with low vision understand what an attached image/video actually is, can help provide context of an image, but also (key for this post's topic) comes up in search results. For example, if I post an image of a cat, and write alt text of An image of a grey cat lying on a sofa outside, anyone searching grey cat on sofa would see my post in search results! This is great! No matter what the post content is, the search results also check for alt text in images (unsure about video.)

You can add alt text to an image on Bluesky by clicking on it once it's on the compose box:

You can write a short alt text description yourself, or if you are lazy, you can use some type of LLM to write it for you (Claude has been pretty good at this for me!)

hashtags

This is a hot topic!! Some people think that hashtags look ugly, although personally, I like their vibe:

A lot of feeds are built by individuals. This means that they will look out for key words in posts (and alt text!), or more simply, hashtags. They might seem old fashioned, but most people don't have the expertise that these software engineers at centralised platforms have, so most don't train algorithms.

For example, I have a feed made for posts about Tailscale. This looks for "Tailscale" and the hashtag #Tailscale.

Here's one of my posts that got over 300 likes, I don't think it would have gained as many without the two hashtags I used!:

lists

Lists are hugely underrated in my opinion, even on Twitter. They are basically a hand-curated set of users you can make in the app and will appear as a feed. I have some, but mainly check one of people I follow but I risk missing out on posts from due to other loud posters.

I'm not going to go into how you make them as they are super self explanatory, but I recommend trying it out.

They don't directly help you grow necessarily, but are a great way to follow the latest content from the people you found previously and want to reply to.

conclusion

It’s not going to happen overnight! I’ve been posting on Bluesky for two years now, and have grown to over 3,300 followers by genuinely engaging and enjoying the community. I hope this post helps you too! Feel free to bookmark this to come back to later, or ask me on Bluesky @j4ck.xyz!

🦋