How to get started on Twitter alternative Bluesky Social
The social media landscape tends to be dominated by a handful of players, with X, formerly Twitter, historically dominating the microblogging space.
However, as dissatisfaction grows with Elon Musk's transformation of his platform into a free-speech platform, many users are seeking an X platform alternative. For 30 million users, that alternative is Bluesky.
The X platform's alternative to X
Started by X co-founder Jack Dorsey, Bluesky is noteworthy not only for its recent gain in popularity but also for its innovative, decentralized architecture.
From the Authenticated Transfer Protocol (AT Protocol) that enables portability of data, to the ability for anyone to connect their own personal data server (PDS) to the network, Bluesky Social takes a completely new and novel approach to distributed application design.
How to get started with Bluesky Social
However, this tutorial is less about the architecture of Bluesky and more about how to get started with it. In this quick Bluesky social tutorial, you'll learn how to do the following:
- Sign up with Bluesky and verify your identity.
- Customize and personalize your profile.
- Follow users and reply to their posts.
- Curate a custom feed that's tailored to your tastes.
- Block trolls and troublemakers when you encounter them.
A popular X platform alternative
If you're looking for an alternative to X, Bluesky is definitely worth a try. For anyone migrating from the X platform, Bluesky's look and feel is very familiar, so it's not difficult to learn. And with the ability to customize your feed and tailor it to your interests, you might find it to be a friendlier alternative as well.
Cameron McKenzie has been a Java EE software engineer for 20 years. His current specialties include Agile development; DevOps; Spring; and container-based technologies such as Docker, Swarm and Kubernetes.