I don’t qualify as a Bluesky ‘elder’ — thankfully, given the distinctly dodgy reaction this engenders — but I have been on the precocious upstart social platform for over a year. With this experience under my belt, and having tried out a couple of the candidate destinations for those stampeding off Twitter, Bluesky was very easy to initally dismiss as yet another earnest also-ran for which the glow of simply not being Twitter would eventually fade — perhaps sooner rather than later.

Surprise — I’m still on Bluesky. Furthermore I’m of the steadily strengthening belief it's not only a worthy replacement for Twitter — it easily cleared that bar in street shoes — but I’m fairly sure I will eventually shut down most of my accounts on other platforms and replace them all with a streamlined social approach based exclusively on Bluesky. Here are the most important reasons you may eventually feel the same way:

Bluesky permits you to use your domain name instead of a proprietary ‘handle’ provided by platform. A short example to illustrate: when the Bluesky account for Intellog was first setup, it was @intelloginc.bsky.social. You will likely recognise this as a variation on those in use on other social platforms with all their silly, picky rules. However, the Bluesky handle for Intellog is now @intellog.com. Yep, exactly the same as the domain name. This has been owned by Intellog for years and will continue this way for the indefinite future. Nobody, short of the registrar and only then if their bill hasn’t been paid, can take it away.

If anything in cyberspace is property, the lowly domain name is it. With ownership comes privileges. Most important of these is that in the event Bluesky gets binned at any point in the future for any reason, the handle ‘comes with’, as opposed to remaining behind with them. No ifs, ands, buts or gotchas. Bluesky can’t keep what they never owned in the first place.

If you’re still not convinced, here’s yet another reason why this is really important. To 'verify your account', 1 — as Bluesky describes it now — it is necessary to add a single, simple entry to the DNS 2 related to the domain — something that can only be done by, or with the consent of the domain’s owner. Yet another privilege of ownership. This approach therefore serves as a somewhat crude but actually quite effective way of proving you actually are who you say you are on Bluesky.

Let me illustrate with an exaggerated example: if you had it in your head to call yourself @ibm.com on Bluesky — to make people think are you are IBM, say, for some nefarious purpose — this will require access to IBM’s DNS. I’ll save you the trouble of looking it up — there’s a legion of super smart infosec people at IBM and elsewhere preventing you from doing just that. The DNS security model has been in place for decades and has a track record of working quite well. If it was not fundamentally secure, the internet as we know it today would have crumbled years ago.

By using DNS to authenticate its users, Bluesky piggybacked on an already well-established internet-ish way of proving your bona fides. It’s quite brilliant in its simplicity. To verify Intellog’s account in this manner took just eight minutes on Bluesky.

In my time on Bluesky, I have seen my fare share of newcomers who take the time — quite often in their first post — to introduce themselves. Some use all of Bluesky’s gloriously restrictive 300 character limit to list all of their descriptive keywords so the ‘algorithm’ will kick in and kick-start the desired networking with their long-lost ‘mutuals’ from other social platforms.

Folks, there is no algorithm on Bluesky.

If you sign up and don’t follow anybody there will be nothing in your feed. Not one, single, solitary post and short of any further action there never will be. However, if you choose to find and follow @weratedogs.com (which I highly recommend, by the way) on Bluesky your following count will tick up from zero to one and your feed will contain only posts from @weratedogs.com. Trust me, I was initially tempted to stop right there. A feed consisting only of cute pups with clever, pithy captions is nothing short of social media heaven in my opinion. However, I digress.

Want to mix in some aviation in with your four-legged friends? Track down @blufly.media and follow them, too. Your feed will consist of posts with good ol' furry, four-legged dogs — as well as the occasional (F-11) Husky, (C-2) Greyhound and (A.109) Airedale — from these two excellent sources. 3

Continuing with this thought, if you subsequently choose to unfollow @weratedogs.com — now why would you do that? — all of those cute pups vanish from your feed like they never existed. To be clear, what Bluesky does not do is deluge you with dog pictures because they — or rather, the infernal, black box, proprietary ‘algorithm’ — somehow gleaned you like them. Absent @weratedogs.com, your feed will contain only @blufly.media's aviation-oriented posts. It will stay this way until you choose to follow somebody else. Or many ‘somebody elses’, or nobody, as your heart desires.

Who you follow is your feed. No more and no less.

It is a two-edge sword, of course. Until such time that you post on Bluesky, you aren’t providing much in the way of clues to facilitate others finding you — other than the blurb in your profile assuming you took the time to populate it with some useful tidbits. Crafting well-written posts early and often on Bluesky is the best way to leave a breadcrumb trail to your new Bluesky home. You had best get busy lest ye remain invisible.

I’ve found the Search facility in Bluesky to be quite good for finding both posts and people. A couple of keywords and it won’t be long at all before you round up a nice cohort of following accounts, the posts of which will be populating your feed forthwith. Conversely if you craft reasonably articulate posts, and lots of ‘em, it won’t be long before folks are finding you, too, and becoming one of your followers. There are other Bluesky experiencing-shaping tools such as Custom Feeds, Starter Packs and Lists — as well as thermonuclear Blocks you're going to love — but these can all be layered on at some point down the road as you get rolling.

For now, though, remember to follow The Golden Rule: treat other posters as you would like to be treated yourself. See you all out there under the bright Bluesky. 4

©2025 Terence C. Gannon

Have any thoughts on the subjects on which I have touched above? I would love to hear from you. Please leave your thoughts, where else, as a reply to this post on Bluesky. ~ TCG