Bluesky is changing social media by giving users full control over their content, followers, and experience—without algorithm interference.

If you’ve been online in the last month, you’ve likely seen people mentioning Bluesky. At first glance, it looks like most social-media text-based apps we’ve used for years, but it’s actually very different in ways that put the user in control of their own content, followers, and experience.

Bluesky started as a project initiated by Jack Dorsey when he was CEO of Twitter in 2019. This article promoting the concept of protocols over platforms as a way to protect and promote free speech was the starting point.

Platforms vs protocols

The text-based social media app we are most familiar with is X (formerly Twitter) which is a closed platform – a contained space that houses the posts you make and the followers you collect. If you leave Twitter, you leave behind everything you’ve written and everyone who follows you.

Bluesky is a platform, but the difference is that it was built on an open protocol – a set of instructions and standards that anyone can use to build an app. Other protocols we use daily include SMTP (Simple Mail Transfer Protocol, for email) and HTTP (HyperText Transfer Protocol, for pages on the internet). Protocols are by nature decentralized (think of how you can read your email on any number of different apps), so if you decide in the future you don’t like how Bluesky works, you can take all your followers and messages and use a different app to view and interact with them.

Bluesky, which is free to join, allows you to be in complete control of your online social space. There is no algorithm choosing content for you. Instead, you can follow Feeds that collect posts on a specific topic using the keywords – or even emojis – that you are interested in. A key difference for small businesses:

on Bluesky, you don’t have to fight an algorithm for your followers to see what you post. Posts display chronologically, like they did in the early 2010s on Twitter and Instagram.

Ongoing user dissatisfaction with how X and Meta are operated, as well as recent policy changes to allow “free speech” there in the form of offensive content aimed at LGBTQ+, BIPOC, and disabled people, has resulted in an influx of millions of new users to Bluesky over the last month. It has transformed the once-sleepy platform into a vibrant place to interact. As of writing, the member count has surpassed 30 million.

To help maintain a safer community atmosphere, Bluesky has its own moderation team in place 24 hours a day, maintaining its community guidelines, plus several automated moderation systems. On top of this, users and teams can use Bluesky’s Ozone collaborative moderation tool to review and label content posted on the network. For those of us who don’t speak GitHub, we have control over what we see in the Settings> Moderation section at bsky.app. Click Bluesky Moderation Service at the bottom of the page and you can select the level of filtering that suits you.

Bluesky’s moderation tools let users customize their experience, from filtering content to setting safety levels. Take control of what you see and create a space that works for you.

Let’s walk through how to set up Bluesky to suit you:

1. Sign up for an account at app Make sure to fill out your profile with your company’s details, website, the products/services you offer, and a user icon. Blank profiles are suspected of being bots, and you’ll have an easier time building your following if who you are is clearly stated.
2. Click # Feeds (bsky.app/feeds). You can see you have two Feeds already: Discover and Following
3. Using the Search feeds bar, type in a keyword, like knitting, sewing, embroidery, crafting, etc
4. The results below the search box are Feeds that you can follow. Click any of the results to see the posts that Feed has collected. Click the + to pin a Feed to your # Feeds You’ll see each feed you followed added below Following in My Feeds. Repeat as many times as you wish.
5. A Starter Pack is a collection of accounts that share a specific focus, like this one that features Indie Yarn Dyers and Makers. You can follow everyone in a Starter pack with one click at the top, or pick and choose which accounts interest you.
6. Are there topics you don’t want to see? Click ⚙️ Settings > Moderation and add the words you want to mute. Bluesky won’t show you posts with those words for whatever time period you pick.
7. *The DISCOVER tab uses your likes on Bluesky to curate a feed of posts. This is the only use of an algorithm on Bluesky. If you never use the DISCOVER tab, you will only see posts from accounts or Feeds that you’ve chosen.
8. Pictures and videos under 60 seconds are welcome on Bluesky, but be sure to include ALT text to describe the visuals. Bluesky users are very sensitive to accessibility concerns and will be most supportive of those who post with accessibility in mind.
9. Now that you’ve customized the app to suit you, start posting! Share what’s interesting or important in your world. Show off your latest WIPs and FOs. For yarn crafts, add the yarn ball emoji 🧶 to have your post picked up by the knitting + crochet and Craftiverse An active account encourages users to engage with you, and over time will help boost your follower count.

A few notes about what Bluesky is and isn’t. Bluesky is a place to connect with people with shared interests like crafts, sports, news, politics. Bluesky is a place to build community and share things you think that community will want to hear about.

Although you will find feeds that focus on products and sales (the #Etsy feed, for example), in feeds for various crafts such as Knitting + Crochet, Quilting, and Embroidery, selling is not the priority of most users. Instead, users enjoy sharing WIPs and FOs, asking questions about techniques, or help with a design. Sharing news about the things you make or do is great; repeatedly posting pictures with a link to purchase may not get a positive response.

Instead, encourage followers to join your Newsletter or visit your website, and let the growth and sales follow organically.

Keep an eye on the Feeds that most closely match what you have to sell, and see what other businesses are posting and how their followers respond. In a place that is as supportive as Bluesky is, you’ll soon get a feeling for how to adjust the tone of your social media posts to fit the new laid-back Bluesky vibe.

Right now, Bluesky is free to join and use. In future, there may be subscriptions added for access to premium features. Personally, I’d pay for what’s being offered for free at Bluesky. This kind of real-time genuine user interaction is something I had thought we’d never see online again.

Are you on Bluesky? Share some tips about what you’ve learned about the platform in the comments below.