10 Hacks Every Bluesky User Should Know

If you’re tired of X’s and Threads, maybe it’s time to move on to greener, or maybe bluer, pastures. Lifehacker’s Joel Cunningham moved to Bluesky in 2024, and since then many of our writers and editors have followed suit and are living on the butterfly site. It turns out that with the right platform, it’s possible to love social media again.

Bluesky is quite different from most other social media networks. You have a lot of control over who sees your posts and how they respond to them, and you can also block and mute users in bulk and change moderation settings to this effect. If you’re new to Bluesky or just using the default settings, it’s time to dig deeper into all the ways you can personalize your experience.

Use Starter Packs to Find People to Follow

Credit: Khamosh Pathak

If you’ve just started using Bluesky, your feed will seem pretty light, especially if you want to venture outside of the algorithm-driven Discover feed and look at what makes the app unique.

But there are ways to overcome this problem. Bluesky calls them Starter Packs, and anyone can create and share them. Starter Packs are essentially lists of profiles that you can follow with just one click. A website like Bluesky Starter Pack is a great place to check out these packs because it lets you search and filter based on your interests or even the most popular accounts. Open a Starter Pack and click on the button Track everything button if you want to follow everyone in the list. You can also open a Starter Pick and choose people to follow individually.

Find and pin feeds

Credit: Khamosh Pathak

Bluesky really encourages you to get out of your usual mutual network, and that’s why there is a Flow section in the sidebar. Any community member can create a custom feed and you can subscribe to it with a single click. This means you don’t have to stick to the usual default settings, like your subscriptions feed, and can instead browse posts however you want.

Bluesky offers a few algorithmically generated feeds like Discover and Popular with Friends, but the vast majority of feeds are personalized. You can search for any topic and when you like what you see, you can click Pin Feed to add it to the top of your scrolling window. Then, all you have to do is tap or click on a pinned feed to jump to it.

Try AT Protocol apps like Flashes and Deck Blue

Credit: Pranay Parab

Just like Mastodon, Bluesky encourages third-party apps. Developers can plug directly into the underlying AT protocol and create their own applications on Bluesky.

This means that yes, there is a TweetDeck alternative for Bluesky, both as a website and a Mac app (I prefer the Mac app, honestly). If you’re more of a photo person, you can also try Flashes or Pinksky, which recreate the Instagram experience by focusing on photos and videos.

Securely sign up for third-party apps using app passwords

Credit: Khamosh Pathak

Bluesky doesn’t have a traditional authentication system where you can sign in to third-party apps by simply connecting them to your Bluesky account (like you can do using your Google or Apple accounts). So how do you use all these third-party apps based on the AT protocol? Simple: Uniquely generated application passwords. Each Bluesky service or application will ask you for a unique application password that will only work for that particular service and is not the same as your primary Bluesky password. This way, your Bluesky account will not be compromised even if the app leaks, and you can quickly change the password or revoke access if you no longer want to use this service.

Go to Settings > Privacy and security > Application passwords > Add an app password to create a new application password. Make sure to give it a unique name so you can find it easily. You can remove an app’s password using the Remove button next to the service name.

Choose who can respond to you and how

Credit: Khamosh Pathak

When it comes to social media platforms, Bluesky offers perhaps the best moderation tools in the industry. A good example is how you can restrict replies to your messages.

Go to Settings > Moderation > Interaction Settingsand you will find a multitude of options. You can open replies to everyone, or you can even go nuclear and block anyone from responding to your messages.

Then there are the granular options. You can restrict replies only to your followers, people you follow, people you mention, or you can create a list of people who can reply to you.

While you’re here, you can also disable the “Allow Quote Posts” feature, so other users on the platform can’t repost your posts directly on their pages.

Take control of your posts, even once they’re out in the wild

Credit: Bluesky

If someone has quoted your post and you’d prefer they didn’t, you can quickly resolve this issue. Go to the post, click on the three-dot menu and choose the Detach quote option. The message will remain as is, but your quote will be deleted.

Likewise, you can quickly hide replies to a post. Choose an answer, click on the three-dot menu and from there you can choose to hide the answer for you or for everyone.

Note that this won’t prevent people who can see your posts from screenshotting them to share as images.

Use community-created mute and block lists

Credit: Khamosh Pathak

Bluesky has community lists to help you subscribe to new accounts, and also to block accounts in bulk. You’ll find many moderation lists for different types of posters online, either by searching Bluesky or looking at third-party websites like ClearSky. This way you can quickly block brands, scammers or anyone else you wouldn’t want to see with just one click. This is a great way to sort out at least the most infamous or nefarious profiles. To use a moderation list, open it, click Subscribethen choose either Mute accounts Or Block accounts.

Credit: Khamosh Pathak

We say it a lot at Lifehacker: you really should use RSS. Just like Bluesky, it’s another way to find or read new blogs and news without relying on an algorithm. And you can even follow Bluesky profiles in your RSS reader of choice, no setup required. Go to a Bluesky profile and add ‘/rss’ at the end of the URL. Then copy it and add it as a source in the RSS reader of your choice. Very easy.

Repeat this for as many profiles as you want, sort them into easy-to-access folders and now you can read articles and links from your favorite Bluesky profiles directly in your RSS reader, so you can easily mix them in with your articles and blogs.

Use your own domain name as username

Credit: Khamosh Pathak

This is one of my favorite features. Bluesky allows users and organizations to replace their identifiers with their own custom domain addresses. An identifier such as “@lifehacker.bsky.social”, which is written in the default format, can be changed to simply say “lifehacker.com”.

This works through a simplified form of self-verification (although Bluesky now offers a traditional verification system as well). You will need access to your domain manager to achieve this.

Go to Settings > Account > Handle and choose I have my own domain. Next, enter your domain address. Bluesky will show you the DNS records you need to update using your domain manager. Once done, click Check DNS Record and wait for the handle to update automatically.

Publish to Bluesky, Threads and Mastodon at the same time

Credit: Justin Pot

Even if you use Bluesky, that doesn’t mean you should only use Bluesky. You can consider Bluesky your home base and continue publishing your content on other networks like Threads and Mastodon at the same time, using an app like Croissant. It’s a simple app that allows you to connect your Bluesky, Threads and Mastodon accounts at the same time, taking advantage of their fediverse connectivity. You can then use Croissant to write your messages and send them to all three networks at once. You can also schedule posts, which is useful if you use Bluesky professionally. The croissant costs $2.99/month, or $19.99/year.