MacKuba

I’ve been a pretty active user of Bluesky since spring 2023. I enjoy it a lot, and I’ve managed to learn a lot about how it works, what works well and what doesn’t, and also what’s likely coming next. I’ve decided to write down some of the tips & tricks that I often give to friends when I invite them there, or the advice and answers that I sometimes give to people that I find in some feed asking about things.

This of course got much longer than I planned 😅 so if only have a moment, here’s a TLDR:

• there are official iOS and Android apps, but you can also use bsky.app in the browser, and there are plenty of third party apps of all kinds now, which I’ve listed in the “Apps” section
• tweak the algorithm in your “Discover” feed by opening the “…” context menu on a post in that feed and selecting “Show more like this” or “Show less like this”; or, if you prefer a classic chronological feed, you can set the Following feed as your main feed and remove Discover. You can also try the For You feed.
• if your timeline feels empty, you can find some people to follow through “starter packs”, or you can go to the “Feeds” tab, scroll down to the “Discover New Feeds” section and look for some feeds on the topics that interest you (on the top list or in the search); follow these feeds, and then if you find some interesting people posting in those feeds, follow them too. You can also search for feeds on goodfeeds.co.
• don’t be afraid to interact with people, repost good posts, like good comments, comment in threads and so on – that’s how you make friends! (but be nice :)
• if you see too much NSFW stuff, look for “Content filters” settings in the Moderation tab in Settings
• everything you post here is very public, so don’t share anything too private 😏
• if you own some cool domain name like “taylorswift.com”, you can set it as your handle
• DM and group chats, drafts, bookmarks, trends, thread composer, pinned posts, videos and GIFs are now available
• better 2FA and post editing is planned; some version of private posts shared to limited audience is probably coming at some point, but not in near future

And now the long version:

I had different plans for this year… then, Elon Musk happened.

Elon took over Twitter in October last year, which set many different processes in motion. A lot of people I liked and followed started leaving the platform. Mastodon and the broader Fediverse, which has been slowly growing for many years but never got anything close to being mainstream, suddenly blew up with activity. A lot of those people I was following ended up there.

Then, Twitter started getting progressively worse under the new management. Elon’s antics, the whole blue checks / verification clusterfuck, killing off third party apps and effectively shutting down the API, locking the site behind a login wall, finally renaming the app and changing the logo – each step made some of the users lose interest in the platform, making it gradually less interesting and harder to use.

Changes, so many changes… and things changing meant that I had to change my workflows, change some plans, build a whole bunch of new tools, change plans a few times again, and so on. My GitHub looks like this right now, which is way above the average of previous years:

Update 01.03.2023: Updated Mastodon address - my previous instance has been unexpectedly shut down and I had to make a new account. I’ve decided to set up my own server to make sure it won’t happen again.

Update 09.11.2023: I made a follow-up post which talks about the social media related projects I’ve been working on this year, and about Bluesky, where I’m spending most of the time now.

This is just a small update about Twitter and Mastodon, since things have been… very unstable and chaotic in the last few weeks, as you’ve surely noticed if you log in to these even occassionally.

Twitter has been my internet home for over 13 years now. I started using it when my colleagues from Lunar Logic showed it to me, and especially in the recent years it’s been my main source of information and news. It’s where I went to keep track of what was happening in the Apple/Swift world, find useful tips about UIKit, SwiftUI or Xcode, follow the news, rumors and dramas on the Crypto Twitter, and find out every day what important thing was happening in the world, including following the Covid pandemic and the Russian invasion of Ukraine this year.