What Older Adults Should Know About Bluesky

Social media rival to X and Threads recently doubled its number of users

Edward C. Baig,

AARP

Comments

Published December 11, 2024

Jonathan Raa/NurPhoto/AP

In this story

An X alternative • You control your feed • Ignore some content • Post text, photos, video • How to start • If you move • Find your friends • Paid tier coming

When X-alternative Threads exploded onto the scene in July 2023 with more than 100 million sign-ups in just five days, the launch of Meta’s then-new social media app appeared to represent the first serious challenge to X, the microblogging platform owned by Elon Musk and formerly known as Twitter.

The Threads app has since ballooned to more than 275 million monthly users.

Now another serious X competitor called Bluesky is grabbing headlines. The idea started in 2019 as a project of Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey while he was still Twitter’s CEO.

In recent months, Bluesky usage has more than doubled, and in the aftermath of the presidential election, it leaped past 24 million users. The apparent hope among those who have flocked to Bluesky is that political rancor and polarization won’t follow.

As of mid-November, another Twitter/X rival, Mastodon, had around 919,000 active users.

For a time recently, Bluesky Social was the third most popular free app in Apple’s App Store, trailing only Threads and ChatGPT. It was also No. 3 among free Android apps in Google Play behind Threads and TikTok.

Tech site The Verge wrote, “Bluesky seems to have a real shot at becoming the next place to get the pulse of the internet.”

See only the types of posts you want

What’s behind Bluesky appeal, and will it resonate with older adults?

Chief executive Jay Graber has described Bluesky as “billionaire-proof” and “radically different than anything that has been done on social media before.”

During an appearance on CNBC cable network, she explained that Bluesky does not control what you see on the service. It has “no single algorithm showing you things,” Graber said. “If you want to see just cats or just art, you can do that.”

This decentralized approach follows open-source principles. In simple terms, that means it’s designed so a single entity can’t control it.

Content filters let you ignore what you don’t want

You can set content filters to hide adult-oriented, sexually suggestive or graphic material or set warnings before you can view such posts.

You can hide or get warnings for content categorized as sensitive, extremist or intolerant. Same goes for posts that are misleading, spread misinformation or propagate a scam. You can also mute or block specific accounts as well as filter out certain words or tags.

What are you allowed to post?

You can access Bluesky for free through the app or on a computer, and as with other social media, you can post text, images and videos, as well as reply or repost what others surface. Oh, and you can weigh in with a Like.

Bluesky has a 300-character limit, compared to 280 characters for the free version of microblogging app X and 500 characters for Threads. The number of photos you can post has no current limit, and you can upload up to 25 videos or 10 GB daily. A company spokesperson says such limits might get tweaked in the future.

As with early Twitter, which it resembles, you can follow and message other people and have other people follow and message you back.

How to get started on Bluesky

Until February 2023, Bluesky was invitation only but now is open to anyone.

When you first enlist, you must enter your email, choose a password and indicate your birthday. Next, you get to pick a handle — your name, company or whatever in front of .bsky.social. Mine for folks who want to follow me is @edbaig.bsky.social.

You’re prompted to choose subjects that interest you: culture, food, movies, news, pets, sports, tech and so on. Bluesky uses these to customize the experience and help build out your network.

As you navigate Bluesky, the various feeds you follow are all listed under an aptly named place called My Feeds.

By default, you’ll find a Discover feed, which is meant to mix what’s trending with the accounts you follow. It’s probably the closest thing to the algorithm-driven feeds of other social media.

A separate Mutuals feed is where you can see posts from users who follow you back. And a Popular With Friends feed is just that, a blend of content from accounts you follow and accounts your followers like.

Bluesky lets you add, remove or replace feeds with any other custom feeds that come closer to matching your interests and sensibilities.

If you leave, you don’t have to start over

It even has something known as account portability, meaning you can move to other social media servers on the open-source AT Protocol framework and bring your data and followers along.

Graber explained it this way in The New Yorker: “If centralized platforms are governed like monarchies, federated networks are governed like little feudal societies. There isn’t just one king ruling over the whole network, but there are smaller lords who still have absolute power over their domain.”

Where are my friends?

One of the early challenges is connecting with the people you used to follow on X or finding new people or organizations you might want to engage with.

A good place to get going is user-generated custom feeds known as Starter Packs, which you can search by topic, more than 110,000 at last count. You can start your own Starter Pack or have Bluesky generate one for you by choosing a set of recommended accounts from your network.

If you’re tech savvy, you can install a free Chrome web browser extension called Sky Follower Bridge that is designed to help you find and follow the same users on Bluesky as you do on X. Browser extensions are software that can add functionality to a web browser, in this case Google Chrome.

Bluesky is free now, but a paid tier is coming

For now, anyway, you won’t see advertising on Bluesky. But in my experience, Bluesky has some glitches.

Executives at the company have flagged that Bluesky is working on subscription models for such premium features as higher quality video uploads and further profile customization. But the company added that Bluesky will always be free, and that paid subscribers won’t get preferential treatment, including the kind of blue checkmarks that X uses to “verify” users.

Still, for all its efforts at providing a safe and amiable space, as Bluesky’s population increases, it also will be worth monitoring how much of the toxic behavior and trolling exhibited elsewhere will land on this platform.

%{postComment}%

Edward C. Baig covers technology and other consumer topics. He previously worked for USA Today, BusinessWeek, U.S. News & World Report and Fortune, and is author of Macs for Dummies and coauthor of iPhone for Dummies and iPad for Dummies. Follow him on LinkedIn; Threads; and X, formerly known as Twitter.