With BlueSky being (still) in Beta, but because there are a growing number of people coming over to the app, a couple of us thought it would be a good idea to document and share some of the tips that we have picked up.
My first thought is you could use a better interface rather than the default BlueSky one. More of this in a minute, but it’s worth mentioning twice. On my phone I use GraySky which I customise to open Only Posts on startup. On my laptop I use Deck.Blue because it’s excellent.
One of the nice things that BlueSky gives you is the opportunity to curate what you read. Bluesky does this through giving you custom feeds. I don’t think there’s much argument that the best feed to subscribe to is Only Posts. Maybe you should sub to that one, and set it as your default?
But what if there’s a topic you like? There’s probably a feed for it too. So, you might like to search for, and then subscribe to, a feed about Knitting, or perhaps Crochet, or maybe SCUBA diving? Here’s how you can subscribe to your chosen feed(s) how you add it (or them) to your app, and how you pin them to the top of your main feeds bar. Seven easy steps:





It’s worth mentioning that in GraySky your main feeds bar is itself highly customisable. UIf you want to you can remove any of the standard feeds that you get as default, and install your custom feeds instead.
Another customisation you could consider, is changing your home feed to show all replies. This is highly recommended. Here’s how you do this simple little config in three easy steps:



Outside of the default BlueSky app, if you are a laptop user, you might want to have a good look at DeckBlue, it’s a TweetDeck-ish app that offers you a lot of customisation. At the time of writing DeckBlue isn’t mobile-y, but as a laptop tool it’s a pretty powerful piece of software. Here’s a screenshot of my DeckBlue dashboard:
