So You’re Tired of Swimming In Vomit
A guide to switching from Twitter to BlueSky
If you’re anything like me, you’ve probably noticed that over the past few years, the social media platform Twitter (aka ‘X’) is much like an Olympic-sized swimming pool that has been taken over by the dumbest and richest man in town, who immediately ordered all of its water to be drained and replaced with vomit. Yes, it’s still the biggest swimming pool in town, and, sure, there are a lot of people still playing there, running around, having a good time with the usual poolside antics. But, it’s becoming increasingly difficult to look past the fact that they’re all now, y’know, swimming in vomit. And maybe… just maybe… it’s worth dipping a toe in the pool across the road that’s admittedly slightly smaller, but also - and this is key - contains water rather than vomit.
If you’re sick of swimming in sick, and want to consider the possible alternatives, this is my guide to making the switch from Twitter to BlueSky. (BTW, if you’ve never swum in the vomit pool that is Twitter, and would still like to give BlueSky a crack, you can use much of this guide, as well.)
I’ve been using Twitter, then BlueSky, for more than a decade and a half, mostly using it to live-tweet (we’ll come to terminology later in this guide) cricket matches and Australian Survivor. If you read my regular report cards on either of these two subjects, you should know that at least 75% of the jokes I use in those pieces were originally written live, as I was watching the play in the cricket and/or the episode of Australian Survivor. It’s a fun thing to do, to write snarky and/or pithy and/or stupid comments designed to amuse people under time constraints. Furthermore, beside being fun, it’s brought me a whole heap of other benefits - it’s how I first got to know my eventual partner, it’s how I made friends all around the world, it’s how I got several book deals, it’s How I Met Your Mother and loads of other benefits.
So, yeah. Most of this guide will be how to best use BlueSky to live-tweet sports and television shows. There are other uses, I know, but that’s what I know best.
But, I Must Keep Swimming in Vomit!
But before we start with the BlueSky guide, let’s look at some of the reasons why people might question the need to move on from Twitter, despite it being a place in which they’re swimming in vomit. Here are some of those reasons, with my responses.
All my friends are over here swimming in the vomit!
This is the big one, obviously. If you’ve built a community of online friends with whom you interact, then it’s difficult to leave that. Sure, you’re swimming in vomit, but you’re swimming in vomit together.
My solution: DM three or four of the best of your friends on Twitter, and see if you might all want to switch pools at the same time. If they’ve got friends they want to bring over, they can DM those friends, who can DM theirs as well. Think of it as like a pyramid scheme, if it helps. A pyramid scheme for no longer swimming in vomit.
It’s pretty simple to set up a BlueSky account. You all can do it. Go on, I dare you.
I don't think you understand how big a deal I am in the vomit-swimming community! Why, I'll regularly go the top of the diving board, and do a dive, and loads and loads of vomit swimmers will applaud me and shower me with likes. Sure, much of those likes come from tiny little golems made completely from vomit, with blue ticks (yes, yes, technically white ticks on blue backgrounds) emblazoned into their mindless skulls. But it’s still kinda nice, y’know?
I get this too. If you’ve built up a following on Twitter, it can be soul-destroying to think of starting again from nothing. I get it. It’s rewarding to see the numbers go up. I had more than 20,000 followers on Twitter when I made the switch, built up over more than a decade of live-tweeting dumb cricket jokes. I mean, I was no Ashton Kutcher, but I was doing okay in my little niche.
And, yes, it’s a nice hit of endorphin to come up with a great little joke that goes viral, with people liking and retweeting it. Very difficult to give that up, in exchange for the smaller hit you’ll get on BlueSky. That’s perfectly reasonable.
Here’s the thing, though. When you head up to that diving board, and do your impressive dive that garners the showering of applause in the form of likes, you’re still swimming in vomit. You’ve probably noticed that when your tweets go viral, all the likes and praise often also comes with a whole heap of unsavoury vomit golems spitting their bile at you as well. That’s less fun.
More importantly, there’s this: There’s no need for you to make this an either/or situation at first. You can do your spectacular dive into the vomit pool and receive all the praise for that, then while everybody’s still applauding over in the vomit pool, duck over to the BlueSky pool and do the exact same dive, and get a smidgen more acclaim. You’re not swapping out the big endorphin hit for a smaller one. You’re augmenting it.
PRACTICAL TIP: If you want to cross-post (and I did this for a long time before giving up), the trick is this.
Write the post in Twitter
Before posting it, triple tap with your finger. (This is for iOS, btw. Sorry, Android heads. You’ll have to find your own hack.)
The triple tap selects the entire tweet and brings up the option to copy. Do that.
Switch to BlueSky. Hit the new tweet button.
Tap. And Paste.
Send in BlueSky.
Switch back to Twitter.
Send in Twitter.
Does that look like a lot of steps? I suppose it does. Honestly, you can do it in less than a couple of seconds.
After a while it becomes a habit. And, maybe, after a longer while, you start switching it around, writing the tweets in BlueSky, then switching over to Twitter to crosspost. Then, maybe, after a while more, you just stop crossposting at all, and maybe you only ever pop back over to the vomit pool every now and then to drop off videos highlighting the best dives you’ve been doing over on BlueSky.
But I'm used to swimming in vomit!
Yes, of course. If you know the Twitter interface, it’s annoying to have to learn something new. But it’s not that different.
Honestly, if you started Twitter when I did, BlueSky is eerily similar to those early days, when it was fun, and the pool was much less full of vomit. But if you started Twitter later, there are some tricks to BlueSky that might surprise you. But that’s okay. That’s what the rest of this guide covers.
Using BlueSky
The main feed on BlueSky - at least, the main one I use - is the ‘Following’ feed. This is simply a reverse-chronological list of everything tweeted and retweeted by people you follow, the most recent tweet on top. No algorithm more complex than that.
Now, you can poke around in other algorithms. There’s a Discover algorithm that purportedly offers to show you things you might be interested in. Honestly, I’ve mostly found it pretty rubbish. You can also subscribe to algorithms that other people create. Again, I’m yet to dabble deeply in any of that. Maybe once you’re embedded in the BlueSky world, you can investigate that further and find better ways to interact, but, for now, let’s focus on the Following feed.
The first thing to notice about the Following feed is that it’s literally just the tweets of—
Actually, let’s just stop here for a second. I call them ‘tweets’, because ‘tweet’ is a great word. Everybody knows what ‘tweet’ means. Everybody knows what ‘retweet’ means. You may run into scolds on BlueSky who’ll tell you that the correct terminology is ‘skeet’ or ‘post’ or who knows what else. (More on scolds later.) You’re perfectly within your rights to ignore those people. There are mute and block buttons if they get particularly obnoxious about it. But, yeah, ‘tweet’ is fine. Elon doesn’t want the word. It belongs to us all now.
Now, where was I? Ah yes. The Following feed contains the tweets of everybody you follow, most recent first. That has a whole heap of implications.
Who Should I Follow?
You start a new account on BlueSky. The first thing you want to do is work out who to follow. There are a couple of good ways to do this.
Starter Packs
Firstly, BlueSky comes with Starter Packs. This gives you a whole heap of people to follow in areas you’re interested in. I have starter packs for both Australian Survivor and cricket. If you’re interested in either of those things, click on their respective link, follow everybody and bang, you’re away. If you’re interested in other things, do a search for starter packs for those things, and get following.
PRACTICAL TIP: Follow readily, unfollow readily. If you have a lot of followers on Twitter, you’ve probably got out of the habit of following everybody who followed you. Rightly so. It becomes impossible (or, at least, impractical) to do so after a while. For now, while you’re starting out on BlueSky, give folks the benefit of the doubt. If you share an interest, follow them. See what they have to say. If they prove to be boring or too much, just unfollow them later. No big deal.
Hashtags
Another good way to find people to follow is through hashtags. For example, to find people live-tweeting Australian Survivor, search for #SurvivorAU. If somebody looks interesting, follow them. Once they’re in your Following feed, you’ll see all their stuff. Again, if they get boring later, unfollow them.
Obviously, if you’re tweeting about a topic, you should use the hashtag too. Not only does it help people find you, as outlined in the previous paragraph, it also helps people who aren’t interested in the topic keep it out of their feed, by muting the hashtag.
PRACTICAL TIP: If you hold down on a hashtag, the option will pop up to mute the hashtag. Select that, and voila! All tweets containing that hashtag will disappear from your feed. See ya later, #FormulaOne car racing!
ANOTHER PRACTICAL TIP: Maybe you don’t want to type #SurvivorAU after every funny thing you live-tweet about Australian Survivor. Here’s a simple hack (for iOS, again Androiders - you’re on your own!). Go to Settings > Keyboard > Text Replacement. Press the ‘+’ sign. Under phrase, put ‘#SurvivorAU’ (eg). You can even add an emoji if you like. Under shortcut, put sau. Now, at the end of each tweet, simply type ‘sau’, and hit space. And double voila! You have a hashtag. Easy peasy.
Retweets
Retweets are a secret key to finding followers. Obviously, if somebody gets retweeted into your timeline from somebody you follow, consider following that retweetee. Especially if the retweet entertains you. Again, you can always unfollow later.
But here’s the other trick: Check who else retweeted them. (Or liked them.) Those folks share your sense of humour. Consider following them as well. Because, again, what can you always do later? Exactly.
Oh, and by the way, and I honestly can’t emphasise this enough: RETWEET FREELY. This isn’t Twitter. Liking a tweet is nice. It lets the person know you, uh, liked it. And, sure, that’s lovely. But it won’t spread the tweet any further. Nobody will pop up in a ‘Following’ feed just because somebody likes a tweet.
But they will pop up if they’re retweeted into there. A retweet is the real deal. A retweet expands the reach of the original tweet, introducing it to new people who might enjoy it. It gains people new followers. So, retweet freely.
Here are my rules for retweeting:
If I read the tweet and think: ‘damn it, I wish I’d thought of that joke.’ That’s a retweet.
If I read the tweet and laugh out loud. That’s a retweet.
Also, usually if I retweet you, I’ll follow you as well.
Retweet freely!
How Do I Get More Followers?
If you use the various tricks I’ve mentioned above, you’ll find people to follow. No problem. But how do you get followers of your own? If BlueSky revolves around the Following feed, how do you get into people’s Following feeds in the first place?
Honestly, the answer lies mostly in the suggestions made above.
Find a Starter Pack in an area you’re interested in? Ask the person who runs it if they’ll include you.
If you hashtag regularly, you’ll pop up every time somebody searches that hashtag. If your tweets are entertaining enough, people will follow you directly.
Oh, and if you retweet regularly, then if people check out the retweets (and, yes, likes too), they’ll see your name there and, if they like the cut of your tweeting jib, they’ll follow you too.
There are other ways as well. If you follow people, they might follow you back. If you like people’s tweets, they might follow you. If you retweet people’s tweets, they might follow you.
But, mostly, just write the best tweets you can and hashtag them. The hashtag gets you on the radar. The good tweets get you follows. (And, heck, if you can’t think of good tweets of your own, retweet freely on others’ good tweets, and people might just end up following you as a curator of high quality content.)
What About Scolds And Humourless Folk?
Look, BlueSky isn’t perfect. You’re not swimming in crystalline clear water over here. It’s just… you’re not swimming in vomit.
Scolds
BlueSky has scolds. I don’t know why. Think of them as self-appointed pool lifeguards blasting self-appointed whistles at you. There’s not huge amounts of them. But there are enough that you should know how to deal with them if they come over to blast a whistle in your face.
There are certain things that will cause these certain very annoying people to pop into your replies and give you a stern lecture. I’ve already mentioned the ‘using the word tweet’ thing, but the other one that really runs the risk of getting the scolds all up in your grill is the non-use of alt text on images. If you tweet out an image and don’t put alt text on it, prepare for at least the possibility of a scolding.
And, okay, I get it. It’s nice to put alt text on images. It helps visually impaired people understand the context of a joke. That’s very difficult to argue with. This, however, has been true literally since the web began. Every image on every website has the option of having alt text associated with it. You can alt text on Twitter too. There is an opportunity for helping visually impaired people everywhere, so why there’s a particular bee in this particular BlueSky bonnet is a bit odd.
Nevertheless, obviously, if you have the time, throw some alt text on your image. That’s a kind thing to do. But, hey, if you’re live-tweeting, and in a rush to get the joke out while it’s still relevant, don’t sweat it that much. If a scold pops in, you always have the option to mute and block them if they’re too much.
Humourless People
There also seem to be a slightly higher proportion of people on BlueSky who were born without a sense of humour and who will misunderstand jokes. (Having said that, if you really want to deal with humourless folk who don’t understand even the most obvious jokes, check out Threads sometime. Hoo boy!)
Your mileage may vary on these folk. Certainly, my mileage varies depending on my mood. Most times I just try to ignore them. Or, sometimes, I’ll reply, doubling down on the joke to make it even more obvious that it’s not to be taken seriously (the risk here, obviously, is that they still don’t get it, then you’re trapped in conversation with somebody who’s terminally unfunny).
If I’m in a less tolerant mood, or they’re particularly obnoxious in their humourlessness, then I might mute them. And, of course, if I’m in a bad mood, or they’re being actively unpleasant, there’s the block button.
The point is: don’t be afraid to mute or block people who you’re unlikely to ever find interesting. Honestly, it’s for the best. (You should do this on Twitter, too, if you’re sticking around there. Think of it as a little vomit vacuum that you’re using to clean up the area immediately surrounding you.) You don’t have to explain why you’re muting or blocking them. It’s not a sign of weakness. They didn’t ‘win’ because they annoyed you to the point where you blocked them. Life’s too short to deal with people who aren’t entertaining to you.
Conclusion
Hopefully all this helps you get started on BlueSky. It’s not a perfect place, but it’s worth dabbling in for sure.
And, yes, maybe BlueSky will someday get filled with vomit too.
But, if that ever becomes the case, we can all change pools again. The skill of changing pools when you notice they're full of vomit is a good one to learn. Why not start practising it today?
PS I’m on BlueSky here:
@liebcricket.com for cricket stuff
@danliebke.com for everything else