Self-Promoting on Bluesky: Algorithm Free?
At the precise moment in which we made the decision to post less and spend more time on our WIP, Bluesky sent that invite code we had asked for ages ago. Great timing, Bluesky, great timing… Still, we created an account and started posting.
NOTE: this post has been updated on 11/07 to add a section on third-party apps after 'Posting'.
POSTING
The first thing we noticed when we joined was the amount of furry porn. It's why we gave up on art Feeds and follow individual artist accounts instead. We have no idea what we did to make it disappear from the Discover and For You Feeds, but one day they were all gone. The only time we still see anything furry-related is when an account we're following re-posts it. The second thing we noticed was the fact that the app doesn't allow you to save drafts. Something else you can't do is create a thread right away, which means you have to quickly reply to the previous posts and hope that no one else sees it before you've finished it. This is just not practical and it's baffling that the Bluesky Team gave users DM before making it possible to save drafts. So, we must always post on Twitter first to see how many posts a thread will need before posting on Bluesky. The Bio allows more characters and active links than Twitter, so that's good, but adding the Header was tricky, as even with the right size, the image gets cropped. What's even less good? Not being able to pin a post. This means that whenever someone visits your profile, the first thing they see is the last thing you posted/re-posted. Much like we did with Instagram, we use the same reviews that we post on Twitter. Unlike with IG, however, we have no idea how many people are seeing our posts because Bluesky has no stats. We do get regular engagement... with our horror book quotes (Horror really is the king of engagement). Our film/TV reviews are hit and miss, and the self-promo posts are even worse. At least in terms of likes and re-posts because, again, we don't know how many people are seeing them. Bluesky is definitely not very self-promo-friendly.
NO ALGORITHM?
The Feeds were a pretty big difference in relation to Twitter. Instead of that chaotic 2 tabs system that if set to For You vomits all the topics you’re following into a single Feed, you get several thematic Feeds that can be pinned to your home screen and accessed separately. It’s an OCD dream come true - posts neatly arranged by theme! They were a bit confusing at first, but once we got the hang of it, we realized how useful they were, both as readers and as indie authors trying to be seen. Since a single Feed can pick up several hashtags at once, you get a lot more content than by searching for keywords or phrases individually, or clicking a hashtag. And by adding the right hashtags/keywords, one of our posts can turn up in several different Feeds at once and reach way more accounts beyond the ones that are already following us. As you can see from the links on the sidebar, we created some Feeds of our own. In doing so, we became aware of something a little troubling. Everyone keeps repeating that unlike other social media platforms, Bluesky has no algorithm. Of course some Feeds obviously do, like Discover, but those are obvious. However, things aren't that simple. All of our Feeds (at least the ones we have control over) were made with SkyFeed, which, when Bluesky proudly announced that there were 40 thousand active Feeds on the platform, was responsible for more than 35 thousand of them. Well, here are some of the things SkyFeed lets you exclude from your custom made Feed:
- Item
- Image Count
- Like Count
- Reply Count
- Repost Count
- Embed
- Duplicates
- List of Users
- Language
If you pick Item, you get even more options as you can remove any post that is:
- a Post
- a Reply
- Has labels
- Has no labels
- Is in Hellthread (which is a massive thread that users can’t escape from) (fortunately, this happened before we joined)
- Is not in Hellthread
- Is repost
None of this is visible and you’ll never know if any or how many of these filters were applied by the Feed creator unless they tell you. Our own Feeds have filters to remove Duplicates and we used the RegEx block to mute some self-promotion-related words, like ‘amazon’ if it turns up on a link, to prevent Spam and keep the focus on reader talk. Yes, we’re also trying to self-promote, but there are plenty of less specific and much more popular Feeds for that. We stopped excluding replies, as that was removing some interesting stuff. The ones based on engagement, however, are very close to Twitter/X’s big accounts-focus, and could lead to a vicious cycle in which it becomes impossible for smaller accounts to break in. The possibility of removing Reposts does seem a very effective way to kill those annoying accounts that do nothing but re-post others’ content. It also makes the requests to re-post stuff to reach more people a clear sign that few appear to have bothered trying to learn how things work. The Duplicates option is less severe, as it only lasts for a limited period of time. So, if a Feed picks up posts from the last 3 days, as long as a post is older than 3 days, a re-post will turn up. To be fair, none of the Feeds we’re following seems to be doing any of this, and maybe no one else is. However, it’s easy to see what could happen, especially as more Twitter refugees join the platform. If things do get more exclusionary, a user who wants nothing more than to read posts and find accounts with similar interests, could create their own custom-made Feed with no filters to see everything. An account trying to self-promote, like ours, faces a bigger challenge, as it would then need others to follow said Feed, which isn’t easy if few are seeing the account to begin with and even less seem to have any interest in searching for Feeds. So, something that we felt might even reduce the number of followers by making it easier to catch the posts you’re interested in from a specific account, might end up becoming another popularity contest in which each lost follower is a death knell.
THIRD PARTY APPS
Bluesky lets you connect to third party apps to add functionalities. So far, we've tried 4 of them - 3 Feed builders and an alternative interface. We discuss Feed builders in the next post, but here, the fourth one is more important. As of January of this year, Skeetdeck allows users to save drafts and later, it added the ability to write threads directly while composing a post. So, you can save drafts on Bluesky... through Skeetdeck. We haven't actually tried it, though, but checked the app and while it shows you the Feeds you made and offers the additional advantage of being able to mute accounts from a post with no need to go to that person's profile, it doesn't import the Feeds you're already following and doesn't let you pick Don't Show More Like This in Discover. The settings you can access are limited and of course, you can't edit your profile, so you'll have to keep switching between apps. This is all so bizarre. While we think it's weird that you must use another app to build Feeds when Bluesky keeps advertising them as a way for users to better curate the content they see, at least that seems something a little too complex to add to a social media app. But having to sign into another app to be able to save drafts is just nuts.
MODERATION
An unseen algorithm isn't the only problem one can face on Bluesky. Its moderation tools have a great deal of potential for stifling engagement, too. The Lists are public lists of accounts that anyone can make and which allow whomever subscribes to them to mute or block a whole bunch of people in one go. Some of these Lists are very, very long and it’s highly unlikely anyone will bother to read all names, much less check each Profile to see if the list maker was correct in their assessment. Worse, it's also possible to add or remove accounts from said List without needing to make a new one… Do people constantly check the Lists they subscribed to to see if everything is in order? It’s easy to see how crazy things can become. All you need is a wannabe little dictator and an earnest-sounding appeal to the well-intended masses to cut someone off from a huge chunk of the Bluesky community. We see why Bluesky made the Lists public - this way an affected account can know what happened and who did it. However, we can’t help but wonder why they even thought that was a good idea in the first place. Has the Bluesky Team met other human beings apart from each other? The number of ways in which this could be misused is astronomical. Even we ended up on 2 Lists! One ended up removing us, but last time we checked, we were still on the other one. We used https://bsky.thieflord.dev and turns out that we’ve been blocked by several people we’ve never interacted with, and are still in this Mute List called ‘not in feeds’. It’s a very eclectic List, which was made by yet another account we never interacted with because we, along with ‘most’ of the other people (wait, most? What did the others do?) on the List ‘post objectional post that shouldn’t be in any feeds’. Therefore, the List maker asks people to ‘Please Use it to filter user out of your feeds’. Since muting is private, we have no idea how many people have used this List to remove us and our 'objectional post' from their Feeds. Still, we were pretty surprised to find out that there are people out there who went to the trouble of blocking us, and putting us on a List complete with a warning to the Bluesky community. This was made by a small account, but if it had been a bigger one, things wouldn't seem so funny.
The Labels sound equally problematic, and at least one of the biggest Labelers recently imploded. One of the accusations levelled at them was precisely incorrect labelling. Much like with the Lists, you must trust that the person/team applying the labels won't make mistakes or act maliciously. However, they're an even bigger problem than the Lists because there's no way of knowing if anyone labelled your account unless you subscribe to that particular labelling service or someone tells you. Oh, and if someone labels your account as something, that label may apply to all your posts regardless of what they're about.
COMMUNITY
Along with the alleged lack of algorithm, something else that often gets mentioned in relation to Bluesky is how much nicer the people are than on Twitter. Except, we've seen some very nice and supportive exchanges on Twitter, and some very nasty ones on Bluesky. There's also plenty of complaints about how ditching the invite-only system made things worse because the newbies ruined everything, so they're not particularly welcoming. The 'nicer' people can be pretty insufferable and aggressive. The discussion about Alt Text that routinely pops up on our Following Feed is a good example. On the surface, they're fighting for a good cause - accessibility - but the reactions are just out there. Artists' concerns about Alt Text helping AI to better steal their work are simply dismissed, and some outright accuse those who don't use it of hating blind people. And sometimes they're not even talking to the artists, just complaining among themselves and basking in their superiority. A really bad convo that did involve an artist, had the caring, compassionate Alt Text supporters saying they hoped he'd go blind. We're not talking about a State-sponsored institution or a news outlet or anyone with a greater responsibility towards the public - these are private citizens sharing their work with fellow artists and potential future clients. We always add Alt Text to the book quotes, but not the panels from our books. We could say that this hurts engagement, as some people insist they won't like or re-post anything without Alt Text, but since there are no stats, we have no idea. There also appear to be some Bluesky Elders who put way too much emphasis on the 'social' bit of social media. To a newbie complaining about lack of engagement it was told that the best way to get it, on a platform that has a tool that picks up several hashtags at once from all over the place to present it to whomever uses it, was to actively seek out communities and reply to people's posts. This was funny because they didn't have a problem finding that post, and because it comes across as terribly conceited - they will only acknowledge others' existence if they go to them.
There are several well organized writing communities on Bluesky, with weekly prompts and challenges, but we always feel a little on the outside because our books are digital comics. There's also a Feed named 'Writing Community', though there are other writing-related ones. You can see some of the Feeds we're following on the sidebar. They're also the main ones we try to post to.
MIXED RESULTS
Between the Lists and the Labels and the Elders, Bluesky sometimes feels like a minefield. We have doubts about the platform's future as a whole and as a good place for self-promotion in particular. Still, we keep trying and it's certainly more rewarding than Threads, even if the self-promo posts are mostly a failure. We know we should try following more accounts (but not too many, or we could be labeled 'engagement hacking'), but as you can guess from this blog's title header, we're not really in the mood for that.
