OH I REMEMBERED SOMETHING if you don't care about a thread someone you would like to keep following is posting, you can click the three dots in the corner of it and hit "mute thread" and it should hide it from you. super useful for sports threads, live tv blogging, etc

i think that's everything i have learned about bluesky that either a) people seem to not know coming in and are driving me crazy doing or b) is counterintuitive and/or a weird design thing that newbies couldn't be expected to know.

oh if you see a post that has a weird link preview that goes nowhere that's because of a weird thing bluesky does when you make a typo involving a period. the explanation for why would be kind of boring but if you have one of these come up, you can get rid of it by hitting the x in the corner

oh by the way if you aren't seeing adult content but you wish you were, go to the menu, click "moderation", and then turn adult content on. and then tip the sex workers who post it if you can! they are doing good work

oh and a thing you might not be used to here is that the website periodically bugs out completely and you can't use assorted features. this is NOT ON YOU it's just the site is growing real fast and the infrastructure has a hard time keeping up.

highly recommend doing this if you are trans or could be mistaken for being trans, by the way, bluesky support has been sitting on their hands about a technical issue that lets accounts send self harm imagery in DMs and transphobes have been taking advantage of it.

this is kind of a niche issue but: if you are getting weird and hostile responses that feel a little off, there are some folks on here making accounts that automatically reply to large quantities of posts in a vaguely hostile manner. you can ignore them, and also, it's not personal

this is worth noting and also the case with many other search engines, including duckduckgo, which is what i use (it's not very good either)

if you have been around the block on the internet and everything i am saying here is incredibly obvious please feel free to block the account, btw, i will not judge you or be offended. i know this is incredibly basic

a lot of people here, including sex workers, shop owners, journalists, authors etc are doing public-facing jobs that require them to be on social media to self-promote. try not to be the bluesky version of the guy at the coffee shop who thinks the barista is flirting with him because she was nice.

calling people you hate by cute nicknames like "the orange stinker" or whatever for donald trump gets your post around people who muted "donald trump". this also goes for saying "tr*mp" or whatever. it's asshole behavior. also the nicknames are embarrassing for you

if you don't have an icon set people will assume you are a low-effort troll. this also goes for "avatars" that bluesky makes you choose when you sign up. this isn't an endorsement of that perception, which unfairly hits people who can't see the images, but you should know about it

"no _____ under 1,000" are a great way for trolls to work their way into groups for the sake of anything from stalking to flipping the account to be propaganda. it is very foolish to join in on these

some posts are in fact jokes

not everyone who criticizes the democratic party of the united states is a republican. i recommend against assuming that strangers who were posted into your feed by people you followed, presumably on purpose and through your own choice, are maga trolls.

if you see an account claiming to be a celebrity and their domain name isn't their official website there's a good chance it's fake. bluesky moderation sucks ass so they miss a ton of these

the "elonia" thing is transphobic and misogynistic (you are degrading musk for supposedly being a woman and you are degrading musk for supposedly being trans). it's also not actually funny. it's just cringe

i recommend actually googling the thing you are telling people to google before telling them to just google it because google doesn't really work anymore

if you reply to a post and then block the account you're replying to, your reply will be hidden, and they probably won't see it

if you see a quote post that just says BLOCKED there are several possibilities: -you blocked the person being quoted -the person being quoted blocked you -the person being quoted blocked the person doing the quoting -the person doing the quote post blocked the person being quoted

this website was made good by perverts and sex workers and if you don't want to see a wide and beautiful variety of posts from those accounts you need to adjust your own moderation settings, curate your timeline better, and possibly join threads instead if that doesn't work

if you follow more than a thousand accounts and have a fraction of that following you, everyone is going to assume you are doing some kind of scam, and they will not be interested enough to investigate what kind of scam

if you follow back everyone who follows you, you will end up getting blocked when one of the accounts you followed back turns out to be a troll and people use blockenheimer.click to mass block their followings

be chill about trans people

interested in a topic someone mentioned but don't have an actual response to their post? if you do a quote of their post instead of a reply, your conversational pivot can happen on your page and on your terms, and the original posters only have to follow along if they are actually interested

i got domain verified by buying my domain name through porkbun, which has a "bluesky" button and requires copy and pasting one (1) url. if you're on another registrar, here's the guide. bsky.social/about/blog/4... it literally took me less time than it takes for my tea to brew to do this

TO CHANGE YOUR DM SETTINGS: click on the speech bubble icon that takes you to your DMs. click the upper right hand button. change your settings to allow only DMs from people you follow, or for no one at all. there. now you don't have to put "no DMs" in your fucking bio

welcome to bluesky. we have spent the last year and change developing a site culture and frankly a bunch of people acting like twitter posting was normal and healthy coming here has completely fucked the vibes. this account is an attempt to correct that