HivePosh started working with Bluesky recently, so the attention of many Hivers, including myself, is riveted to this social network. I've spent some time researching it and here's what I've discovered.

My first impression was that Bluesky was a copy of old Twitter which made my initial experience smooth. However, as it has turned out, it also has an original feature at its core: feeds.

There are two default feeds on Bluesky:

When a new user publishes a post, he/she gets views and likes from these two feeds. But there are many more of them. For example:

How about this:

What is more important:

Feeds Often Play the Role of Subreddits or Publications

For example, these are the Bluesky's top 3 cat feeds (from goodfeeds.co):

Other popular feeds:

These are screenshots from goodfeeds.co, a Bluesky feed searcher.

Anybody can create a feed, for example, on blueskyfeedcreator.com.

The degree of moderation of feeds varies greatly.

How to get included? Feed settings let you create a closed club for chosen authors or an automatically generated feed based on a specific hashtag. You should try one to know for sure.

How to Optimize Bluesky Posts

To get into the moderators' field of vision, your Bluesky post (for example, Hive link share) must have relevant terms. By terms, they mean:

• a hashtag #
• an emoji or series or emojis
• regular words or phrases (and that means that the longer your Bluesky post is, the better chance to be spotted by mods of feeds).

From feed moderation dashboard on blueskyfeedcreator.com with my examples of terms

Every feed chooses its own terms. For example:

Yes, emojis work as hashtags on Bluesky:

Each feed also chooses what areas to scan for terms:

• Post text
• Alt text (an image description)
• Embedded link

If your post has a hashtag, emoji, or words chosen by a feed as terms, it will often only send your post to that feed's approval queue. Therefore, posting good content and keeping your account neat is crucial for getting accepted by the best feeds.

Feeds can whitelist and blacklist users. So users with spammy-looking accounts have chances to never get access to some feeds.

I guess that, when you have a decent thematic account, you can contact relevant feeds to ask them to consider adding you to their list of allowed users:

From feed moderation dashboard on blueskyfeedcreator.com

The rest settings are:

From feed moderation dashboard on blueskyfeedcreator.com

Sharing Hive Links on Bluesky

There are two possible strategies for sharing Hive links on Bluesky:

• Link dropping. A quick link sharing with minimal effort, resulting in relatively limited attention from Discover and Following feeds. If you don't have time and interest in anything serious on Bluesky, that's your way.
• Genuine account building on Bluesky. That will open access to feeds and hearts of a broader audience on Bluesky. Rare sharing links to the best Hive content will be more fruitful in that case. That's your way if you want to establish a strong account on a growing social media.

An Idea of How to Onboard from BlueSky to Hive

• Create a feed on Bluesky
• Ask Hivers to support it with likes for better ranking on goodfeeds.co and other feed searchers.
• Run regular contests with prizes in HBD / $HIVE to make the feed more popular on Bluesky and make Bluesky users sign up for Hive front-ends

The more likes a feed has, the better it is ranked on feed searchers like goodfeeds.co. "Like" means you bookmark the feed (it'll be available on More Feed) and "Pin Feed" means you'll have access to the feed from your account's Home page"

I hope this has been a helpful read. Please share your thoughts on Bluesky and how your user experience was there!

The drawing was generated with PeakD AI: https://peakd.com/ai