I’m not referring to John Lennon and Yoko Ono’s song by the way. Instead I am referring to the ‘new-to-most’ social media platform called ‘BlueSky’.

I’ll explain why and give you top 10 features and tips further down the article. In the meantime, here is my path to finding this out since the 2024 US Presidential Election.

Yes I own a business that encourages the use of social media for business, but when it comes to personal use, exploring hobbies and interests, my recent experience before finding BlueSky has been pretty rancid.

For me, I’d say the ‘evil intent through content’ took hold around Brexit time of 2016 and has increased exponentially, initiated by humans and harvested by bots.

That is because I have been using X, formerly Twitter as my primary platform to read news and information on the topics of politics, business, tech and football.

I have been on Twitter since December 2008. I used to like it, really like it. There’s some really funny and interesting content there.

The last 2 years though, particularly since new ownership and brand change to ‘X’, have been nothing short of an eye watering cringe fest of hatred, racism, misogyny, homophobia, transphobia, bigotry, weaponising, manipulation… and more trite.

Throw in the invasion of bots, adverts and an inability to have any meaningful conversation or debate without a tirade of abuse, means I was still begrudgingly frequenting a social dustbin and leaving with a headspace full of sh*t.

My disdain finally peaked as the results of the 2024 American Presidential Election were announced. My understanding of X being owned by a narcissistic maniac with a bunch of grotesque power hungry mates (that will be enemies to each other within 18 months) was made clear and forced me into action.

Last Sunday I had a moment whilst peeling some carrots, post social feed scroll a few minutes earlier. I had seen a tweet mentioning BlueSky. I had a delayed reaction and decided I needed to investigate this BlueSky malarky some more.

In case you are wondering, the carrots weren’t blue, they were your tried and tested loveable orange, but colours must have triggered me in some way.

So onto BlueSky I went. I created the @whyus company account @singletonatwork personal work account and a personal musings account and started to explore.

It was like going back to your hometown after a few years away. Tipping caps, nods and smiling ‘hi’s’ to people (@handles in this case) you kind of recognised positively from yesteryear, but couldn’t quite remember why. There was also regular engagers that were migrating at exactly the same time, minus carrots.

The atmosphere was welcoming, conversation and friendly discussions were taking place, the sun was cracking bluesky flags and I felt like cracking open a can of Woodpecker… ‘what a refreshing change’ I thought!

So why is this?
Well here are my top 10 features and findings so far.

1. Layout and usability
It’s pretty darn easy to use and find your way around. If you were on Twitter you’ll fly like the former bird, as it’s essentially the same look and layout pre X. After all it was conceived by Jack Dorsey, the former Twitter CEO, before he sold to that bloke that supports the 2025 president elect.

2. Starter Packs
You can create ‘Starter Packs’. People benefit from yours, and you benefit from other peoples. Basically, you create a group of up to 150 people you like and give it a name. Then you share it or pin to the top of your feed, and your followers can simply click ‘follow all’ to follow all the people in the starter pack. They / you will follow on the basis you / they trust each other’s judgement; that’s a friendly social thought isn’t it. This means it’s much quicker to get going and get valuable content on your feed to peruse or engage with.

3. Sky Follower Bridge 
This is another useful tool to find the followers or people you follow on X that have already moved over to BlueSky and you want to reacquaint with. It’s a Google Chrome extension though, so you’ll need to do this on a desktop / laptop.

4. Own your @Handle
This is a little complicated and I’ll create a separate guide to explain in more detail, but essentially you can either have a Bluesky handle (bsky.social) or use your own website hosting to have your own handle, thereby authenticating, or verifying yourself. This prevents platforms monetising by forcing payment to verify; aka X.

5. Reply Settings – You Choose
When posting, you can choose who can reply including everybody, nobody or a combination or people you follow that you have placed in your Lists.

6. Lists
Easily create ‘Lists’ so that you can organise the people you follow into topics (lists). This makes it easier to find people to refer back to, or posts you want to find and revisit.

7. Curated Feeds.
You can create feeds of handles (people) of a particular interest (tags), then share the feed for others to tag, thereby creating multiple interest feed timelines.

8. Mute, Filters and Blocks
Control what you do and don’t want to see by muting or blocking specific words, tags, images and people. This makes for a much more pleasant experience.

9. Create Threads
Posts are limited to 300 characters, but you can extend your post as a thread by simply clicking the + button to continue typing and keeping your longer post in one posting.

10. It’s free financially and of adverts!
You don’t pay to use it, you don’t pay for verifications, you don’t pay for direct messaging and it’s free of adverts (for now)!

Don’t get me wrong, it may not last. The bots, bullies and bad asses will infiltrate, but there is a world of goodwill on BlueSky at the moment. I do believe, right now, above us there is only bluesky in a positive environment.

On November 15th 2024 and 1 week post US Presidential Elections, 1,000,000, people have joined in 24 hours. BlueSky has jumped to #1 in the Apple App store and amassed over 15 million users. No I don’t think I’m a trend setter, I was late to the party too. In the following 5 days, they have amassed over 20 million users, t hat's 1 million a day.

The Guardian Newspaper this week officially announced (on X) it would no longer post content on X from its official accounts. No irony lost there. Every day, credible journalists are migrating to BlueSky and closing their X accounts.

As the conscious advertisers leave X, you would think it would be a financial disaster for its owner. It’s not though really is it. X was never about making money, more making fame and pathing the road to presidency. You can make a whole lot more money that way.

Some will call it a ‘leftist hugfest’, but right now, if I can find a place to read my interests, research and converse in a more open minded environment, I’m going to encourage others to join and engage all day long.

Will you be joining the ‘eXodus’ and giving BlueSky a try? If so, let’s see if we can get on over there.