Bluesky and BookSky for newbies

There is a bit of learning curve when it comes to bluesky and BookSky so here's some advice from me, the BookSky moderator, on how to maximize your experience on bluesky and BookSky too.

Follow the BookSky admin account on bluesky! I will post new feeds there, as well as announcements, polls about upcoming additions to the BookSky ecosystem and respond to requests for help as best I can. You are also welcome to follow my personal bluesky account, but I do post 18+ content and some people are very distressed by that so please don't do anything that would cause you undue stress.

On that note, I recommend going into your personal moderation settings and making sure that you have the settings applied here that are going to make your bluesky experience most enjoyable. You can set limits for viewing or hiding adult content, mute specific words or hashtags, limit who can reply to your posts and more.

If you already own a domain through your work or side hustle or have always wanted to own a cool website domain, I also recommend verifying yourself with your domain. This provides an additional layer of verification and whether you’re verifying with your professional website domain or ilovetacos.cool it shows that you’re a real person who went through the effort of changing your default username and not a spambot (of which there are many on bluesky).

Don’t stress about the bots. There are bots on bluesky! They might follow you. They might comment some ChatGPT garbage under your posts or have a very silly bio. Just block them or mute or report them. Nobody is personally harassing you with them, they follow everybody. It’s annoying but it’s not a big deal and they usually get taken down within a day or two. As moderator, I do my best to remove them from BookSky when I see them, but you can always tag the BookSky admin account on bluesky if there are any that I've missed.

Don’t mass follow or engage in other ‘engagement hacking’ behavior. Yes, I know this is common on other platforms, but on bluesky it makes you look like a spammer. There are ‘moderation lists’ where you can block or mute anyone who is following tons and tons of people and a lot of people use them which means if you're following thousands and thousands of people, you will inadvertently get blocked by a lot of people on the site. I know some shady social media coaches recommend follow farming / mass follow backs as it can have great short term results, but it is NOT the move on bluesky. Part of my job as moderator is making sure that spammers are not able to post on the feed so I do not recommend any sort of behavior that will make bluesky (or me) think you are a spambot.

Don't blindly trust moderation lists. Moderation lists are user generated lists that you can subscribe to to block/mute people en masse. I used to love this feature of bluesky, but once I got added to both a MAGA list and a communist list in the same day, I realized the system was irreparably broken. There are so many false positives in all of the big block lists and people often use them in petty or malicious ways to target people they don't like. I find it way more effective to mute/block individual users who are irritating to me or mute hashtags that I don't want to see more of. If you choose to use moderation lists, choose small ones where you are very familiar with the criteria they're using to add people or ones that are run by people you personally know and trust. I don't use any blocklists right now and I don't think my experience on bluesky has been negatively impacted at all.

Assume good intentions from other bluesky users. A lot of people just joining us on bluesky are used to the combative nature of Twitter and that is not the vibe here (at least not on BookSky). It’s okay for other people to have different opinions or preferences than you about books, reading (or anything else). Let them do their own thing, and you can do yours.

Customize your experience. Annoyed by the #20bookchallenge posts clogging up the booksky feed? You can long press on the hashtag and mute it so you’ll never see it again. You can also open the moderation settings and add other hashtags or terms that you never want to see again. You can mute the word romantasy, the name of your least favorite author or the name of the book that just came out that you really, really don’t want to get spoilered for you.

Join us on the BookSky Patreon! There are a lot of cool things I have planned for BookSky in 2025 (brand new feeds! ad-free browsing! a custom labeler? a wiki about how to use bluesky? resources for authors and publishers?) and Patrons will get a vote in how all of that shakes out. Plus, if you're an author or illustrator or publisher (etc.), when you become a Patron, your name / site / bio will be featured on this website as a 'Artist in Residence!'

Still got more questions? Maybe I already answered them in our brand new FAQ!