How to make the most of the decentralized platform and grow your following

You may have heard about this Bluesky thing. It's catching on.

Recently the social media platform surpassed 20 million users and it's showing no signs of slowing down. The site skyrocketed with 500% more traffic since the U.S. election, as Elon Musk has taken X, formerly Twitter, into an increasingly political direction over the last several months.

Jump Ahead:

Bluesky's secret sauce: It's decentralized. It uses an open-source framework called AT Protocol, giving those outside the company both transparency and much more control. Instead of signing up on Bluesky's server, you can set up your own personal data server if you'd like, where you maintain full control and can set your own rules.

In this way, you can set up your domain name as your user name. While optional, this has an added benefit of verifying your identity for other users. Here's Bluesky's guide to setting this up.

Bluesky's decentralized nature also allows for the ecosystem to evolve in any number of ways, as opposed to a platform like X where the company dictates everything, from the algorithm to future functionality. Bluesky encourages developers to build on top of it and gives creators independence from their platform if they want it, while also reducing the risk of censorship. You can set up custom feeds to follow what you'd like and messages are encrypted end to end.

Then there's the other very practical reason you should be on Bluesky, if you're not already: A huge amount of people are there. It's not just the tech savvy anymore, either. The general public has started to flood to the platform looking for a choice beyond X and Meta-owned Threads. And more and more brands, and celebrities, are establishing their presences.

So what are you waiting for? Here's how to get started:

Once you're in, you'll see it's a lot like Twitter used to be. That isn't by mistake. In fact, Twitter founder and former CEO Jack Dorsey was involved in the beginnings of Bluesky, co-founding it in 2019. The familiar UX allows you to hit the ground running quickly. You can quote posts, repost them, heart them, reply, utilize hashtags, and all of the rest you'd expect.

What you won't see? It's not as toxic as other social media platforms, at least not in its current form. It doesn't force controversial content into your feed like some other platforms do. Instead, it'll be curated based on what you select and the custom feeds or lists that you set up. That makes for more fruitful discussion and less shouting, fighting, or controversy in general.

--> Follow RebelMouse on Bluesky<--

Once you're there, be sure to promote your presence on Bluesky:

One more tip: Look for bsky.app or "sky" as the referral source in either GA4 or Looker Studio to track the impact of traffic from Bluesky.