Our tips to make Blue Sky the best alternative to X (Twitter)
Blue Sky is a social network competing with X.com (formerly Twitter). The platform is gaining success despite its invitation system. Here are our tips for making it your favorite social network.
As with every new major problem with Elon Musk’s Twitter, an alternative to the social network is gaining success. In the absence of Threads, still blocked in Europe, more and more people are turning to Blue Sky.
The social network is still available by invitation only and it should become compatible with Mastodon in the coming months. Very similar in appearance to Twitter, the social network offers differentiating functions that are important to know to improve your experience. Here are our tips for mastering Blue Sky.
Of course, the first tip is to follow us on Blue Sky.
Customize the content you can see
The first step is to configure your moderation settings on Blue Sky. In this menu, you will be able to define whether you want to see explicit images, whether they are images depicting violence or adult content.
Blue Sky authorizes this type of content on its platform, but allows each account to adjust its visibility.
This menu is also where you can mute or block accounts.
Improve your image sharing
Blue Sky’s netiquette is to provide alternative text for images to describe them for visually impaired people. This is a good practice to generally adopt on the web, but Blue Sky goes further with a simple option.
In your Blue Sky account settings, you can activate the option “ Require alt text before posting » so that the social network requires you to indicate such text each time you want to share an image or photo. A good way to get into this civic habit and make your publications more accessible.
Configure your algorithm
Blue Sky has the particularity of offering you to adjust the organization of the main flow of the service’s home page, in other words the algorithm, yourself. You can, for example, limit the display of replies, hide reposts (equivalent to retweets), or quotes from other posts.
Forget the somewhat toxic “for you”, here you configure exactly what you want to discover. With the Feeds system, Blue Sky also offers an à la carte algorithm system. These are user-designed smart lists. For example, the “Mutuals” feed is automatically made up of posts from people you follow and who follow you back.
Never provide your password
Blue Sky offers an open API, which means that many tools are developed online to exploit the social network without controlling the platform: browser extensions, alternative applications on smartphones and even practical services.
Some of these services or applications may require you to identify yourself with your Blue Sky account. For example the Deck.blue site which offers an interface and functions similar to Tweetdeck. He is very important to never give out your password account to these services. Instead, you can generate application passwords.
This option available in the Blue Sky settings allows you to generate a unique password to indicate to your application. So, the latter knows this generated password and can authenticate you, but it does not know your real password, the one which will allow you to log into your account. If the service in question is hacked, malicious people will only have access to the one-time password.
Practical third-party tools
Here is a small selection of very practical third-party tools for using Blue Sky. Remember to generate application passwords for use. Do not tell them your account password.
- Deck.blue: an interface similar to Tweetdeck
- Sky Follower Bridge: an extension for Chrome and Firefox that allows you to recover your Twitter subscriptions
- Graysky: an alternative application for Android and iPhone
If you also have tools or extensions to recommend, do not hesitate to suggest them in comments.
