A Bluesky Starter Guide for Elixir Devs

It feels like the eXodus of the Elixir community from X to Bluesky is in full swing. Even if you don’t want to abandon X yet, setting up camp on Bluesky is a smart choice. I wrote this guide to make the switch easier for you. Here’s how to join the Elixir community on Bluesky and some key terms you should know about.

🔗 1. How to sign up

Just go to bsky.app and create an account. Don’t worry if your preferred username isn’t available. We’ll replace it with your private domain in the next step.

🔗 2. Use your domain as handle

When you sign up, you will get a username like @pjullrich.bsky.social, but the cool kids use their own domain as handle, for example @peterullrich.com. This looks cool and verifies your account at the same time.

You can start the setup from the menu Settings > Change my handle. Click I have my own domain, enter your domain and add the given DNS record to your DNS provider. Then wait a few minutes and click Verify DNS Record.

And that’s it! If you get lost, the Bluesky official guide provides screenshots of each step.

🔗 3. Set up your profile

Seriously, please add a profile picture, name, and description to your account right away. Half of the new accounts who follow me have no name, description, profile pic, or banner. That makes it really hard for me to know who you are and to follow back since I’m terrible with names!

🔗 4. Use #ElixirLang

We’ve retired the hashtag #MyElixirStatus for #ElixirLang during the big migration, so please use it deliberately. DON’T use #Elixir unless you want your content to compete with potion makers and D&D players. It’s #ElixirLang from now on.

🔗 5. Find folks via Starter Packs

Starter Packs are a Bluesky invention that is so obvious and yet so genius. They are user-curated lists of users and feeds related to a specific topic and you can follow all mentioned users with a single click. Starter Packs make it easy to find and follow the most important people who talk about a certain topic or are generally interesting.

I created a Starter Pack for Elixir-ists and other BEAM people, and so did Peter Solnica and Ryan Winchester

• My Starter Pack
• Peter’s Starter Pack
• Ryan’s Starter Pack

You can find more Starter Packs in the unofficial and not complete Bluesky Directory.

A small tip: Check the Starter Packs regularly because we add new Elixir folks regularly as they join Bluesky.

🔗 6. Find your X connections on Bluesky

The Sky Follower Bridge browser extension helps you quickly find the Bluesky accounts for people you follow on X. You won’t find all of them, but this will give you a good starting point for migrating your network from X to Bluesky.

🔗 7. Add more Feeds

When you sign up for Bluesky, you only have the Discover feed, but just like on X, you can add more feeds to your Home view. For example, you can follow the Bluesky team, posts mentioning #ElixirLang, my list of Elixir People, a feed that shows posts you pinned, and more.

The fastest way to find and add feeds is to navigate to bsky.app/feeds or to click on the hashtag symbol at the top right of your Home view. You can browse and add feeds under the Discover New Feeds section.

🔗 8. Follow a Labeler

The Bluesky network is policed by two groups of moderators: The official Trust & Safety team and independent moderation services. Moderation services are also called Labelers because they add labels to posts and accounts that show certain behaviours. Bluesky users can subscribe to these labelers and allow them to warn or block certain content automatically.

The most popular labeler is probably Skywatch. If you don’t want to moderate your timeline manually, I suggest you subscribe to Skywatch and select under each label whether they should warn about or block posts for certain topics.

🔗 9. Import your old Tweets

If you don’t want to lose your previous .. ahem … art, you can import your old tweets either through the paid BlueArk service or the free Twitter-to-Bluesky script.

🔗 10. Delete your old Tweets

Once you’re ready to take the plunge and expunge your X account, you can delete all your old tweets using either the paid TweetDelete or the free tweetXer script.

🔗 11. Show your X you’ve moved on

You can change your X banner to one of these to show folks where to find you from now on:

courtesy of bluesky-migrate.com

🔗 12. Watch Bluesky grow

I enjoy checking the number of total Bluesky users tremendously. Since the US elections, many people have left X for Bluesky, and currently, 1 MILLION new users join per DAY!

You can watch the Bluesky user count grow in almost real-time on these websites:

• bsky.jazco.dev/stats
• bcounter.nat.vg

🔗 13. Get back TweetDeck (and more tools!)

If you are looking for a TweetDeck alternative for Bluesky, look no further than the freemium deck.blue.

Justin Jackson wrote up a nice overview of current Bluesky projects. It’s worth checking this list regularly because Justin updates it whenever he finds a new project.

🔗 14. Consume the Bluesky Firehose

Bluesky offers a public firehose which sends you everything that’s happening. You can connect to either the simplified, JSON-based firehose Jetstream or the CBOR-encoded Firehose directly. I streamed about how to connect to the Firehose here.

I used WebSockex to establish the WebSocket connection and CBOR to decode the CBOR packages. However, I ended up deleting the CBOR step and connect to the JSON-based Jetstream firehose directly.

🔗 15. Follow me, maybe?

As a terminally online person, it was hard for me to leave X, but I’m more than happy to spend most of my waking hours on Bluesky now. If you liked this article, maybe give me a follow over there and let’s continue the conversation. See you in the sky!

🔗 Extra: Warning - You’re being watched

– tin foil hat on –

One note of caution: Bluesky is a truly public network. Everyone can see everything, and anyone can connect to the firehose, or the JSON-based Jetstream, and collect and store everything. This is different from X, which removed public access to their firehose and - at least in the pre-Elon times - blocked even the CIA and FBI from accessing it, at least most of the time.

So, when you post on Bluesky, you can be almost certain that all major law enforcement agencies will collect and store your content for all eternity given their unfiltered and unlimited access to everything that has happened on the platform.

Just to be clear: If your X account is public, they were probably already able to do this because they can scrape your public tweets, likes, replies, and retweets. However, scraping at this scale is infinitely more difficult than connecting to an API that gives you the data in a machine-readable format.

And to be double-clear: This is almost certainly happening on Mastodon as well because anyone can start their own instance, connect to the fediverse, and listen to everything. In fact, any distributed social network will face this issue unless they grant network access only to select instances.

And to be triple-clear: Even private social networks comply with law enforcements and frequently hand over user data if instructed to do so. Funny enough, X complies with many more requests (71%) than Twitter ever did (20-30%)!

All this to say: If you post on Bluesky, Mastodon, and probably now also X, be mindful about what you post and don’t incriminate yourself. That’s all!

– tin foil hat off –