Building community on Bluesky

For whatever reason that probably isn't totally healthy, I love short-form text social platforms. The mix of humor, sincerity, shitposting, and real time information is a hot mess on the best of days, but all of that frenetic unfiltered energy has an unmistakable allure. It's like being in a panopticon of bored amateur poets.

Over the years, these platforms have helped me build connections and friendships, and played a large part in my career choices. I got my first job in product design because I saw a tweet about an exciting role, and took a moonshot attempt to make it happen. When I quit that job under public duress, the design community helped me out, and sent me countless messages of support on Twitter. (That meant a lot.)

I went to work for Twitter because I loved the product despite all its warts, and felt compelled to contribute to it. I ended up leading design for the main timeline of the app, the literal front door of Twitter. It was pretty damn cool!

Things were going good, but then the doors fell off in dramatic fashion. I decided to quit Twitter once as an employee, and again as a user a few months later. Since then, I've been sort of wandering around amongst the Twitter alternatives, giving a fair shot to Mastodon, Threads, and Bluesky for the last 2 years.

Short text vibe check

Mastodon and its technical underpinnings were all structurally great, but the wrist-slapping social norms, clunky UX, and lack of algorithmic feeds made it feel too insular and limited for me.

Then I tried to settle into Threads, but from the start I was deeply skeptical of the platform's product design decisions, draconian moderation, and big tech ownership. It was an uncomfortable alliance to contribute to an app that I didn't trust.

And then there's Bluesky. I was on there very early—I'm user ~30,000 or so—but the first phase of Bluesky was too feral even for my tolerance. Hellthreads, Alf kink, and lewd selfies weren't quite what I was looking for, so I kinda dipped out.

But the concepts underlying Bluesky were always incredibly compelling. The Bluesky project got started while I was working at Twitter, and our teams were working on a lot of the same ideas—custom algorithmic feeds, starter packs (we called them Followpacks), user-centered moderation controls, and more. These features surely would have landed at Twitter too, if it hadn't gotten X-ed out.

Since the US election, people have been fleeing X for Bluesky, so I thought it was worth giving the platform a second shot. It’s matured so much since the early days, and now the foundations feel solid, full of potential, and fully detached from the Jack Dorsey/Twitter origins.

Hello #designsky

I had no big intention of trying to build a community on Bluesky, but thought it would be interesting to play around with the tools, and hopefully get some friends together in the process.

I started by building a custom feed around the hashtag #designsky to understand how this worked. (Here's my first test post for this.)

There are several advantages to a custom feed:

• it can be sorted in a ranked order rather than chronological.
• it can have a mix of different inputs—like, posts with a hashtag, posts with keywords, posts from users on a certain list, and so on.
• it can be very broadly inclusive or constrained, so you have flexibility in curating what shows up, and what the vibe is like.
• it's super lightweight. People don't need to jump through a bunch of hoops to contribute to it or read it.

The Designsky feed felt pretty amazing even in its first version, and it picked up a bit of traction with some other designers. So I decided to keep going, and pulled together a starter pack of designers linked to the custom feed. Since then I've been gradually tuning all of this and expanding what shows up.

The internals of this setup are complex, because on Bluesky, starter packs, lists, hashtags, and feeds are all different concepts. I made them work together like this:

• The #designsky hashtag is the unifying element that allows anyone to get a post into the Designsky feed. You can also just browse the hashtag if you don't care about feeds.
• The starter pack is linked to the custom feed for discoverability, so if someone sees the starter pack, they can also find the feed.
• I also maintain a separate list of designers who are in the starter pack. I use that list to automatically include designy posts that contain keywords (like "design," "UX," and that sort of stuff.) That way, members don't have to constantly tag #designsky for their posts to show up in the feed.
• I added a second starter pack when the first one hit the 150-person limit.
• These are all self-reinforcing feedback loops that help the community build traction in different dimensions.

All of this is very manual and annoying to maintain, and I don't have a ton of time for this! So I'm a somewhat lousy moderator of things. But it's been incredibly fun and rewarding to see the design community rebuilding itself and rediscovering old and new friendships.

Will this work out in the long term?

A platform's design and its underlying philosophies drive how people interact and behave on that platform. So far Bluesky is doing all the right things, both technically and philsophically. I'm optimistic that we finally have a new place worth investing in—for the first time in a long while.

Realistically there will always be capitalist pressures and a million hard problems to deal with on any social platform, and I wouldn't be surprised if those issues eventually happen on Bluesky too. But we can enjoy it while it's still great.

If you're on the butterfly app, please say hello! 👋🦋