With the disgraceful fall from glory that is Twitter’s existence since a certain billionaire took over, I’ve spent a lot of hours—way too many hours, let’s say—roaming the internet in search of a new microblogging home. For a while that was Mastodon. For reasons I’m not going to get into here, I’ve moved on from that platform and am currently all in on Bluesky.

So, what the heck is Bluesky?

Bluesky is a lot like how Twitter used to be. (No, I will not be calling it by its new name. Its new name is very stupid.) It looks like Twitter and functions like Twitter but it’s got some key differences.

• it’s still in development and still in beta
• it’s currently invite-only (you can join their waitlist or beg a friend for an invite; members receive 1 invite every 2 weeks)
• there are no DMs (this will likely change in the future)
• hashtags aren’t clickable but the search function is pretty good and users have a workaround for that
• it’s got custom feeds (more on that later)
• Twitter founder Jack Dorsey was an early investor in Bluesky and is on the board but is not involved with how it functions and certainly does not run on, no matter what your Mastodon-loving friend might say

I’m already on Bluesky. Why are you telling me this?

It seemed necessary before getting to the good part of the post. Context, amirite? There was a flood of new Bluesky users the day after Twitter’s rebrand went live. Many users considered the rebrand and the announcement of its new business goal the death of the platform they loved for many years and went looking for familiar-looking territory. I myself was on it for about 14 years, joining up when I was a fresh-faced college student studying Journalism. With so many new users coming in at once, a wide variety of new custom feeds were born. Bluesky allows users to pin several customized timelines to their home feed and flip between them easily. The default feed is made up of posts from people you follow (newest at the top, as God intended) but some popular custom feeds are: What’s Hot Classic (popular posts), Discover (popular posts based on what stuff you like), Gardening, Art, etc. If you’re searching for a topic for a custom feed, you’re probably going to find it at GoodFeeds. It’s not affiliated with Bluesky but wow, it’s awesome! From there you can see newly created feeds, search for feeds, explore popular feeds, etc.

Focus, Woman. Gimme Those Bookish Custom Feeds!

This list is probably not complete and will likely be outdated by the time I press publish. If you comment below or send me the link on Bluesky, I’ll be happy to add more. (BTW, my handle is jilly.ca over here.) I recommend checking the feed’s description to see what you need to include in your post for it to show up in the feed and then pinning it for easy access.

• Bsky Book Club
• BookSky 📚💙
• Books 📚
• Books
• Discount Books (I made this one – here’s where authors can promote their free or temporary discounted ebooks)
• Promote Them Books
• Book Reviews
• Queer Bookworms 🌈📚
• Skybrarians

• Romancelandia
• Historical Fiction+ (hey, I made that one! Histfic, historical romance, historical mysteries, etc)
• Non-Fiction (I made this one too)
• Women’s Fiction
• Spec List (Speculative Literature)
• Scifi & Fantasy (all media)
• Sci-Fi Fantasy Books
• Horror Writing
• Poetry
• Comic Talk
• Audio Drama
• KidLit
• Sapphic books

There are a LOT of writing/writer feeds as well. Make sure to check out Helen Whistberry’s wonderful thread for those links. Let me know in the comments (or tag me on Bluesky) if I missed any (I’m sure I did and I’m sorry)! Follow me on Bluesky: jilly.ca