Curating Your Social Media Feed

a.k.a. How I made Bluesky work for me

So social media right now is a mess. Conceivably, an author might be expected to maintain a presence on Facebook, Twitter/X, Instagram, Threads, Mastodon, Hive, Counter.Social, and Bluesky - and that’s before we get into things like YouTube and TikTok. Right now, I have accounts on Facebook, Twitter/X, Mastodon, and Bluesky, although I’m trying to wean myself off Twitter.

Thing is, I used to really, really love Twitter. It felt like both an old comfortable shoe and a wall of TV screens beaming my interests straight into my brain. My feed was a mixture of friends and sources of information that I trusted and found informative - and even the hated-by-many algorithm was incredibly adept at finding people and articles I liked.

Then Musk bought it, and it all went a bit, well, Fash. And if you’re saying it could have been worse, for me, it was. Because I’ve owned a Tesla since 2019.

It’s not been great. But where to go in this post-Twitter hellscape? Well I dabbled a little bit on Hive some months, but I seem to recall that not having a desktop site, which for me is quite a deal breaker (and then they had some kind of hideous security issue). I’d joined Mastodon some years ago, albeit not actually using, so I fired that account up again. Ultimately, I ended up making every post I made to four separate sites (Twitter, Facebook (Page), Mastodon, and Bluesky), but neither of them felt like home.

I like Mastodon, but I think I liked the concept and idea of Mastodon more than I liked the experience. Meanwhile, a lot of people were talking about Bluesky, but for me Bluesky just, well, didn’t work. It was just a lot of people who frankly, I wasn’t interested in. They were strangers. I would browse a bit and not feel particularly engaged. Truthfully, I’d be bored. And as time went on, I opened the app (or fired up the desktop site) less and less. I’d go weeks without checking it out.

But here’s the thing. And I’ll admit right now that this is where I’m going to dive straight into “No Shit, Sherlock!” territory. This is the bit where if I used tags on this site, I should be tagging this post it as “obvious, bloody”. If you’re not shaking your head when you read the bit I’m about to say and thinking to yourself, “Well, duh!” I’ll almost be a bit disappointed in you. But seriously, I think sometimes the obvious is so under our nose that we fail to notice it, and equally, it’s therefore sometimes worth just pointing it out.

The key is how I’d set up my Bluesky account some months ago, when I first signed up. I didn’t know anyone who was on Bluesky except for one author who I followed on Twitter. (I won’t mention their name, here, now, purely because it might seem like I’m taking a pop at either them or their followers, and I’m honestly not). Because Bluesky doesn’t have a Twitter-like algorithm (or at least, it didn’t seem to then), when I initially started up, I had an empty feed. So I took a short cut, which was to go to this author’s feed and follow everyone they followed.

(There was probably also a bit of author insecurity here, in that I was thinking of my Bluesky account as a promotional tool for me as an author to talk to people, rather than an entertainment / information tool for me to read interesting stuff, which means that I was hoping that if I followed a load of people, they’d follow me back, and I’d start to build my “audience”).

And of course, I ended with a feed that didn’t feel like mine, because it wasn’t mine. It was someone else’s. (I should say that I also did the old trick of automatically following anyone who subsequently followed me, but while that might be socially admirable, it’s also the sort of thing that makes more sense if you’re thinking of social media purely in terms of you talking to other people, rather than of you listening to other people).

When you follow your friends, you care about their victories and setbacks; when you follow someone else’s friends, not so much. When you follow people whose interests and lived experiences very closely align with yours, then the things they find interesting, you’ll likely find interesting too; but when the interests and lived experiences don’t align so closely, again, not so much.

This is not to in any way insult the author, or their followers, just to point out that a made-to-measure suit is only a brilliant fit if you’re the person it was made for.

So what did I do? Well first, I got ruthless. Darwinian, even. I went through every person I’d ended up following and clicked on their profile to check out their posts. I had a simple test. I would take just a few seconds to look at the last several posts they had made. If there was something in there that grabbed me, they made the cut. Otherwise, I unfollowed.

That probably took out about 60 to 70% my feed. I should say that if you’re one of those I culled, please try not to take it personally. Firstly, I was hardly thorough or scientific about it. Secondly, social media posts are like books, with taste being highly subjective and one’s man’s gold being another man’s stinker. Thirdly, a lot of social media posts (including many of mine) are highly personal and engage on an emotional level, which means if you know the person, or feel like you do, they might be very interesting, but if you don’t, they’ll be pretty pointless.

Then I followed one person, JC, an Irish acquaintance / friend-of-a-friend of mine, who on Twitter that morning had announced he was moving to Bluesky. And he was sort of the Patient Zero of my renewed Bluesky experience, because he followed a whole load of people (a lot of Irish friends and acquaintances, for example) that I’d followed on Twitter but had failed to find on Bluesky. (Possibly because they’d joined since I had).

(And if you’re asking how this is different from what I’d done with the author? Well in that case, I’d followed everyone he followed, nearly all of whom were completely unknown to me, where with JC I went though his list and followed only the small proportion who were people I’d met or interacted with, or who knew from Twitter were producers / finders of really interesting content.)

And suddenly, Bluesky felt a lot like Twitter had felt. (And in the wake of that, I did one other thing, which was to move the Twitter app to the far page of my iPhone’s display, and move the Bluesky app to the position that the Twitter app had previously occupied).

As I said, in a sense this is all obvious. But it was a lesson I’d needed to relearn. Every Social Media experience is different, vastly so, depending on who you choose to follow. (Just as you and I might both have Netflix, but we might be watching vastly different programming). As with everything in life, you get into it what you put back, and social media is no different. When joining a new platform, it might be tempting to just follow a whole bunch of people to fill your feed up, but that’s actually the worst thing to do. You need to curate your feed. And if the people who you want to follow aren’t yet on that platform, then well, wait. Give them time.

It’s not quite true that there are no short-cuts in life, but what is true that most things that look like short-cuts will turn out to be cul-de-sacs.

Going forward, I will make author-type posts to my Facebook page, Mastodon, and Bluesky, but I suspect Bluesky will end up being the platform I use in a personal sense. If you’re interested in Bluesky, it’s not currently open to just join up, but is instead in a public-beta where to join you need to get an invite code from an existing member. But if you fancy checking it out, I currently have five invite codes. Just comment here if you want me to give you one. And if you do join, you can find me at: @jonnynexus.bsky.social.