you are no longer on twitter

welcome to bluesky. we have spent the last year and change developing a site culture and frankly a bunch of people acting like twitter posting was normal and healthy coming here has completely fucked the vibes. this account is an attempt to correct that

OH I REMEMBERED SOMETHING if you don't care about a thread someone you would like to keep following is posting, you can click the three dots in the corner of it and hit "mute thread" and it should hide it from you. super useful for sports threads, live tv blogging, etc

also if you keep all your reactions to something you are watching contained in a thread this makes it very easy for your followers to do this with you. highly recommend if you're worried about being annoying

ok bye!!

i think that's everything i have learned about bluesky that either a) people seem to not know coming in and are driving me crazy doing or b) is counterintuitive and/or a weird design thing that newbies couldn't be expected to know.

i will add more if i think of it but i don't expect this to be an active account. take care out there everyone. don't forget to curate your experience

oh if you see a post that has a weird link preview that goes nowhere that's because of a weird thing bluesky does when you make a typo involving a period. the explanation for why would be kind of boring but if you have one of these come up, you can get rid of it by hitting the x in the corner

you can also do this with actual links if you want to link something with graphic violence and attach a warning, or for any other purpose

oh by the way if you aren't seeing adult content but you wish you were, go to the menu, click "moderation", and then turn adult content on. and then tip the sex workers who post it if you can! they are doing good work

i just mad this account today so i could make sure all the tech tips are still relevant to newbies and when i checked the menu it was automatically off

oh also "graphic" on here means "violent" not "sexual" or "nude"! something to keep in mind when marking your own nudes. have fun out there with your hogs and boobs and stuff everyone

oh and a thing you might not be used to here is that the website periodically bugs out completely and you can't use assorted features. this is NOT ON YOU it's just the site is growing real fast and the infrastructure has a hard time keeping up.

this is also why a lot of people show up as "invalid handle". this drives me up a wall because it's a terrible way to communicate with users! but the site is very new, and you're basically testing it right now, and frankly, 2012 twitter was MUCH worse

highly recommend doing this if you are trans or could be mistaken for being trans, by the way, bluesky support has been sitting on their hands about a technical issue that lets accounts send self harm imagery in DMs and transphobes have been taking advantage of it.

you are no longer on twitter@twitter.rip

TO CHANGE YOUR DM SETTINGS: click on the speech bubble icon that takes you to your DMs. click the upper right hand button. change your settings to allow only DMs from people you follow, or for no one at all. there. now you don't have to put "no DMs" in your fucking bio

this is kind of a niche issue but: if you are getting weird and hostile responses that feel a little off, there are some folks on here making accounts that automatically reply to large quantities of posts in a vaguely hostile manner. you can ignore them, and also, it's not personal

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i don't know what these are actually *for* but the people who run them are usually posting racist memes and shit too. i don't think you need to be scared of them! but don't let them waste your time.

and also i want to be really clear that if you get this you didn't DO anything to provoke this kind of weird automated behavior, they're really just siccing the bot on everyone and your account happened to come up.

i believe the way those work is they're hooked up to chatgpt or something like that and they just reply in really high volumes; you can identify them by looking at their reply tab and seeing if they're talking faster than anyone could reasonably type.

this is worth noting and also the case with many other search engines, including duckduckgo, which is what i use (it's not very good either)

Dilong@dilong.bsky.social

Another fun thing is that Google searches are personalized so two people can Google the same thing and get different results! Or even just different phrasings of the same search can have wildly different outcomes (although that's less surprising)

theverge.comYou can get rid of AI Overviews in Google SearchGetting around AI.

while i am doing general tech 101 this has cleaned up my google results a bit when i do use it, which is mostly just a thing i do to search products www.theverge.com/24162621/goo...

if you have been around the block on the internet and everything i am saying here is incredibly obvious please feel free to block the account, btw, i will not judge you or be offended. i know this is incredibly basic

a lot of people simply didn't get trial by fire internet 101 and it's not their fault but it's becoming impossible to handle them

especially if this is coming on your discover feed for being choir preaching. it's fine!

a lot of people here, including sex workers, shop owners, journalists, authors etc are doing public-facing jobs that require them to be on social media to self-promote. try not to be the bluesky version of the guy at the coffee shop who thinks the barista is flirting with him because she was nice.

calling people you hate by cute nicknames like "the orange stinker" or whatever for donald trump gets your post around people who muted "donald trump". this also goes for saying "tr*mp" or whatever. it's asshole behavior. also the nicknames are embarrassing for you

if you don't have an icon set people will assume you are a low-effort troll. this also goes for "avatars" that bluesky makes you choose when you sign up. this isn't an endorsement of that perception, which unfairly hits people who can't see the images, but you should know about it

usually when i tell people to join mastodon i am being sarcastic but the culture around accessibility there is actually way better, so consider that if here isn't working for you because of that and you don't have a lot invested in the people here already

if you follow more than a thousand accounts and have a fraction of that following you, everyone is going to assume you are doing some kind of scam, and they will not be interested enough to investigate what kind of scam

this is not a referendum on you personally. it is a guide to how you are going to be perceived if you behave in certain ways

i am closing comments here because most of you were raised by dogs 💜

"no _____ under 1,000" are a great way for trolls to work their way into groups for the sake of anything from stalking to flipping the account to be propaganda. it is very foolish to join in on these

some posts are in fact jokes

not everyone who criticizes the democratic party of the united states is a republican. i recommend against assuming that strangers who were posted into your feed by people you followed, presumably on purpose and through your own choice, are maga trolls.

if you see an account claiming to be a celebrity and their domain name isn't their official website there's a good chance it's fake. bluesky moderation sucks ass so they miss a ton of these

the "elonia" thing is transphobic and misogynistic (you are degrading musk for supposedly being a woman and you are degrading musk for supposedly being trans). it's also not actually funny. it's just cringe

same goes for "what if trump wore women's makeup" and "what if trump and putin were gay and they fucked". queer people can see you posting that shit and know not to trust your fairweather ass

i recommend actually googling the thing you are telling people to google before telling them to just google it because google doesn't really work anymore

if you reply to a post and then block the account you're replying to, your reply will be hidden, and they probably won't see it

if you see a quote post that just says BLOCKED there are several possibilities: -you blocked the person being quoted -the person being quoted blocked you -the person being quoted blocked the person doing the quoting -the person doing the quote post blocked the person being quoted

this website was made good by perverts and sex workers and if you don't want to see a wide and beautiful variety of posts from those accounts you need to adjust your own moderation settings, curate your timeline better, and possibly join threads instead if that doesn't work

if you don't want to see people advertising their onlyfans and/or shilling adult furry art that is your problem, not the problem of the adult artists who are trying to make a fucking living.

blockenheimer.clickBlockenheimer for Bluesky

if you follow back everyone who follows you, you will end up getting blocked when one of the accounts you followed back turns out to be a troll and people use blockenheimer.click to mass block their followings

interested in a topic someone mentioned but don't have an actual response to their post? if you do a quote of their post instead of a reply, your conversational pivot can happen on your page and on your terms, and the original posters only have to follow along if they are actually interested

bluesky doesn't work so good yet and doesn't have the ability to untag people in conversations, which makes it even more important that you don't reply to posts about something specific like essay prompts that desperately want your feedback

be chill about trans people

bsky.socialHow to verify your Bluesky account - BlueskyHere's how to verify your Bluesky account by setting your website as your username.

i got domain verified by buying my domain name through porkbun, which has a "bluesky" button and requires copy and pasting one (1) url. if you're on another registrar, here's the guide. bsky.social/about/blog/4... it literally took me less time than it takes for my tea to brew to do this