A lot of the once bird app's flocks appear to be migrating from X (formerly Twitter) to Bluesky. A big wave of people have finally left Elon Musk's social media app, hoping to regain some of the magic of old Twitter.
While the official app and website are a great place to get started with Bluesky, there are a whole bunch of third-party clients that make the experience even better, just like TweetDeck did for Twitter. These are the best Bluesky clients I've come across so far (and keep in mind that if you're worried about giving your account password to a third-party service, you can always set up an app-specific password).
TweetDeck was the preferred Twitter client for power users. On TweetDeck, you could set up a multi-column view to keep track of more than one timeline at a time. The app also had useful features such as refreshing the timeline automatically, making it ideal for following events in realtime or post scheduling. For Bluesky, all of these features are available in Deck Blue. It has a customizable multi-column view, lets you decide how often the timeline is refreshed, and it lets you hide certain types of posts from your feed.
Deck Blue locks a few features behind a paywall. You can pay a minimum of $1/month via Patreon to get access to post scheduling and the ability to add up to four accounts. Not everyone is going to need these features, so the free tier remains very useful.
If you prefer not to use Bluesky in your Mac's web browser, you can use a Mac app instead. Sky.app is my favorite option. The biggest advantage of Sky is keyboard shortcuts. You can use Command-Number shortcuts to cycle through all the tabs in Bluesky's left pane. Command-2 takes you to search, Command-3 to notifications, and so on. The app also lets you hide replies from your following feed, choose to view translations (via Google Translate) in a pop-up window as opposed to opening a new tab in the browser, and choose to see newest search results at the top.
At the moment, Sky isn't overloaded with features, which means that you'll sometimes feel like you're using the Bluesky website in an app form. For instance, when you try to open the app's settings, it redirects you to Bluesky's settings page instead.
The great X-odus has left us with multiple social networks attempting to replace what once was Twitter. Three major contenders are still standing—Threads, Bluesky, and Mastodon. If you want to cross-post to these three social networks at once, you can use Croissant. My colleague Justin Pot wrote about this app and how you can make the most of it. Croissant costs $2.99 per month or $19.99 per year, which means that this app is best suited for small business owners who rely on these social media platforms to reach their audiences. If you just want to post on Mastodon and Bluesky, consider linking the two accounts instead or try an alternative app such as Openvibe, which lets you view a unified timeline from all three social networks.
I like using Graysky on iPhone or Android as an alternative mobile app for Bluesky. The app doesn't default to your feeds from Bluesky's website or official apps, but instead, it allows you to choose and add various custom feeds. You can use this to your advantage by using Graysky to view different types of content than you might get on the official app. Graysky doesn't have many settings that you can tweak, but there is a pro tier that lets you add custom themes and view translations by DeepL for $10/year. Although Graysky is a decent app, its developer is now working with Bluesky, so the future of this app is unclear.
If that bothers you, then you can try Skeets on your iPhone or iPad. The app has a ton of customizations, including font size, autoplaying GIFs, opening YouTube links in its app, and many more. My favorite feature is bookmarks, which lets you save useful Bluesky posts. The official app doesn't support this yet, but Skeets has it built-in. It also lets you extract text from images to quickly create alt-text for the photos you upload. Skeets is free to use but it locks some features behind a subscription of $3/month.
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