Why gaming & gamedev Twitter is moving to BlueSky and why you should too + Best practices for growth!

15/11/2024
|In Treasure Trove
|By Robby Bisschop

Ever since Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter (and rebranding it to X, ugh), many people have considered fleeing to other social media platforms like Mastodon, Threads or Hive. But there is a new king in town and its name is BlueSky. When is the right time to move and what are the platform’s pros & cons?

Directory:

Why are people moving?

It all boils down to Musk and his influence, sadly. There were some good changes to Twitter (yes, I’ll keep calling it that) like bigger upload file sizes, longer videos, longer tweets, the chance to edit your tweets… but all of them came behind a paywall and people paying then also got a visibility boost in the replies. Not good. (and I say this as a x2 Twitter blue user – for professional reasons)

There are waves of bots, fake accounts, fake interactions, false numbers & statistics… It’s not looking good and even our good friend Mario fell victim…

The latest changes that really upset everyone, and that truly kickstarted the major exodus, is first the removal of blocks: people you’ve blocked could now see your content again, even though they couldn’t interact with them. This article won’t do a deep dive on why that’s a nightmare, especially with stalkers, or other people with bad intentions in mind, but it’s… bad for everyone?

Then Musk got all political and started backing Trump publically and even created an @America account to promote the campaign… And now everyone on Twitter can no longer opt-out of getting their writing used by GROK (their AI) and train on your tweets. It’s just a shit show all around.

How does this affect YOUR Twitter presence?

  • Important people started leaving the platform, take Rami Ismail for example.
  • A lot of people in game development, game media, PR, marketing… all started posting on BlueSky as their main platform.
  • Tweets had fewer impressions/engagement (unless it was about Twitter/Musk/Trump)
  • Accounts you followed didn’t show up in your feed anymore
  • Paying advertisers stopped pumping money into Twitter Ads
  • Bots had free rein (spamming everyone’s DMs and replies)

Best practices on BlueSky

1. Follow everyone from Twitter again!

Most people on BlueSky were on Twitter before and you can just follow them again. Now, you could do this the hard way and look for them (or ask them to follow you… by posting on Twitter!) But luckily there is a tool that can save you a ton of trouble:

  • Simply download the Sky Follower Bridge plug-in for Chrome.
  • Browse to your “Following” tab on Twitter in Chrome
  • Press ALT+B to launch the pop-up & provide your BlueSky credentials
  • Start the search and either hand-pick who to follow or use “follow all”

2. Get yourself labeled!

You can get yourself some useful labels like:

  • Game Developer
  • Game Business
  • Game Journalist
  • Game (title of a game)
  • Game Studio
  • …

And Trezy (nice guy that he is) went through the effort to make this all automated for everyone to enjoy! Here are the steps to follow:

  • Browse to the Games Industry Labeler by @Ozone.Birb.house
  • Select the labels you want to apply to yourself.
  • Now for the “hard” part: start a new chat with @ozone.birb.house (BlueSky doesn’t make this part easy, you’ll have to start a new DM/chat and search for the account there)
  • Say “hi” in chat
  • The bot will kick into action and ask you to type “start” and if you are an Individual, organization or a Game.
  • Just follow the steps from the chat
  • ???
  • Profit!

3. Get yourself added to some starter packs and follow plenty of people from them

What’s a starter pack? It’s a list of up to 150 people that you can browse through or simply use “follow all”. they are typically grouped per topic or type of people in them, eg: Solo Game Developers. It’s very useful and the quickest boost you can do as a lot of them will follow back.

At the very top of a starter pack, will be the person who created it. Find their post about the starter pack and reply, or send them a DM if you want to be added to the starter pack yourself.

Here are some starter packs to get you started, but I suggest you search for “game starter pack” every now and then to look for new ones.

(think of any others we should add to this list? Email me!)

4. Set your DMs to open!

We all like to talk to each other, right? By default, chat settings are set to “only users I follow” and you may want to allow other people to reach out to you.

Go to Settings > Chat Settings, and set it to “Everyone” so you can talk to more people. No worries: I haven’t seen any bot abuse yet, this isn’t X!

Follow us for more tips!

Do you know what else you can do? Follow these friendly pirates and we’ll help you navigate the unruly seas of the internet! Or if you need someone to manage your socials for you, we’d be happy to lend a hand (or a hook!) via a list of expert community managers that work for us.

Did we forget something obvious, or do you have insights to share?
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Robby Bisschop
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