Since I did a post on Mastodon access methods, I figured it only made sense to do a similar post for Bluesky. Bluesky hasn’t been around nearly as long as Mastodon, and as a result it’s far more limited with respect to 3rd party client options. However, as it recently dropped its invite-only status, user numbers are starting to tick upward at a decent rate. I think it’s only a matter of time before more and more access options start to crop up. Even in its relatively fledgling state, there are already a handful of good options available.
Unlike the Mastodon post, there wasn’t an accompanying poll which made me decide to write this post… so I have honestly no idea what the numbers are for each area. That being said, I would have to imagine that, at least at the moment, the official mobile app is likely way out in the lead, followed by the official web app. That’s purely speculation on my part, though, and I would expect the results to trend away from that over time as more 3rd party clients are introduced.
Official App
The official app is honestly pretty good. However, I really don’t love how the feeds I’ve pinned are all displayed at the top of the screen. While I guess it’s nice to have easy access to pinned feeds, as someone who spends the majority of his time looking at the Following feed I think it’s much more elegant how some other apps have hidden other feeds behind a tap or click.
My main gripe with the official app, if I’m being honest, is that there’s no iPad version of it. Using an iPhone app on an iPad just looks awful, and prior to the release of some 3rd party options, I opted to just use the web app from my iPad. Obviously I could just use the official app on my phone and an alternative app on my iPad, but I like the idea of having the same experience everywhere… for a variety of reasons that we’ll get into later.
The official app also suffers from being a bit feature-barren at the moment. Things like hashtags and GIF support are nowhere to be found. The biggest missing feature for me, though, is lack of an ability to bookmark skeets. I very frequently use this functionality on Mastodon since I commonly see articles posted that look really interesting, but I often done have the time to read the content at the moment. It’s super helpful for me to just bookmark the post. While I could add it to my Reading List in Safari, that means I can only see the content when using another one of my Apple devices.
Official Web App
I actually rather like the official web app, and I would say I end up using it about half the time that I’m at my laptop. While previous versions of it looked very similar to the mobile app with pinned feeds sort of tabbed along the top of the screen, the current version nicely tucks them over to the right side of whatever feed’s content that I’m currently viewing. The interface is slick, and while it would be nice if the content would auto-refresh rather than forcing me to click a button, there’s at least a nice visual indicator letting me know that there are new posts when I tab back over to it in my browser.
The main issues with the official web app are the same as those for the official app: missing features. The web app is missing the same hashtags, bookmarks, and GIF support.
3rd Party Apps
While the app ecosystem for Bluesky is still fairly nascent, there are some good options out there. I initially started off with Graysky, which I started using when it was still in TestFlight. My main motivation was to get something that I could use on my iPad, and it worked quite well in that capacity even before it had an official release. I really dislike how Graysky by default wants to show all of my feeds and have me pick which one to view, but that’s easily resolved by setting a default feed in the app’s settings. My only real complaint from Graysky is the fact that it’s a React Native app, which means it just feels a bit… off relative to native apps.
As a result of that, I was excited to try out Skeets when it became available. Skeets is written in SwiftUI, similar to IceCubes for Mastodon. While Skeets continues to be a work in progress, it’s been my favorite app so far. What really sold me on it is the fact that you can add bookmarks, and those bookmarks will sync between your devices. While that still means I can only really access those posts on my Apple devices, I still like the flow better than adding things to my Safari reading-list. I also found Skeets to have the most elegant handling of feeds, with a default feed that then has an arrow next to it at the top of the screen that can be used to quickly swap to other feeds. Skeets has great iPad support, and subscribers can get push notifications as well. I actually went ahead and signed up for $2 USD a month for push notifications and bookmark support, which are well worth it in my opinion.
3rd Party Web Apps
The only 3rd party web app I’ve spent significant time with is Deck.blue, a client that aims to give a Tweetdeck-like experience. It’s honestly quite nice, and if you loved Tweetdeck, I think you’ll immediately feel at home with Deck.blue. It’s super customizable, even down to things like the accent colors, column widths, etc. It’s under extremely active development, with tons of new features popping up regularly. It’s also extremely stable, and I’ve yet to run into any kind of bugs with it even after months of use. The only thing I don’t really like about it is that there isn’t an easy way to flip between feeds if I don’t want to have those feeds always open as columns. I don’t really want to add horizontal scrolling on my screen for feeds that I only want to occasionally look at, but constantly adding and then removing columns gets old. I don’t think this is really a problem for Deck.blue; it’s more an effect of how I like to use the Bluesky service.
I’ve been interested in Ouranos, but I’ve not really used it at all. Ouranos mainly seems to be trying to emulate the Twitter UI (I refuse to call it X… that’s just stupid.) However, it seems to only have a light mode available at the moment, and I can’t subject my poor eyes to that. It’s possible there’s a dark mode available in the settings, but I haven’t been able to access the settings portion of the app yet without causing it to crash. I’ll continue to check back periodically as it matures, though.