The SWTOR Community on Bluesky

Hello! If you enjoy connecting with other SWTOR players on social media, many players and creators have been moving over to Bluesky from Twitter. Bluesky is a social media platform very similar to Twitter, which allows you to post short-form text and images, and is sometimes known as micro-blogging. It also offers a really easy way to get in touch with other SWTOR players and creators.

How to Join Bluesky

1. Go to https://bsky.app/ or download the Bluesky app on your phone.
2. Sign up using your email. You can leave the hosting provider as “Bluesky Social”, you don’t need to change it.

Sign up is very easy, and then you can either start posting or start following other SWTOR players!

If you like to post about SWTOR, use the word “SWTOR” in your post text which will help others see and find your post who play SWTOR.

How to See SWTOR Posts on Bluesky

Once you have an account, I recommend you start by making it easier to find some SWTOR posters!

• Starter Pack: Star Wars: The Old Republic Content Creators
• Feed: All Things SWTOR
• Put the SWTOR feed on your homepage

SWTOR Starter Pack

Bluesky has some really great features for seeing posts about topics you like. One is Starter Packs, which allow you to easily browse or automatically follow a bunch of people in a hand-picked list.

Intisar, from the This Week in Aurabesh blog, has put together and is maintaining a list of friendly Star Wars: The Old Republic Content Creators. You can look at the list and choose which ones to follow, or use the handy Follow All button at the top.

All Things SWTOR Feed

Another really useful feature of Bluesky is Feeds. Feeds allow you to create a list of rules, and all posts that fit those rules will show up in the feed.

Shintar from the Going Commando blog has put together a All Things SWTOR Feed, she said that the feed is very simple and shows all posts that include “SWTOR” or a handful of related terms such as “Old Republic” or “Darth Malgus”. This is a great way to see posts from more “normal” people who are playing or enjoying the game. You can even make this feed your homepage!

Your Bluesky Homepage

Bluesky works slightly differently than most social media platforms – you can customize what you get to see a lot more, even including what shows up on your homepage.

To customize your homepage, you can press the hashtag symbol on the top right to get to your Feeds page. Since I subscribed to the All Things SWTOR Feed, I have it available on my list, and customized my list to put it first on my homepage, so only posts with the word SWTOR in them will show up on my homepage. I can also visit the Following tab to see posts by people I specifically follow.

Why the move?

The Twitter platform at one point was the easiest way to connect with other players, creators, and professionals in the Star Wars universe. It had the most amount of interesting people to follow and the least amount of barriers when it came to communicating with community compared to most other platforms. The platform was sold in 2022, and since then many changes to the platform made it less ideal for many users. A quick list, while not limited, includes the addition of Verified badges simply being paid for, the removal of the block feature, the commentary by the current owner, rebranding to “X”, automatic consent to AI training from posts, and a general feeling of seeing more “bot” posts and less posts by friends or people users wanted to actually follow.

When X first changed hands, multiple new platforms attempted to take its place, including Mastodon, and independent project, and Threads, owned by Facebook/Instagram, and Bluesky, which was actually created by a former-CEO of Twitter. Unfortunately, none of these platforms were very complete at that point, for example Threads did not even have a desktop version, Mastodon had a much higher learning curve than most social media platforms, and Bluesky’s userbase was very small and missing many simple technical features. Due to all the of the changes to Twitter, many users were looking for a new “home” for short-format public posting, but none of the options had really taken off, but more and more negative features were being introduced to Twitter over time. During this time though, all three social media platforms were growing, with new features being added over the last year or two, and all of the platforms gathering new users.

Of the three, it’s seeming like the SWTOR Community / Creators seem to have settled on Bluesky being the favorite. It is the most similar to Twitter, it does not have the negative stigma often connected with the company Facebook, and it is less technical than Mastodon. It also has  lot of features that make it very easy to jump in to and find your favorite creators or topics that none of the current social media platforms have, which is really neat. While there was no one specific event that started users looking elsewhere from Twitter, Bluesky has picked up more than 1 million new users since the US election, and Bluesky has reached nearly 15 million users worldwide, and this momentum is why I decided to finally switch over, in addition to Bluesky finally having all of the technical features I needed to easily share news about the game. I reallu liked the feeds and starter packs and community aspects of Bluesky, and I also love that my account is actually 100% verified – my username is actually @swtorista.com and has been linked to my site so there’s no mistaking it!

Interview with Bluesky COO that answers a lot of questions!