Kick Start Your Bluesky Experience

Posted by Eric Van Johnson on February 16, 2025

@phparch.com

The social networking landscape has changed so dramatically in the past five years. It’s challenging to keep up with. When you get on a new social network, one of the first hurdles you have is to figure out who’s on that network you would be interested in following.

A while back, I created a GitHub repository to help people in the PHP community find other PHP developers and handles to follow on Mastodon. You can find that repo here. The list specific to PHP Developer is here.

But of late, I’ve really started to warm up to BlueSky. Without getting into too much of the nitty-gritty, BlueSky was founded by the former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey. The way the story was told to me was BlueSky was supposed to be the next iteration of Twitter. Part of the agreement with the sale of Twitter was that Dorsey would be able to walk away with the codebase for BlueSky. There are some interesting aspects to BlueSky. I’ve seen verified accounts but have not bothered to look into how to get one. Also, you might notice that some of the people in BlueSky don’t have BlueSky handles. For example, the handle for PHP Architect is phparch.com. Anybody who owns a domain can do this. Here’s a link to that. But if you’re just getting on BlueSky and you’re a PHP developer, BlueSky has a thing called a starter pack where anybody can create a starter pack of interesting people to follow. This is a list of some of the starter packs I follow and that you might appreciate as well. So if you’ve been thinking about joining BlueSky or if you’ve been on BlueSky for a little while but haven’t really gotten your feed to feel is beneficial, check out some of these starter packs. You can follow individuals in the starter pack, or you can just follow everybody in the starter pack with one click of a button.

I suspect I am on one of these lists because I started getting a ton of followers, but in the event I am not, you can always follow me at @ericvanjohnson.bsky.social. Also, as I mentioned, the PHP Architect account is at @phparch.com

OK, let’s get you some people to follow.