BluFly 🛩️

Guide for Followers and Trusted Contributors

BluFly is a curated — yes, humans-in-the-loop — Custom Feed on the Bluesky social media platform. It features a wide variety of posts by, and for fans of aviation in all its forms. Our big picture, long term aspiration is to be ‘AvGeek Central’ on Bluesky.

This guide provides at least some of the details as to how BluFly is set up, how it is curated as well as other related information. Already a member of Bluesky and just want to check out BluFly? Here it is.

First Things First: What's a Bluesky Custom Feed?

The bête noire of modern social media is the black box algorithms which determine what you see and when you see it. Furthermore, as you've likely already experienced, these can also change right underneath your feet without warning and can have an immense impact on user experience. Typically, there's no recourse or appeal — you simply have to live with whatever the algorithm wants you to see. And don't even get us started about the whole concept of microtargeting!

Bluesky tosses this whole concept out the window: Bluesky's Custom Feeds can be created by anybody for any purpose. Furthermore, the mechanics of Custom Feeds are completely open-source. You can go and look at the ‘source code’ of any Custom Feed whenever you want. Here's BlueFly's algorithm definition file which, incidentally, is simply a JSON text file. That means it can be read relatively easily by both machines and humans.

See Algorithmic Choice with Custom Feeds in the Resources section below for lots more information about Custom Feeds directly from the folks who created them.

BluFly's ‘Prime Directives’

Given Custom Feeds “can be created by anybody for any purpose”, let's start with the latter and conclude with the former for BluFly:

• Strictly Aviation-Related Content — First and foremost, posts you will find in BluFly are about aviation. To further define that, anything made by people that flies (intentionally) is fair game. You'll find both full-size and model aircraft, lighter- and heavier-than-air, aircraft with motors and without, drones and UAVs, historical and contemporary aircraft, flight simulation, books, the people behind the aircraft, aviation-related products and services, aviation events and education and … well, the list goes on and on. Or stated another way, if you describe yourself in any way an AvGeek, then BluFly is a feed for you.
• Words and Pictures Emphasized — We have certain aesthetic aspirations for BluFly. Posts should consist of plain text (specifically, hashtags are discouraged) and as many as four pictures per post — that's currently a Bluesky limitation. When you do the quick scroll through BluFly, it should seem to be mostly words and pictures. See what we mean? So how are we doing so far, d'ya think?
• Links — Yep, BluFly encourages the use of links, but only to materials which directly support all of the objectives of BluFly. Wherever possible, use links which render well. If you're not sure what that means, we'll be putting together some more detailed information on this in the near future.
• Threads — Yep, BluFly also encourages the use of threads — which is to say many separate posts linked together when you have more to say than can be contained in a single post. However, this should be done in a manner which makes it obvious that's what they are. Typically including the ‘🧵 [1/5]’ in the first post in the thread, ‘🧵 [2/5]’ in the second post and so on.

So that's the ‘what’, what about the “who’? This is much simpler: BluFly is a project of Intellog Inc., a digital media and communications company based out of Calgary, Alberta, Canada. When we first got on Bluesky, we took a look at the Custom Feed landscape and thought there were some deficiencies in current offerings in the aviation domain. Candidly and setting all modesty aside, we thought we could do better. Consequently, all BluFly posts are sourced, vetted and submitted to the feed by a human being who works for Intellog Inc. More information can be found in the About Intellog Inc. section below.

Guidelines, Recommendations and Rules for Trusted Contributors 🛡️

BluFly seeks to build a team of Trusted Contributors made up of folks who volunteer to source, vet and submit posts directly to the feed. The only prerequisite: you need to be as nuts about aviation — or some particular aspect of it — as we are!

By the length and detail of this section, please don't think BluFly is a maze of rules and regulations the unsuccessful navigation of which will get you turfed as a Trusted Contributor. Please be patient as you work through this section as it contains a lot of important detail with which you will want to be familiar if you're thinking about joining the team.

That said, we're not keen for BluFly to become a chaotic free-for-all where anything goes. That's the rest of the internet. The key word in Trusted Contributor is ‘trust’ — to some degree we're trusting you with the BluFly brand. We think that's an important responsibility and we hope you do, too. With that admittely martinetish prologue out of the way, here goes:

• The All-Important 🛩️ (Small Airplane) Emoji — In order for a post from a Trusted Contributor to appear on BluFly, the 🛩️ emoji (also known as the ‘small airplane’ emoji) must be included in the text of the post. That's it, that all you have to do. Generally speaking we put it at the end of the text and offset it with a ‘ | ’ (space — vertical bar — space). But that's just us. You can put it wherever you want in the text of your post. Not also that there are other emojis which can be added to futher describe the post. See the Emojitags section below for more information.
• Photographs — Text-only posts will simply not get the attention they deserve, so it's highly recommended you use photographs with every post. Multiple photographs can sometimes (but not always) be better, but there is currently a limit of four per post imposed by the Bluesky platform. However, as an alternative to cramming four photographs into one post, consider a thread (see that section below) with descriptive text and a single picture for each post in the thread. See also the next section on the use of Alt Text — we also recommend you provide these, as well. With respect to the size of the image it's our experience that 1200x800px and 1080x1080px work well. However, Bluesky seems tolerant of whatever size you have on hand. Book covers, for example, almost always are in some sort of portrait format, which is perfectly fine.
• Alt Text — Whenever you add a photograph with Bluesky, you'll see a little box somewhere in the image labelled ALT. This is shorthand for “alternative text’ and is intended primarily to help with those with vision limitations understand the nature of the picture you have included in your post. When writing the Alt, imagine you're describing the picture to somebody who is not looking at it. It's a challenge, at first, but you'll definitely get the hang of it. However, if that's not a good enough reason to use the Alt— it really should be — it also provides another way more verbose opportunity to include text in your post. The only catch being that it's text your viewer only sees when they click on the picture. Behind the scenes, it likely also aids in discoverability.
• Quote Posts — Have you seen something on Bluesky which meets all of the BluFly criteria but it isn't from a Trusted Contributor and/or the text of the post doesn't include the 🛩️ emoji? Quote post it! There are a couple of things to keep in mind, though: first, make a reasonable effort to ensure that doesn't already appear on BluFly as a quote post from somebody else. Also, avoid quote posts on posts which are already reposts/quote posts — they don't render well. If everything is still a go, then click the 🔁 icon below the post, select ‘Quote post’ from the drop down and then add at least the 🛩️ emoji to the text. Additional descriptive material in addition to that is also great — perhaps with some explanation of why you're reposting it, for example.
• Hashtags — In a word, don't. As in don't use them. They are not supported in Bluesky (yet, that is, although they're supposed to be in the works) which means they do nothing to aid in the discoverability of your post. This is really what hashtags were originally intended to do way back when on that other platform. Given they now do nothing, we believe their net effect is to simply distract from the central theme of your post. Write well — you'll be discovered soon enough. See the article Twitter+ in the Resources section below for more information in this regard.
• Posting Frequency — We have some pretty good data that familiarity does breed, if not contempt, certainly steadily diminishing interest. Our theory: it's not because your posts are no good but rather a subconcious sense that another good post from you is on the way shortly, so why bother paying attention to this one? The big exception to this rule is the next section — Threads — see immediately below.
• Threads — Although we recommend one post per day, we also think of multiple, roughly contemporaneous posts linked together into a thread as really being one post. They tell a single, integrated story which simply doesn't fit into a single post. Keep in mind the ‘head post’ is on the only one which appears on BluFly. Viewers of the feed will have to click on your head post to see the other posts in your thread. This is by design.
• Commercial Posts are Okay ... Probably — We don't specifically object to posts which include a call-to-action (CTA) to potentially buy something. It's what make the world go 'round, right? However, a couple of thoughts: please make sure it's done in a way which support all of the aesthetic objectives of BluFly. For example, it makes perfect sense that a post about an aviation-related book you've written, reviewed or simply just liked include a link to a website where the book can be purchased. Also, make full disclosure if you financially benefit for the product/service. Finally, there may be a better way: perhaps the CTA can be put into a post from someone else? Like the BluFly admin account, for example?
• Real Identities Required —  While Trusted Contributors are free to use whatever handle they either already have or will choose for the Bluesky social platform. We prefer real names but they're not absolutely mandatory. However, you do have to be prepared to have BluFly list your real name in the Trusted Contributors section below.
• Avoid Prohibitions! — The governing Social Media Policy contains specific prohibitions, so it's important to avoid these. Posts which are deemed — solely by the administrators of BluFly — to be in violation of any of these prohibitions will result in the removal of the Trusted Contributor from the feed along with all of their posts, at the very least temporarily and without notice.

Please keep in mind that we're always going to do our level best to work with you to get you to the top of your BluFly posting game. If we step in from time-to-time to help out, please keep in mind we're always doing that with the best interests of both you, the Trusted Contributor and BluFly in our aspirational, collective goal to make it the best aviation-related feed on Bluesky.

Emojitags

In addition to the ‘small airplane’ 🛩️ emoji which is mandatory for a post to appear the BluFly feed, there are a series of additional emojis which may optionally appear in the post to further define its content — hence the portmanteau ‘emojitags’. The list of currently recognized emojitags is (in no particular order):

• 🎙️ — The microphone indicates a podcast series or episode.
• ⚔️ — Crossed swords are for military aviation and related.
• 🎈 — The balloon denotes posts related to lighter-than-air vehicles which includes blimps, dirigibles, hot air balloons and the like.
• 🚁 — The helicopter is for rotorcraft or any other vehicle capable of vertical take-off or landing.
• 📍 — The pin is used for posts related to a specific place that somebody may want to visit at some point. For the time being at least, it is not necessary to provide latitude and longitude. However, the post should contain enough information to enable it to be found by others. At the very least a name.
• 📡 — The satellite ground station is for any uncrewed vehicle which is controlled from the ground or operates autonomously. For convenience and taxonomic reasons, this same emojitag is used to identify flying model aircraft. Note that scale models (eg. Airfix) are separately identified immediately below.
• 🔍 — The magnifying glass identifies scale models of aircraft or related equipment which are intended for static display purposes only. Flying scale models should use the tag immediately above.
• 🎨 — The palette is for any post which has is art, such as watercolour, oil painting or line drawing, for examples. It is also used to identify posts with an art-oriented them.
• 🛰️ — The satellite is for ‘high altitude platform station’ (HAPS), such as AALTO HAPS for example. These kinds of vehicles are intended to provide some of the services normally expected from space-based satellites.
• 🏫 — The school is for posts related to any sort of academic pursuit: papers, schools, educational programs and anything deemed to be of interest to students past, present and future.
• 🦆 — The mallard duck is for any aircraft which operates off water either some or all of the time.
• 🖥️ — The computer screen denotes some sort of flight simulation either based on a computer setup, dedicated hardware and right on up to the full-motion simulators used by the airlines.
• 💺 — The airline seat identifies an image taken from inside an aircraft looking out. This would be both pictures from the cockpit or passenger cabins.
• 📰 — The newspaper identifies news items but current and historical.
• 🦅 — The bald eagle indicates human-made air vehicles which mimic birds or bird-like flight such as ornithopters and other ‘flapping wing’ contrivances.
• 📅 — The calendar page, not surprisingly, is used for calendar events.
• 🧰 — The toolbox is for employment, career development or job opening-related posts.
• ⚡️ — The lightning bold is for electric and/or alternative fuel aviation.
• 📚 — The pile of books is for books and magazines, either paper or digital.
• 📹 — The hand-held video camera is for videos which are shorter than feature length.
• 🎬 — Clapper board is used for feature-length movie or mini-series, either scripted or documentary.

All Emojitags which apply to the post should be added — more than one is perfectly okay. For the most part, we add them right after the 🛩️ at the end of the text but you can put them wherever you want as their presence anywhere in the text will not effect how they work.

One of the main reasons for using these emojitags is to enable the creation of BluFly subfeeds that cater to specific interests. For instance, in the future we can see a BluFly Military feed which will only show those posts which include the ⚔️ emojitag. Or, perhaps, a BluFly Civil which excludes all posts which include the ⚔️. These subfeeds are a work-in-progress but we will definitely have announcements about them if and when they are available.

Trusted Contributors

This list is updated on an ongoing basis and is presented in alphabetical order:

• Billy Hepburn 🇬🇧 — Experienced aviation photographer and pilot as well as publisher of the flight360 (and it's predecessor aero360.co.uk) website since 1994. A high percentage of the content is interactive 360 degree aviation media.
• BluFly 🇨🇦 — Administrative account for BluFly.
• Dan Yocum 🇺🇸 — “Polymath. Linux. Physics. Astronomy. Airplanes. Music. Human rights for everyone. Not in that order.”
• Intellog Inc. 🇨🇦 — “Digital Content | Social Media | Project Development”
• Jason Hampton 🇨🇦 — Avgeek, planespotter and amateur photographer: airplanes and outdoorsy stuff mostly.
• Martin Wilkinson 🇬🇧 — “Grandad, aeromodeller, vintage aviation photographer, trainee campervanner”. You can also find Martin's beautiful work on Picfair. and Redbubble.
• Not There Yet 🇨🇦 — “Eclectic essays podcasted from the third decade of the 21st century. Currently featuring: Jack Northrop's Flying Wings” (podcast)
• Phil Cooke 🇬🇧 — Power scale soaring savant, co-founder of the Power Scale Soaring Association and works at Rolls-Royce in Derby, UK.
• The New RC Soaring Digest 🇨🇦 — The 30 issues of the digital-first version of the classic journal for RC soaring enthusiasts, published by Intellog from January of 2021 through June of 2023.
• The WorkNotWork Show 🇨🇦 — “I Can't Believe I Get Paid for Doing This” (podcast)
• Terence C. Gannon 🇨🇦 — Founder and CEO of Intellog Inc. He is the first to admit that he's “not there yet”.

In addition to the above, there is a Bluesky List: BluFly 🛩️ | Trusted Contributors also contains this information and enables the list to be queried as well as review all posts from these folks. Would you like to become a Trusted Contributor to BluFly? By all means, please please drop us a line in order to start that conversation.

Frequently Asked Questions

• How does a post get on the BluFly feed? — There are three criteria which must be met in order for a post to appear: 1) the post must be by an account which appears in the Trusted Contributors list as above, 2) it must be an originating post, which is to say not a reply and 3) the 🛩️ emoji must appear somewhere in the text of the post.
• How do I get added as a BluFly Trusted Contributor? — It's actually pretty simple: email us and request it. That said, you can count on the curators taking a look at your Bluesky account to make sure it has, as a subset at least, posts which will be relevant and interesting to the followers of BluFly. You also need to read, understand and be willing to remain compliant with Intellog Inc.'s (BluFly's operating company) Social Media Policy.

Resources

These articles are not required reading by any definition. However, they do provide additional valuable information on the Bluesky which you might find useful.

• Algorithmic Choice with Custom Feeds by The Bluesky Team. — Excerpt: “Bluesky is one of the first social media companies that has made algorithmic choice a reality. On Bluesky, anyone can create a feed — cat lovers, coffee aficionados, Swifties, NBA fans and more. As a user, you’re given a few default feeds to start out with as you get settled into the app, but you can easily swap them out for one of the many feeds that others have created” such as BluFly, of course!
• What is Bluesky? by The Bluesky Team. — Excerpt: “Bluesky is building a protocol for public conversation that can make social networks work more like email, blogs, or phone numbers — the open systems that power the rest of our online lives. The protocol we built, the AT Protocol, is close to completion, and the Bluesky app is a microblogging client built on it to showcase the protocol’s features. The Bluesky app also introduces people to how a social web on the AT Protocol will work.”
• Twitter+ | Some unsolicited — and probably unwelcome — advice on where Twitter should go from here. by Terence C. Gannon — This article was written a number of years ago by our Managing Editor and helps inform at least some of the design of the BluFly feed. Excerpt: “Twitter’s enforced brevity is not a constraint. It’s liberation. Forcing my verbose, disorganized thoughts into 50 words or less makes them better, not worse. Apart from that one thing, however, almost everything else about Twitter needs to change.”

About Intellog Inc.

Founded in 2008, Intellog is a corporate communications company with the goal of helping organisations tell their stories and ensure they get heard by the right audience through innovative digital marketing. Significant recent projects include The New RC Soaring Digest a digital-first, aviation-related publication. The WorkNotWork Show and Not There Yet are podcasts written, produced and hosted by Intellog. We also produce tech email newsletters, examples of which include React Status for Cooperpress in the United Kingdom and DragonRuby Dispatch for the WNDX School in Alberta, Canada. In addition to BluFly, we have also just kicked off BluRuby and BluReact which are Bluesky Custom Feeds we are developing for the Ruby and React software development communities respectively.

Disclaimer

While all reasonable care is taken in the preparation of the contents of BluFly, the publishers are not legally responsible for errors in its contents or for any loss arising from such errors, including loss resulting from the negligence of our staff or any of its contributors. Reliance placed upon the contents of BluFly is solely at the readers’ own risk.

This document was last updated at 2024-02-19 12:43 Mountain Standard Time in North America.