BluFly πŸ›©οΈ

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 bΓͺte 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:

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 πŸ›‘οΈ

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:

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’ πŸ›©οΈ 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):

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 πŸ›©οΈ 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 βš”οΈ emojitag. Or, perhaps, a BluFly Civil which excludes all posts which include the βš”οΈ. 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:

In addition to the above, there is a Bluesky List: BluFly πŸ›©οΈ | 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

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.


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.