I may be more than mildly obsessed with Bluesky, the new-ish social media network that is taking the internet by storm, and serving as a safe haven for many former X users fleeing Elon Musk’s increasingly unpleasant virtual cesspit (I may be editorializing a bit too much here).
It’s just that I haven’t had this much fun using social media since, well, I first got into Twitter circa 2010. As I’ve previously written, Bluesky recalls early Twitter, which means it feels vibrant and welcoming and peopled by tons of interesting folks (some 21 million of them, as of this writing).
As I’ve also previously noted, the value you’ll get out of Bluesky is wholly based on who you follow there, since it isn’t really powered by an algorithm trying desperately to keep you glued to your feed. No, you’ll have to work a little harder if you want to tap into your latest font of dopamine, and that means populating your feed with posts you’ll find interesting and provocative and hopefully not enraging (but that’s what the “nuclear block” is for).
I’ve already written about Sky Follower Bridge, an extension that helps you track down people you once followed on X, and the Bluesky Directory, which offers a searchable index of more than 80,000 “starter packs” of people to follow based on your interests. Now I want to tell you about another tool that builds upon those: Bluesky Network Analyzer.
Easily find people to follow on Bluesky based on who’s in your extended network
Bluesky Network Analyzer, from indie developer Theo Sanderson, is another third-party app that helps you find people to follow, but this one has a unique twist: Rather than finding potentially relevant accounts based on your former social media activity, or even your interests, it extrapolates them by considering who the people you already follow also follow.
If that’s not clear, here’s a simpler explanation: Once you grant the tool access to the list of people you follow, it runs a quick search and highlights accounts you don’t follow that are very popular with the accounts you do follow.
Using it is as simple as entering your Bluesky username into the Bluesky Network Analyzer site. If you want to be able to follow people directly from the tool, you can also enter your Bluesky password, but you don’t have to. (The fine print indicates your password is not sent to the site but only stored locally, but if you’d prefer not to risk it, you can also generate an app-specific password on Bluesky itself.)
The tool will import the list of accounts you already follow, then go to work analyzing them to see how many other follows they have in common. The search takes a little while to run—and will obviously take longer if you follow a ton of people—but once it’s finished, you’ll see a list of the results ranked by how many mutuals they share among the people you already follow. To give you some idea of who they are, you’ll also see both the account’s avatar and the bio, if they’ve entered one.
Credit: Screenshot by Joel Cunningham
Of course, it might not be that helpful to see that 202 people you follow also follow the Washington Post. If you’d rather find less basic results, click the toggle to select Sort by proportion (favors niche accounts), which will move accounts with fewer total followers to the top of the list. And scrolling through that list will take time—I follow around 700 people, and my list of recommended follows stretched to 1,500 different accounts.
Why this is a useful way to find followers
I like this tool because I feel like I’ve done a pretty good job curating the list of people I’m following, and so I can assume that if there are accounts a lot of them follow, they’re probably worth considering.
My own results served up accounts of notable people I recognized (including some journalists and former Film Twitter folks) but had yet to locate on Bluesky, so I was able to follow a bunch of them with a few clicks. More than that, I also spotted some people I used to follow on X who had yet to migrate to Bluesky before I last used Sky Follower Bridge.
If you wanted to, I suppose you could head over to Bluesky and search up each person’s username (unfortunately they aren’t hyperlinked within the tool), but I mostly found it to be a good way to jog my memory. Given how many of my former online friends have dropped off of social networks like Facebook and X in recent years, it was nice to be reminded that they exist.