How to Make a Thread on Bluesky (I Measured 20,201 Threads)
To make a thread on Bluesky, start a new post, write the first part, then tap the + button below the text box ("Add another post to thread") to add the next post. Repeat, then tap Post All. You can also post the first part on its own and reply to it yourself, and your replies join the thread. Each post can be up to 300 characters, and the app doesn't limit how many posts a thread can have.
Making a thread takes a minute. I wanted to know how people actually use them, and whether they get more likes. Posts on Bluesky are public, so I read every new post for six hours on October 15, 2026 and tracked the threads started in the first four: 353,154 new top-level posts (not replies), of which 20,201 (5.7%) became threads. Most threads were two posts long, and almost nobody numbered them. Threads got a few more likes than the same person's single posts, but far fewer than the raw numbers suggest.
(Disclosure: I make Agent Sky, a Bluesky growth tool. More on it at the end.)
How Do You Make a Thread on Bluesky?
There are two ways, and they give the same result. Both work the same in the iPhone and Android apps and on bsky.app in a browser.
Way 1: write the whole thread first (the + button)
- Tap the new post button (the pencil button in the mobile app, New post on desktop).
- Write the first post. Up to 300 characters, with images or a link if you want.
- Tap the + button below the text box. Bluesky labels it "Add another post to thread". A new empty post appears under the first one.
- Write the next post and repeat until you're done. You can tap any post to edit it before you publish, or remove one.
- Tap Post All. Bluesky publishes every post at once, already linked as a thread.
The + button appears once the current post has some text in it. The composer's Drafts button can save a thread you haven't finished.
Way 2: post first, then reply to yourself
- Publish the first post like any other.
- Tap the reply button on it and write the next part.
- Reply to your newest post each time, not the first one, so the thread stays in a single line.
Bluesky shows replies you make to your own post as part of the thread. This is also how you add to a thread later: open it and reply to the last post. When you reply, the + button is still there, so you can add several posts at once.
Optional: choose who can reply. In the composer, the Anyone can interact button lets you limit replies to people you follow, people you mention, or nobody. It applies to the whole thread.
Can you schedule a thread? Not in Bluesky's own app, which has no scheduling. Drafts are the closest thing: write the thread, save it, and post it when you're ready. Some third-party tools, such as Publer, can schedule Bluesky threads.
(And in case you got here from a search: a Bluesky thread is just a chain of your own posts. It has nothing to do with Threads, Meta's app. That comparison is in Bluesky vs Threads.)
How Do People Actually Use Threads on Bluesky?
Mostly as two-post threads, posted one at a time, with no numbering. Here's what 20,201 threads that started between 10:04 and 14:04 UTC on October 15, 2026 looked like, counting replies the author added up to 16:04 UTC.
How long Bluesky threads are (n = 20,201):
| Posts in the thread | Threads | Share |
|---|---|---|
| 2 | 14,697 | 72.8% |
| 3 | 3,030 | 15.0% |
| 4 | 989 | 4.9% |
| 5 | 495 | 2.5% |
| 6–9 | 666 | 3.3% |
| 10 or more | 324 | 1.6% |
The median thread is 2 posts and the average is 2.8. The longest had 150, from a bot that counts sheep in emoji.
How threads were posted:
| Method | Share of threads |
|---|---|
| One post at a time (usually by replying to yourself, Way 2) | 79.3% |
| All at once from the composer (Way 1) | 18.9% |
| Both: posted with +, then added to by replying | 1.8% |
I could tell these apart because Bluesky's app saves a whole + button thread in a single step, so its posts share one batch ID. Posts added by replying are saved one at a time.
What stood out:
- Most threads finish fast. For threads posted one at a time, the median time from first post to last was 2 minutes 27 seconds. A third were done within a minute, and 64% within five.
- A fifth of two-post threads put a link in the reply. In 20.9% of them, the second post was a link. Post the point first, link underneath.
- Numbering is rare. Only 2.0% of first posts used 1/ style numbering (1/, 1/5, 1/n) and 1.2% used 🧵. Counting arrows like 👇 and the word "thread" too, just 5.1% of threads said they were a thread at all.
- First posts are longer. The first post of a thread had a median of 149 characters, against 81 for posts that stayed on their own. People seem to thread when one post isn't enough room. (I measured how often posts hit the limit in the Bluesky character limit.)
Do Threads Get More Likes on Bluesky?
A little, but much less than the raw numbers suggest. About a day after posting, I looked up the likes and reposts on every thread's first post and on a random sample of 38,899 posts that stayed on their own. Accounts mirrored from Mastodon and similar networks (handles ending in brid.gy) are left out.
First post of a thread vs a single post (likes counted about 26–30 hours after posting):
| Thread's first post | Single post | |
|---|---|---|
| Got at least 1 like | 64.0% | 42.1% |
| Got 10 or more likes | 18.0% | 8.1% |
| Got at least 1 repost | 24.6% | 14.7% |
| Median likes | 1 | 0 |
That looks like threads double your odds of 10+ likes. But the people who write threads aren't typical. They write longer posts, and some accounts get more likes than others whatever they post. So I compared like with like: 7,061 people posted both a thread and a single post in those four hours. For each person, I compared the average likes on their threads with the average on their single posts.
- Threads did better for 43.4% of them.
- Single posts did better for 35.3%.
- The rest (21.3%) tied, mostly at zero likes either way.
Across all 7,061 people, threads came out about 13% ahead of the same person's single posts. (I used an average that keeps a few viral posts from skewing it.) Threads came out ahead, but not by much. Most of the doubling in the table seems to come from who writes threads. People may also save threads for their better ideas, which this can't separate out.
And later posts get far fewer likes. For threads of three or more posts whose first post got at least 10 likes (1,111 threads), here's what each later post got, as a share of the first post's likes:
| Post | Median share of the first post's likes |
|---|---|
| 2nd | 34% |
| 3rd | 31% |
| 4th | 27% |
| 5th | 25% |
| 6th | 22% |
The big drop is right after the first post. After that, each post gets only a little less than the one before it (the later rows only include the longer threads, so they're based on fewer of them: 199 threads reached a 6th post). So put your best line first, and make the first post work on its own, because that's where most of the likes land. For more on what gets likes, see how to get more likes on Bluesky.
How Do You Write a Good Bluesky Thread?
Some guides say 6–10 posts is the sweet spot and that you should number anything longer than 3–4 posts. That's not what people on Bluesky actually do: most threads are 2 posts, and 2% are numbered. Based on the numbers above:
- Make the first post stand alone. The second post gets about a third of the first post's likes. If someone only reads post one, they should still get the point.
- Don't bother numbering unless it helps. Bluesky keeps a thread's posts in order. Numbers are useful for long, step-by-step threads, and 98% of threads skip them.
- Short is normal. Most threads are two or three posts, and every post after the first gets a fraction of its likes.
- Use the composer for anything long. You can edit every post before it goes out, and readers never catch a half-finished thread. Bluesky has no edit button after posting.
- Put links in the second post if you like. 20.9% of two-post threads do this. Whether it helps reach on Bluesky, I didn't measure, so treat it as a style choice.
If you want to see how your own threads do, our free Bluesky analytics tool shows any account's top posts and its engagement against accounts the same size.
How I measured it, and the limits. I replayed six hours of Jetstream, Bluesky's public stream of network events, from 10:04 to 16:04 UTC on October 15, 2026, and kept every new post (949,347). A thread is a top-level post (not a reply) made between 10:04 and 14:04 UTC, plus every reply its author made to it, or to their own replies under it, by 16:04 UTC. So each thread had between two and six hours to grow, and slow threads finished later than that are counted as shorter than they are. I told + button threads from the rest by whether the posts were saved in the same step. Third-party apps that post a thread one part at a time land in the "one post at a time" group. Likes and reposts came from Bluesky's public API around 16:05 UTC on October 16, 2026. Posts deleted before then are left out of the like counts (but not the thread counts), and so are mirrored brid.gy accounts. I didn't filter out bots, so automated accounts are in both groups. This is one weekday, with every kind of account mixed together, from bots to news outlets. All of it is public data, read while logged out.
Followers aren't the only way a thread gets seen on Bluesky, but they're the part you can build. I built Agent Sky to grow that audience. It finds active accounts in your niche, follows them at a human pace, well inside Bluesky's limits, and checks for a live follow-back before it unfollows anyone. $9 a month, free to start. If you're also wondering when to post your threads, I covered that in the best time to post on Bluesky.
Quick FAQ
How do you make a thread on Bluesky? Start a new post, write the first part, then tap the + button ("Add another post to thread") below the text box to add the next post. Repeat, then tap Post All. You can also post the first part on its own and reply to it yourself. Your replies join the thread either way.
Is there a limit to how long a Bluesky thread can be? Each post in a thread can be up to 300 characters, but Bluesky's app doesn't limit how many posts a thread can have. The longest thread I tracked on October 15, 2026 had 150 posts, from a bot. Most threads are short: 72.8% had just two posts.
Should you number your threads on Bluesky? You don't need to. Bluesky shows a thread's posts in order, so numbers like 1/5 are optional. Few people use them: only 2.0% of the 20,201 threads I tracked started with 1/-style numbering, and 1.2% used the 🧵 emoji.
Do threads get more likes on Bluesky? A bit, but less than it looks. In my sample, 18.0% of thread openers got 10 or more likes, against 8.1% of single posts. But when I compared each person's threads with their own single posts, threads won for 43.4% of people and lost for 35.3%. Most of the gap seems to come from who writes threads, not the format.