I’m one of those folks who has completely moved from X to Bluesky, and for the most part, it’s been a pretty seamless experience. It’s not hard to move your following list over; you can upload (almost) all of your old tweets if you want; and the scrolling and posting experience is almost identical to what you’ll remember from the old days of Twitter. The only feature I’ve missed? Drafts.
Finally, drafts have arrived. In a post to the official Bluesky account, the company announced that it’s added drafts to the platform, and that they’re rolling out now. To create a draft, just start writing a post, and instead of tapping the Post button, hit Cancel or Drafts instead and choose Save draft. What you’ve written will be saved as a draft that you can return to later. The feature works for pre-written threads, too (made using the + button on the post screen). To see your saved drafts, open a blank post and hit Drafts before typing anything else. You’ll see a list of your stored drafts, and you can either tap on a draft to open it, or hit the three-dots button to the right of the drift and then Discard to delete it.
Drafts were a big part of Twitter for me—not just because they helped save posts if my connection dropped in the middle of writing them, but because they also gave me some time to consider if I really wanted to post something before taking it live. It’s a handy feature for a platform with such a small character limit, where it might be easy to toss a stray thought out into the ether without really knowing how it might land or if you’ve expressed yourself as well as you could have.
I’m not alone, here: A common trend on Twitter was posting screenshots of draft libraries, to give your followers a peak at the half-formed ideas you didn’t think were quite ready for prime time. It’s a bit of culture I’ve missed in moving over to the new site, and I’m glad it’s now possible once agin.
What do you think so far?
As for where Bluesky could go next, responses to the drafts announcement include requests for more robust DMs or an edit button, although Bluesky staffers have expressed both logistical and ethical concerns with implementing these. In the meantime, there are third-party tools that try to add some of this functionality, but they do come with wonky formatting that an official solution could probably avoid.
Originally published at Lifehacker
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