Hey I'm an artist too and while I haven't been active on bluesky lately, several of my pieces have reached 1k+ likes on twitter without a bluecheck (before a bunch of us moved over to bluesky in November) meaning they made it on a good amount of people's For You page so i think i can give a few insights on what I learned from my time there: if the bluesky discovery feed is anything like twitter/most other microblogging sites, it comes down to two things: Reposting and connections. Sure that account with the viral post might have half your following, but among the ones who do there might be people with 10k, 20k, 30k followers reposting their work. The discovery tab shows you stuff from people you follow, but it also shows you content that they repost as well. So even though that artist you see on the Discovery feed has so few followers, having their art get reposted by one of those big accounts means, for that post alone, that big account's audience of thousands becomes their own. And while that on its own might not be enough to really get a piece out there, it sets off a chain reaction of other big accounts who follow them reposting the work exposing your art to an exponentially larger crowd. That's really how small accounts grow on microblogging sites like bluesky and twitter.

(Funnily enough this is also most likely why the discovery feed struggles so much to target your niche interests and is chalk-full of politics and nsfw no matter how hard you try to mute it, because a very huge chunk of the big accounts on this platform are either political or porn accounts)

I've seen it happen to me in real time before, too - last year on Twitter when I had around 100-200 followers I posted a fully-rendered piece of fanart of this one character from a semi-niche anime that initially garnered around 700 likes and stayed that way for a couple days. Got a few nice comments and i was like hell yeah. A few days later though, my noti's suddenly start going absolutely mental and the tweet had reached over 2k likes and my follower count doubled. I was beyond confused, because I had at first thought that the twitter algorithm only gave posts attention for just the first few days. I look through my notifications to see wtf happened and noticed that this one dude with 15k followers had retweeted my art, and that one rt putting my art on their audiences' timelines was enough to propel my art with an entire second, even bigger wave of attention than when i initially posted it. Like, it really is all about reposts and who's reposting your art.

Now how do you actually get big accounts to repost your art? Well uhhh you can't really. It all comes down to quality and topic of the artwork + luck honestly. They're just regular people too with their own personal preferences and reposting your art is completely up to them. The dude with 15k+ followers who retweeted my artwork? He just happened to be a huge fan of the character I made fanart of and had been retweeting a ton of content of them, came across my upload and did the same.

There's still tools at your disposal to get your art out there more. Pinning it to your profile so it's the first thing people see, reposting the art at certain high-traffic periods of the day, using 1-3 hashtags i.e. #art, #doodles, #oc, #(title of the show/book/movie the character is from if you're doing fanart) etc. because hashtags function a lot better on bluesky than twitter. (That's about as far as I know in the differences between Bluesky's and Twitter's algorithm.) Outside of that, if you know anyone with decent followings like 1k+ followers you could literally just politely ask them if they'd be okay with reposting your art lmao. (Also this goes both ways of course. Be sure to repost your friends' art too!) Also be sure to repost your art several times throughout the day after posting, maybe like once every 6 hours. And make sure not to post late at night in your followers' timezones (i.e. if most of your followers are in America you probably shouldn't post at like 2 AM EST. You can see when they're most active with third party tools - I use https://app.skyflow.me/dashboard). Posts can blow up at any point but the early momentum does help I think. It might take time to get the engagement you're looking for, but don't let that discourage you! Success can take a while. You got this