In her first article in this two-part series, Alison Barrett interviewed a range of health and human rights leaders on, Why the rush to Bluesky?
Below, she shares tips for navigating the increasingly popular platform.
Alison Barrett writes:
As the world becomes more chaotic and public discourse more polarised, decentralised social media services like Bluesky and Mastodon have the potential to offer a safe haven from negativity and toxic speech.
Both were designed to not be controlled by one company as decentralised networks of servers, giving users more control over their data and experience, and Big Tech less.
One of the features that sets Bluesky apart from X and some other social media platforms is the ability for users to create their own personalised feeds with custom algorithms.
Bluesky provides a platform where you can find what you need without having to deal with misinformation and disinformation, away from the “negativity, hate and abuse” on X, Dr Simon Judkins, emergency medicine leader, told Croakey last week.
Part of what has made X and other platforms so unenjoyable and harmful in recent years is their use of data-driven algorithms, largely for profit and power.
Algorithms are used to sell alcohol, gambling and other harmful products on social media, and Musk has been tweaking the X algorithm to boost his own posts during the US presidential election campaign.
As reported at Croakey last week, in the weeks since the election, Bluesky has seen a wave of public health and human rights experts make the move from X due to that platform’s diminished value and integrity, as well as increasing misinformation and negativity.
Also, ethical concerns about supporting the platform that Musk used to promote a Trump election victory is a motivator.
Getting started
Bluesky looks and feels quite similar to X – it has similar features for reposting and quote posting, tagging people, using hashtags and pinning posts. Users can also have one-to-one conversations via direct messaging but these are not encrypted at this stage – Bluesky said they will be adding more “safety enhancements” including end-to-end encryption in future updates.
Posts on Bluesky, called skeets, have a 300-character limit, and images and videos can be shared.
Kristy Schirmer, Principal Consultant at Zockmelon Health Promotion and Social Media Consulting, said when she created a Bluesky account, she “was greeted with a platform reminiscent of Twitter/X in user interface with minimal friction or learning curve”.
Schirmer said she generally opens accounts for new platforms and recommends individuals and organisations do the same, “even if it’s just to secure the handle and get a feel for the platform”.
Users can curate the content in their feeds by using the “following”, “discover” and “popular with friends” links at the top of timelines.
Feed preferences, including the order of posts, can be adjusted in settings>content and media.
Responding to Croakey’s request for Bluesky tips, other users suggested creating lists of favourite posters and pinning for easy access.
Starter packs
One of the most talked about features for beginners on Bluesky is starter packs – a pre-packaged list of accounts created by users, often based around a theme. Read Bluesky’s guide on starter packs here.
“It seems to me like Bluesky have learnt a lot from those days of Twitter and have some features that make those early times easier to navigate,” said Dr Tim Senior, a GP and contributing editor at Croakey.
“This will allow you to follow people posting – some people say skeeting but it will never catch on! – about topics you are interested in,” he told Croakey.
There are some good collections of accounts about primary care or non-white perspectives or women in medicine or health journalism or Australian psephologists, etcetera, according to Senior. He recommended visiting the searchable Directory of Bluesky Starter Packs here.
Simon Katterl echoed these sentiments. “There’s lots of good starter packs that help you find people knowledgeable in key areas,” he said.
Professor Samantha Thomas recommended asking to be added to starter packs, so that people get to know you and vice versa.
“Don’t be shy! People will be more than happy to add you if you fit the topic of the pack,” she said.
You can search this directory of starter packs. Ones that may be of interest to Croakey readers include:
- Public Health and Health Promotion Starter Pack 1, created by Thomas
- Public Health and Health Promotion Starter Pack 2, also created by Thomas
- Mobsky pack
- Politics in Mind, for people who speak/think critically about mental distress, created by Katterl
- #AusPol on Bluesky, recommended by Katterl
- Commercial Determinants of Health
- Australian GPs, created by Senior
- Croakey Health Media members and directors.
Engage and build community
Judkins said the easiest way to get started is to “link into the community groups that have been established”.
“You will find some old relationships and friends from X but will meet may new people,” he said.
He added, “even though I’m feeling refreshed by Bluesky and its positivity, we all need to make sure that we aren’t in an echo chamber of ideas”.
“We need to step outside comfort zones and hear ideas and thoughts that might make us uncomfortable, so we understand broad community responses and ideas…whether we agree with them or not.”
Thomas advised engaging in conversation – “it’s the best way to get to know each other”.
She also suggeted that users like, repost other users’ posts and follow people back – “it’s important in building a community”.
Katterl recommended the Sky Follower bridge app/extension to help you find people on your old X account too, “if you don’t want to manually search for folks”.
Senior told Croakey he is in a “testing stage” of working out the best posts for each community of people on the different platforms he uses.
“I think my Bluesky community is becoming more like my Twitter community, and Mastodon is smaller with engagement from a small number of friends rather than a broader community,” he said.
Senior also said there is a culture of using ALT text on images, so the platform is accessible for more people.
For academics
According to Kai Kupferschmidt, contributing correspondent for Science magazine, researchers are “drawn” to Bluesky by its “Twitter-like feel, welcoming features, and increasingly, the critical mass of scientists in many fields who have already made the move”.
He said the platform has become so popular with academics that last week “Altmetric, a company that tracks where published research is mentioned online, urged publishers to implement a ‘share to Bluesky’ button like those to share content to Facebook, X or LinkedIn”.
Senior said, “interestingly, for academic communities, Altmetric has moved to Bluesky and is starting to measure Bluesky engagement with journal articles now, too”.
Control and safety
According to Smriti Mallapaty in Nature, the move to Bluesky for many researchers has been about “gaining back control over what appears in their timelines”.
As well as being able to have more control of topics in feeds, Bluesky offers options to “filter out content such as nudity and spam, or specific phrases”, Mallapaty wrote.
“Bluesky also offers a feature that users have nicknamed the ‘nuclear block’, which prevents all interaction with blocked accounts – an option no longer available on X.”
Thomas said another good feature was the ability to detach a post from a quote-dunk – where someone shares your post with a nasty comment.
Users can create and subscribe to collaborative block lists; once subscribed, no content from those accounts will appear on their feeds.
Senior told Croakey there are some good block lists for blocking transphobic people, for example, or science disinformation content.
However, some Bluesky users have cautioned against subscribing to entire block lists in case, as per below post, credible experts end up on troll lists.
Emily Liu, who manages growth, communications and partnerships at Bluesky, told Nature, “with any huge wave of growth, there’s going to be a wave of spam and scam as well”.
“We’ve scaled up our trust and safety team; hired more moderators to help combat all of this.”
Navigating multiple platforms
Schirmer’s advice is “to be on at least two platforms and develop a social media strategy that is aligned to your actual goals, rather than just pushing out content and seeing where it lands”.
While she appreciates that everyone’s resources and capacity are limited, she suggests “there are ways to do more with less capacity”. She can be found on Bluesky here, and is available for ‘pick my brain’ sessions on social media strategy.
Senior said he has “done a bit of copy-pasting of content across X/Twitter, Mastodon and Bluesky” and has discovered Fedica, which allows him to cross-post to all three platforms.
“So far I’ve used the same messaging across all three platforms, but the slightly different restrictions on character number have meant I’ve started to tailor messages a bit,” he said.
***This story was updated after publication
Further reading
Bluesky user FAQ https://bsky.social/about/blog/5-19-2023-user-faq
Nature: ‘A place of joy’: why scientists are joining the rush to Bluesky
Science: Like ‘old Twitter’: The scientific community finds a new home on Bluesky
The Conversation: What is Bluesky and how’s it different to Twitter
The Conversation: What is Mastodon, the ‘Twitter alternative’ people are flocking to? Here’s everything you need to know
The Conversation: Decline of X is an opportunity to do social media differently – but combining ‘safe’ and ‘profitable’ will still be a challenge
Columbia Journalism Review: Journalists Are Leaving X for Bluesky. Will They Stay There?
Croakey Health Media: Suggested principles to guide safer digital communications infrastructure; what do you think?
See Croakey’s extensive archive of articles on health communications
