As prominent individual and institutional accounts eschew Twitter/X for new social media platforms, Bluesky is having a moment. Drawing on the experience of colleagues on the platform, Ned Potter, offers ten tips for academics getting started on Bluesky.

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Many academics and researchers have chosen to leave Twitter/X due to recent events. One of the places they’re sharing ideas instead is Bluesky. For those not familiar with the platform, it is extremely Twitter-like in look and feel but with exponentially less toxicity (for now). It recently doubled its number of users and at the time of writing it is growing by around a million users a day. If you’d like to be part of it, this guide is for you.

Throughout I’ve quoted various academics from my own institution (University of York), and it seems appropriate to start with this advice from Dr Richard Carter:

“Don’t be afraid of starting out again. If you have a sizeable following on Twitter-X, the prospect of shifting to a significantly smaller audience on BlueSky might appear very discouraging. Nevertheless… rebuilding on a fresher, far less toxic platform offers us a chance to reconnect with the core audience of professionals that we always intended to reach and be in dialogue with.”

Here, then, are ten tips for those ready to rebuild.

Fill out your profile BEFORE you start following people

Put in a bio of some sort, and an avatar: it doesn’t have to be a picture of you. As Dr Jeremy Moulton says: “…immediately write your bio and then post an ‘I’m here!’ post that sets out your interests and what’s brought you onto the app.”

Accounts with generic avatars and no biography or introductory text are often perceived as likely to be bots, so users often don’t follow back and sometimes auto-block – so sort your profile before going on that following spree to connect with your peers.

Adapt for – and enjoy – the lack of algorithm

Bluesky is very Twitter-like in lots of functional ways: you can post up to 300 characters at a time, you can repost, you can Like, and so on.

The crucial difference is the lack of algorithm on Bluesky’s default ‘Following’ feed. There’s no endlessly auto-refreshing content, just posts from the people you follow, in reverse chronological order. That’s it.

It takes some time to readjust to proactively seeking out posts and people to engage with, but it’s essential on Bluesky. Dr Lucy Grigoryan says: “It’s worth following a lot of people – more so than on twitter, it really changes the whole experience” – so how do you find people to follow?

Follow some Bluesky Starter Packs

A ‘Starter Pack’ is a curated group of users on Bluesky, which you can follow all in one go with one click.

“One of the best things you can do when starting out on BlueSky is to curate your experience from the get-go: look up different feeds of interest, follow those you’re interested in, follow anyone interesting ‘they’ are following, and take advantage of the new starter packs to rapidly follow the activities of people in related areas of interest / work. It will take a little while to organise, but it’s worth it,” says Richard Carter.

There’s an entire Directory of Starter Packs available, allowing you to search by keyword to see if your discipline is represented. If you’re still looking for people to follow after searching the directory and taking all of Richard’s advice above, you can use Skyfollower bridge to follow the same people on Bluesky you used to follow on Twitter if you wish to.

Get up to speed with custom feeds

A Custom Feed is a curated set of posts (rather than merely a list of accounts) on a theme. There are lots of academic custom feeds already available, including an AcademicSky feed for general HE chatter, a PhDSky feed for and by PhD Students, and many based around specific disciplines: use the handy goodfeeds tool to search for ones of relevance to you.

Prof Colin Beale says “Finding, following and requesting being added to feeds that are relevant to your research and then tagging posts for those feeds appropriately is very helpful” and in fact using custom feeds was the most often cited piece of advice amongst the academics I spoke to about Bluesky.

Be proactive. Like, reply, engage

Bluesky works best when you go beyond broadcasting and truly engage: reply to other people’s posts, join in conversations, cultivate discussion. One the tips from Dr Terry Hathaway is simply “…engaging in conversations rather than focusing on posting some branded message out into the void.”

Dr. Sophie Coulombeau advocates a mix of the professional and the personal if you feel able: “…blend self-promotion (‘Thrilled to announce…’) with other stuff around hobbies, interests, and boosting the work of others, if you feel comfortable doing so.”

Don’t just post links to your articles, post mini-threads highlighting your findings

More than one academic I spoke to advocated using Bluesky to discuss research papers rather than merely linking to them. Here’s how Colin Beale puts it: “As a general rule posts that just say “We’ve got a great new paper here, read it” don’t really work – but explaining in a short thread the key findings is a much more effective way of engaging.”

The follower numbers are lower but the engagement is higher

Several users who maintain presences on both X and Bluesky report that engagement is much higher on the latter: in fact a comparison by Andrew Dressler found engagement was 10 times greater on Bluesky:

Furthermore Katharine Hayhoe reported that not only was the level of engagement considerably higher on Bluesky, the nature of the responses was much more positive too.

Make the most of Bluesky’s powerful moderation tools

Dr Sabine Clarke says “I do a lot of pre-emptive blocking. When people follow me now who appear to have no interests in common, or seem a bit random, I just block them.”

When you block someone they are gone completely: if they leave a comment on your post and you block them, you won’t see the comment and no one else will see the comment either. If someone Quote posts you and you don’t like it, you can detach your post from theirs, so they’re no longer associated.

As well as the nuclear block option, you can also use the mute function to moderate your own experience of the platform. Richard Carter says, “…if there are topics and discourses that you could very much do without seeing regularly, it can be an invaluable tool. I’ve compiled a veritable ‘devil’s dictionary’ of words to help bring a sense of personalised calm to my various feeds.”

Build in accessibility from the start

I’d recommend accessing Settings, find the Accessibility section, and toggle the switch marked Require alt-text before posting and you can create accessible content every time. You can also add alt-text (and indeed captions) to videos. Here’s a great resource on how to write alt-text descriptions, if you want to brush up.

Give it time

It may not yield instant results for everyone, but we all have a unique opportunity to shape Bluesky while it is still emerging as a social network. The rapidly growing academic community, currently fuelled by enthusiasm for a fresh start, can use this more positive platform to share research, gather ideas, and build new connections… Join us!

Ned can be found online at ned-potter.com and on Bluesky @nedpotter. He runs the University of York Library Bluesky account @UoYLibrary. 

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Image Credit: Ondrej Prosicky on Shutterstock.