Since my earlier article Bluesky – the real alternative to Twitter?, Twitter/X has continued to lose users to Bluesky’s algorithm free, open-source user experience. The user base on Bluesky has grown from three million at the beginning of 2024 to more than 20 million by the end of November and includes much of the large ornithology community.

However much Bluesky (or, BSky) might feel like Twitter of old, there are a number of important differences. Most importantly, Bluesky is the first open-source social network, that means that the software that drives the network is made available to users and developers – no hidden agenda, no greedy corporation and no native algorithm to dictate what you see.

Figure 1. A Bluesky post about the platform reaching 20 million users and where those users are migrating from.

 

Arriving on Bluesky

On Twitter/X, or indeed any other social network, the content you see is controlled to some extent by an algorithm. That algorithm decides what you might be interested in viewing, or more and more, what the forces behind the algorithm would like you to see. This isn’t the case on Bluesky’s home feed, which, upon arrival will be a chaotic ‘firehose’ of posts from across the network. This presents an opportunity to filter those posts to only include only content you’re interested in. This is a simple process and allows users to decide what they want to view. Enter Feeds.

 

Feeds drive Bluesky

Feeds are the real driver of content on Bluesky, both for the individual but even more so for communities. Feeds allow you to build your own curated content, grouping specific interest topics without other content getting in the way. Personally, it allows me to access a topic when I want to focus on it – be it ornithology, birding, moths, dragonflies, climate change, general science or even Manchester United! So, whilst I might check into my birding Feeds on and off throughout the day, many Feeds I catch up with as and when I have the time.

There are already active and engaging Feeds on over 2,000 topics! You can be on Bluesky with no followers yet access and engage with thousands of others simply through Feeds.

Figure 2. An example of a Bluesky Feeds screen on a smartphone.

 

Accessing Feeds

Feeds are an integral feature of Bluesky and the built-in functionality makes it simple for users to find, access and create their own Feeds.

Whether you’re using Bluesky on your smartphone or via the website, Feeds are accessed by selecting the # icon (top right of your phone screen and/or in left margin on the website). This opens the Feeds screen and your personal ‘My Feeds’ will be empty until you start following some.

Search for your interests in the ‘Discover New Feeds’ section – this is near the top of the page when ‘My Feeds’ is empty but will slowly move down the page the more Feeds you follow. Add a Feed to ‘My Feeds’ by selecting the + icon on the right and with well over 2,000 Feeds available you’re sure to find ones covering your professional and personal interests.

 

Posting to a Feed

If you want to get your posts/content seen then the best way to do this is to post to an active Feed by using the appropriate tag, keyword or emoji, e.g. tagging your post #ornithology sees it automatically drop into the Ornithology Feed.

Some Feeds may add some individuals to a Feed’s ‘authorised poster’ list if they post solely on the Feed topic.

 

Building communities

Many communities are now building on Bluesky with some that once thrived on Twitter/X quickly establishing themselves here. It’s been a slow start for ornithology but with the BOU arriving on the platform and establishing the Ornithology Feed, others have followed including other ornithological organisations such as the BTO and Wilson Ornithological Society, as well as more and more individual ornithologists.

And new communities are establishing too. Birding on Twitter/X was never really a community as such, with no discrete spaces built around hashtags (unlike how the ornithological community coalesced around the #ornithology tag) which meant birders were just thousands of individuals floating around bumping into one another.

On Bluesky we have birders grouping around site, county and regional Feeds and tags which are in turn picked by the main UK-focused Feeds, Birding Scotland, Birding Wales and Birding UK/IRE. We’ve now got a large, vibrant and connected community across the whole of the UK. And it’s growing daily.

But communities don’t just build themselves and we need more people on Bluesky willing to put in the effort that some of us put into establishing ornithology on Twitter a decade or more ago. Without a team effort to establish discrete ornithological groups that can be aggregated into a broader community (like we have achieved quickly with UK birding) then some areas will certainly fail to gain traction.

 

Increased engagement

Arriving on Bluesky over a year ago, engagement was slow, even within Feeds, as there simply wasn’t enough of us using the platform (which back then was still accessed by invitation only). But recent months have seen a mass arrival of users, now over 20 million, and with it an exponential growth across many interest areas and both ornithology and birding have benefited.

In my last months of being active on Twitter/X, I was posting the same content on both Twitter/X and Bluesky. The difference in engagement around these posts was startling with posts on Bluesky averaging 4x more engagement and some posts up to 20x higher (and with 60% fewer followers on Bluesky). This is down to Feeds driving community engagement with posts in Feeds clearly outperforming non-Feed posts (the latter have however increased as my follower vase has grown).

Figure 3. Example of a Bluesky post with high engagement in a short time (six weeks) – the author never had a tweet reach this level of engagement in 13 years on Twitter/X.

Creating your own Feed

Feeds are the real drivers of building a community and are very easy to set up and there are several tools to help you (see resources below). Birding has seen a proliferation of Feeds appear as enough birders are posting to tags or Feeds for their own site, county or region to allow content to be collated by the UK birding Feed.

We’re now seeing ornithological Feeds being set up, e.g. Ornithology, Seabirds, Avian Hybrids, Raptor Research and Bioacoustics, and I hope we’ll start to see other discrete avian research areas develop their own Feeds – waders/shorebirds, bird conservation, etc. are all waiting to happen. These discrete research Feeds can then be pulled together within the BOU’s Ornithology Feed but users have the choice to which Feeds they want to follow and contribute to. The result is a ‘Russian doll’. Only interested in raptor research? There’s a feed collecting that tag (Raptor Research). Interested in all ornithology topics around the world? There’s a feed collating all of those tags in one place (Ornithology). Similarly in birding, if you’re only interested in birding news from northeast England, then the Birding NorthEast Feed is for you. But if you’re interested in birding news from across the whole of UK and Ireland, then you can subscribe to the Birding UK/IRE Feed.

 

Community starter packs

A brilliant feature of Bluesky is the ‘starter pack’ – a compilation of several key Feeds and people within a specific interest topic. There are already Ornithology and UK birder starter packs to help new arrivals connect with others in these communities, and more and more are popping up all the time covering discrete interested, e.g. raptor researcher.

Figure 4. The ornithology starter pack.

Many community Feed admins have added these starter packs to help people join their Feed where you can either ‘select all’ or cherry pick from the list to follow a whole tranche of people to get you going.

 

This isn’t Twitter/X!

I see all too many people arrive on Bluesky and use it just as they do Twitter/X. Whist it has a similar interface and feel to Twitter/X, there are cultural, technical and user differences you need to understand. So, if you come over to Bluesky, please learn and adapt to your new platform and space and use tags/keywords to contribute to the Feeds you’re interested in and be part of their active communities.

Bluesky is a nice space and the hatred and negativity that has consumed Twitter/X simply isn’t tolerated on Bluesky. Quote-dunking, being argumentative, punching down, bigotry and more, are likely see users blocked by individuals and from Feeds.

Most people quickly work this all out but there are some who try to use Bluesky as they do/did Twitter/X. Many of the latter soon drift away as they don’t get traction or worse, they get blocked.

Some people object to this gatekeeping but its gatekeeping that stops Bluesky from descending into the mire Twitter/X has become. Personally, I want Feeds to be gatekeepered and I love that dedicated individuals are committed to keeping Feeds topic-relevant. When ungatekeepred Feeds become too much of a ‘free for all’ and too much content is off topic, I unsubscribe. That’s my choice to see what I want to see.

 

Twitter/X – losing engagement but not followers

Many Twitter/X accounts have seen their engagements drop off a cliff over the last year. Several things are working against them there. Firstly, unless they’ve paid for a Blue Check account their connect is demoted by the platform’s algorithms. Secondly, their follower base has shrunk in real terms even if the number of followers listed remains roughly the same. This is due to many people having effectively moth-balled their Twitter/X accounts, no longer using the platform whilst leaving their account in place, still following everyone they follow, but obviously no longer viewing or engaging.

 

Leaving Twitter/X for good

More and more of us are leaving Twitter/X behind in varying degrees. Some are moth-balling their account in the hope the platform is cleaned up in the future to allow their return. Some are parking their accounts simply not to lose the content they’ve built up over the years (although see below about migrating your tweets to Bluesky). But increasingly people are deleting their account and abandoning the platform completely. And some are using paid services to migrate their content over to their Bluesky account.

All this is easier for the individual than it is for a society or organisation who may have spent over a decade building a follower base and community on Twitter/X. For some groups that platform has been integral to building their online presence and brand. I know only too well that the BOU falls into this category having been responsible for building and running their social media presence for over ten years. Such groups still have large followings on Twitter/X, so it is harder for them to leave and abandon their core base. But these groups are now finding that engagement is in such steep decline on Twitter/X due to followers leaving – in particular many of the most active members of their community were among the first to jump ship – as well as the built-in algorithms working against them (e.g. by demoting their content).

Societies and orgs need to be building their migration, cross-over and/or exit strategies to take the most active members of their communities to their other social accounts including Bluesky. This needs to be clearly sign-posted, notifying the users of a platform of the intention to leave, with cut-off date, and listing the other platforms available for their society content. But this will take time, so the sooner they start the better.

 

Migrate your tweets to Bluesky

Blueark is a paid-for service that enables you to migrate all your Twitter/X content over to Bluesky. Seeing more and more people do this successfully I took the plunge and migrated over 60,000 tweets over to Bluesky which cost me US$25 (c.£20). The migration loses some of the engagements around those old tweets, but my own original content is there, back to 2011, safe on my preferred new platform.

 

Join the Bluesky community

Download the mobile app (iOS and Android) from your usual app store or go to https://bsky.app/ to use the web client.

 

Further reading and resources

Acknowledgements

My thanks to Jamie Dunning, admin for the Ornithology and Birding UK/IRE Feeds, for feedback on my earlier draft greatly improving this final version.

Blog posts express the views of the individual author(s) and not those of the BOU.

If you want to write about your research in #theBOUblog, then please see here