Bluesky is the one! 10 top tips for joining the growing social media platform

Bluesky is great, and it’s really starting to build now: in fact in under two months it has doubled to 12.5 million users. It’s especially good for individuals seeking to rebuild their professional and personal networks away from the toxicity of Twitter. If that’s you, or you’re just new to the platform and wanting to make the best of it, here are ten top tips.

1) Fill out your profile first.

Generic avatars and profiles without bios give off bot vibes and generally won’t be followed - so before you start showing up in people’s notifications feed as you follow them, give them a reason to follow you back. Put in a bio, put in a pic (even if it’s not of you), put in a link if you have a website or another social media profile you’d like to highlight, and ideally write a post or two as well so people know what you’re about.

2) In some ways, it works just like Twitter.

You can post up to 300 characters in one go, you can post videos, images, links, gifs and emojis. You can reply, you can Like, you can repost, you can direct message. It looks just like Twitter too.

3) In this crucial way it does not work like Twitter: there’s no algorithm.

You know how on every other platform, you think: why oh why can’t it just show me posts from the people I follow, in reverse chronological order? Well I have good news for you: that is exactly what Bluesky’s default ‘Following’ feed does. However, it is a complete outlier in this respect: nearly every other popular social media platform does some version of showing you content you’ve not asked to see, and it actually takes a lot of getting used to when that isn’t provided. There’s a slower pace of life than on Twitter or Insta where your feeds have a literally ENDLESS auto-refresh going on - this reduced activity is something I’ve really learned to enjoy. But when you’re new, if you don’t get out there and follow a bunch of people, your feed will be completely dead. So with that in mind…

4) Be proactive: follow people.

For Bluesky to be of any value to you at all, you need to follow people whose posts make your feed interesting and worthwhile. There’s a number of ways you can find people to follow:

• Use Skyfollower bridge to follow the same people on Bluesky you used to follow on Twitter: I actually wouldn’t personally recommend doing this but a lot of people find the option very useful

• Find people who post content you like, and look at who they follow. I’m a big fan of cannibalising people’s follower lists, it both helps you find people you know and opens up new horizons

• Use Starter Packs. These are curated sets of accounts, usually on a theme, which anyone can create. If, like me, you work in the library industry, a Starter Pack like Alice Cann’s UK Library and Information People would be a great way to follow lots of relevant industry people in one go. The MERL have created a pack that includes libraries, museums and galleries too.

• Make the most of custom feeds - these are curated feeds on a given topic. Unlike a List which is just all the posts from all the people on the list, posts only get added to custom feeds when people use the right emoji and have been added to the feed: so for example the ‘Skybrarians’ feed (I hope this link works…) is a great place for info pros to find each other and share relevant posts. There’s even a custom feed for gifted articles (gift links that bypass journalistic paywalls for e.g. the New York Times). You can also use the ‘Discover’ and ‘Popular with friends’ feeds (both default tabs on your Home screen) to find new people to follow

• Simply search for topics you care about, and follow the people posting interesting things about them

Whatever you do, do SOMETHING. There have been people who join Bluesky and simply wait for something to happen. Because of the lack of algorithm, nothing does happen without proactivity, so they say ‘Bluesky is dead’ and then leave. This is a real shame! Cos it’s great.

5) Be proactive. Like, reply, and engage.

All those cliches about how you get out what you put in really apply here. You have to go beyond broadcasting and truly engage: reply to other people’s posts, join in conversations, cultivate discussion. I follow an author and illustrator called Debbie Ridpath Ohi on Bluesky, and she wrote a great post of tips for those new to Bluesky, which I’d recommend you read here. In it she posted this cartoon which sums up the whole thing perfectly. Be the two on the right!

Thank you to Debbie for giving me permission to reproduce this here. Click the pic to go to the blogpost it appears in

6) make the most of the moderation tools.

Good moderation and the ability to control who you interact with has been baked into Bluesky from the start, and it makes such a difference. Unlike on Twiter (even good old days Twitter) 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. And it’s not just that you can’t see the posts of the person you blocked; they can’t see yours either, or even replies to them. And if someone Quote posts you and you don’t like it, you can detach your post from theirs so they’re no longer associated. Not only that, you can subscribe to blocklists (e.g. this one) which really do starve problematic groups of the oxygen they need. It’s basically the opposite of Twitter, where, famously, hope goes to die.

7) make your own alt-text mandatory.

We all know it’s essential to add alt-text to images but sometimes you can be too quick to post and forget. Access Bluesky’s 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 - finally a social network which offers this! Here’s a great resource on how to write alt-text descriptions, if you want to brush up.

8) A mix of professional and personal is good.

This is by far the most subjective of these tips, so feel free to ignore it completely. But for me I think this kind of social media works well when you use it for professional purposes, but with a little personal thrown in too. If it’s all work, people don’t get to see who you are so you may not build relationships. If it’s all personal, you miss out on that fabulous opportunity for peer-support and ideas and discourse beyond the walls of your office. So, if you feel comfortable doing so, post some stuff about your hobbies as well as your job!

9) give it time.

You will not get instant results on Bluesky, but it’s worth the wait. It really feels a lot like Twitter before it went bad. Don’t give up too early; it takes to rebuild a community and spending two desultory months here and then two more distracted months on Mastodon and then giving Threads a half-hearted go is really the long way round…

10) enjoy it while it lasts!

I don’t want to end on a negative but listen: enshittification comes for us all. To quote Wikipedia:

Enshittification (alternately, crapification and platform decay) is a pattern in which online products and services decline in quality. Initially, vendors create high-quality offerings to attract users, then they degrade those offerings to better serve business customers, and finally degrade their services to users and business customers to maximize profits for shareholders.

Right now Bluesky is in the ‘creating high-quality offerings to attract users’ stage, and they genuinely seem to care about things like moderation and protecting us all, and it’s a great place to be a part of. The more popular it becomes, the more expensive it will be to run, and we may start to move down the curve marked ‘enshitify’ - so let’s make the most of this phase. We’ve probably got a good few years, and the community is worth your time. Let’s do this.

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Notes:

• as always I’ve love this post to become more useful by other people contributing ideas. If you have more Bluesky tips, leave them in a comment!

• this is about using Bluesky as an individual - I may write more about using it as an institution later. But there’s hope in that regard: The MERL joined 3 days ago and have already reached 10k followers at the time of writing!

• the particular blue sky at the top of this blogpost was captured by me in the Pentland Hills near Penicuik, a town in Scotland, where the landscape is beautiful and the sheep look quite angelic when backlit

Library marketers! Don't fall into the trap of thinking TikTok is just a young person's platform...

There’s some really interesting data I’d like to present in this post for your perusal, so I’m going to put it at the top as a sort of tl;dr version - but obviously please do carry on reading for the context of why it matters!

So here it is. Broadly speaking, we think of Facebook as being for older people, Insta and TikTok as being for younger people, and Twitter* for being somewhere in the middle - the sweet spot for that 25-34 demographic. However:

Twitter has around 127 million users aged 25-34, where as TikTok has 256 million users aged 25-34. In other words there are more than twice as many 25-34 year olds on TikTok (the young person’s platform) than there are on Twitter (the 25-34 year old’s platform!).

Remarkable, eh? But why does this matter? Recently I was working with a library on their marketing, and asked them if they'd considered using TikTok. No, came the reply: our average user is 28 years old, an age more associated with Twitter demographics.

First of all, kudos to the institution for a) knowing useful demographic data and b) using it to inform their decision-making! We all need to do more of that.

However there's a risk that we can let the dominant narratives about social networks disguise important insights: in this case, the idea that TikTok is full of young people (which it is) obscured the fact that there are SO MANY people on the platform overall that it's useful library marketing for all age-ranges.

These days accurate Twitter user-figures are hard to find, but here's what I discovered via Statista. There are around 335 million users of the platform, a massive 38% of whom are in the 25-34 age bracket. So: 127 million people in the age range for the target 28 year old. And no other social network that I looked into had such a high percentage in this particular group: so far, so good for Twitter.

However! Whilst only 16% of TikTok users are in the same 25-34 age-range, that's 16% of 1.6 billion users - this amounts to 256 million people in total. In other words *twice as many 28 year olds are on TikTok than are on Twitter.*

Only 8% of TikTok users are aged 35-44 like me (I am clinging on to that age-range for another few months before I get promoted to the 45+ one!) but in my own experience if feels chock-full of them... I drum for a band that exclusively plays 90s Dance music - trust me when I say, people aged 35-50 love it but it's of very little interest to anyone younger! And yet we do very well on TikTok (more so than Insta or Twitter or Facebook) because it turns out, there are a lot of nostalgic people in their 40s on there, who want to see a band play the song Renegade Master live on stage (42,000 views and counting) 😄

Anyway. The point is that TikTok is an option worth considering (in the long term its battles with the US Government may, or may not, change that) even if you don't consider your library's key demographic to be especially youthful. It's always worth looking deeper at the numbers behind the narratives, and how they relate to YOUR library community.

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*I'm just not going to say X. I'm not going to say X, formerly Twitter. It's too annoying. I'm just going to say Twitter, forever.

Universities need to get better at using Instagram – here’s how

I wrote an article for the Times Higher all about University use of Instagram. I think Insta is absolutely the most important social media in Higher Education at the moment now Twitter has become unusable, and this article sets out why that is and what to do about it.

It contains some stats, some useful links, and above all guidance on how to use it well!

The article is free to read - click the image or the link above go to the post on Times Higher Education site

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If you’re interested you can find details of my Instagram for University Departments and Professional Services here.

Nomadic Librarian Social Media in the post-Twitter age

Do you remember that feeling when Twitter first started working for you, and you were suddenly tapped into this seemingly infinite network of other people in your profession, who shared experiences and ideas and perspectives and guidance? What an amazing time that was; I absolutely loved it.

I got into librarianship in 2006, but it only really came alive for me in around 2010 when I got online. In 2011 I joined Twitter (thanks as ever to Bethan Ruddock and Laura Woods for persuading me that my doubts about it were misplaced!) and really everything changed. It led to all sorts of opportunities, but the thing I appreciate most about the platform is the sheer number of voices it has allowed me to hear - I got so many useful insights I wasn’t getting within the walls of my own institution. My eyes were opened, my knowledge was expanded, my politics moved even further to the left and I changed. Twitter changed me, for the better.

Twitter is now untenable

However, since Twitter became X it has become untenable and it is only the sheer power of the relationships I built over 12 years that has kept me there this long. There is no other brand or organisation run by a white supremacist that I would consider giving my time to; it feels deeply uneasy to be part of something so incredibly toxic, because you feel complicit.

I’m not deleting my account (yet) mainly because I don’t want anyone else using the alias, but I am officially leaving the site from Christmas - no longer logging in or posting. I wouldn’t presume to tell anyone else what to do but if you’re still there, I’d recommend at least considering getting out too.

Need some reasons to leave Twitter?

1. Hate speech, harassment, extremist content and misinformation have all spiked since Musk took over

2. Musk himself has said some abject things, including describing antisemitic conspiracy theories as ‘the absolute truth’, and threatened violence against his enemies

3. Musk has reinstated previously-banned white nationalists and whole host of incredibly toxic accounts which he’s now actively promoting, whilst deleting accounts of journalists he doesn’t like and reducing traffic to news sites

4. Honestly there’s just an endless list of things. Even just researching enough to list points 1-3 above is so bleak, I don’t want to do any more; every day there’s something else awful he’s done, just google his name and you’ll see the latest

So what happens next for libraries and librarians? Originally this one post about both those categories, but it got ridiculously long so I’ve moved the bits about libraries into a separate Part 2. Let’s focus first of all on us, the people working in the cultural orgs, which is the slightly less complicated side of the coin in some ways.

Social media for librarians, information professionals, and others who work in cultural organisations

So here’s a massive disclaimer about this section: it is VERY subjective. (The bit about libraries and social media in part 2 is far more objective.) It’s based on my experiences and my preferences. Your mileage may vary.

I have now been actively looking for and posting on Twitter alternatives for over a year, and this is what I’ve concluded. (tl;dr Bluesky is the closest equivalent to early Twitter, and I whole wholeheartedly recommend getting yourself an invite code if you can.)

Threads just isn’t quite happening for librarians

I wanted Threads to work, so I joined early and optimistically. I followed lots of library friends, plus a few larger accounts, newspapers and the like. And what I’ve found is, my feed is 90% posts from the Guardian etc and hardly any from the library people. (There is apparently loads of book-chat on Threads, but not so much library chat.)

Part of the reason for this is that Threads is unavailable in the EU. So the entirety of European librarianship, pretty much, is absent from the discussion. I love European librarians and want them in my network! [EDIT: since I wrote this post, Threads as become available in the EU! This may change everything and make Threads a viable network for librarians over time, we’ll have to wait and see.]

Threads famously became the fastest growing new social network ever: while Facebook and Twitter both took over 2 years to reach 10 million users, Threads took just 7 hours. There are now 137 million people with accounts - but that doesn’t matter. What mattes is active users. There are around 10 million active Threads users, who only spend 3 minutes a day on the app. (Obviously, 10 million is a large number - but compared with 200 million active Twitter users, or 2.35 billion active Instagram users, clearly there is simply less conversation to be had there.)

So my Threads account lies dormant, with a post basically saying: I’m putting my eggs in the Bluesky basket.

Instagram is essential for libraries but potentially less so for librarians

I enjoy Instagram but I am there as a drummer, not as a library professional. I do follow some librarians on there and enjoy their posts, but they tend to be about their lives rather than their work.

My experience has been that Instagram’s primary focus on video, then on image, and then on words, means it’s not as suited for a professional network in our particular profession (and a lot of info pros aren’t there on principle because it’s a Meta product) - but actually this is probably too limited thinking on my part. Naomi Smith is making the @blackandgoldeducation critical librarianship account work on Instagram, and points out:

There are many people, organisations who are interested / amazed by ideas of #critlib and share similar values especially younger audiences which is the main instagram demographic

LinkedIn is actually pretty good after all!

I have been so sneery about LinkedIn over the years, put off by some performative posting I saw in the early days, and the (rightly earned) reputation the platform has for being a home to the ‘I get up at 4am and have already done 3 workouts and boosted productivity in my companies by 6% by the time you have breakfast!! hashtag #stayhumble’ brigade. HOWEVER I was basically wrong, because like almost all communities, the thing it’s most famous for is not what it’s actually like for most people there.

Connect with the right people (oh hi!) and LinkedIn is a friendly, supportive place where you get useful updates about what is going on in the industry. It’s also a good place to share ideas, with decent numbers of people reading posts on there, and people actually leave comments and ask questions - posting on LinkedIn feels like blogging felt about 10 years ago!

The only downside is it’s almost all professional, and I love a little bit of personal mixed in - I want to know about who we all are as people, as well as what we achieve in our jobs. But basically if, like me, you’ve written LinkedIn off in the past, give it another go because you can be part of the good bit of it…

Mastodon is good, but it’s not quite the Twitter replacement I craved.

When I joined Mastodon I initially really enjoyed it, but several small things have meant that optimism was short lived. It doesn’t look great or feel that good to use - it’s a little clunky - and there’s well documented issues with finding people across the federated servers. There are also lots of examples of being people scolded for doing the wrong thing on Mastodon, though I’ve not experienced this myself.

More than that though, the biggest issue for me is I just find myself scrolling for a long time on the platform before I find content I’m interested in. The conversation just doesn’t quite seem to match up to what I need from a professional / social network mix - and that’s very much a personal thing so you might find the chat absolutely hits the sweet spot for you.

I had an interesting chat with a BlueSky user called Mx Vero who said Mastodon DID work better for them than Bluesky - in particular the code4lib.social server, which leads me to speculate that the info pros at the more technical end of librarianship are more likely to find Mastodon useful, because the are less likely to be put off by the technical hurdles to getting set up on the platform in the first place. So there’s a greater amount of conversation to be had in that area of libraryworld, on Mastodon.

Someone on Bluesky asked ‘why didn’t Mastodon work for ya’ll?’ and one of the answers was this:

“It felt a little like eating something because it was good for you but not something you enjoy”

This sums it up well: Mastodon has a great community but the vibe - I’m bringing out all the scientific terms now - is just slightly off, for me personally. Which brings us to…

Bluesky. I’m all in: Bluesky is the one.

I am only two months in to being part of this platform, but I really, really like it. It feels VERY twitter circa 2015 - not least in visual style as it is made by the same people who made Twitter in the first place, but just in terms of the way it feels and the conversations we’re having there.

The hit-rate of stuff I’m interested in versus total posts to scroll through is much higher than anything since several-years-ago-twitter, and there’s a real sense of a community sharing updates and ideas. It seems to have a good mix of serious and fun.

You need an invite code to join (which is part of the reason it’s not overrun by far-right people) - just ask on your other networks and chances are someone will message you with one. We all get one a week to give out to people. When you get there, say hi!

Click the image to view my profile (if you're already on Bluesky!)

I asked others why it worked for them: Alice Cann said:

“I found library and related people here on BlueSky immediately and there are a core amount of people posting quite often”

Selena Killick said:

“Ease of use and the fact that Librarian twitter seems to have moved here has helped”

…and several others chimed in with similar views. Arianne H. said:

“Once I figured out how they work, I have found the feeds to be a really useful way to keep up with library related conversations, especially Skybrarians. I like that feeds are created by users.”

Feeds are, I think, like Twitter lists but intended as a much more public-facing thing rather than a personal one. Here’s the skybrarian feed link for those already on the platform - thanks to Andromeda Yelton for setting it up!

manu schwendener said:

“Best feature for me: that their roadmap and issues are public”

…and also has some useful guidance on first Bluesky steps, including using Follower Bridge to reconnect with your Twitter contacts. It’s a pretty manual process that will take a while if you follow a lot of people, and it’s a bit hit and miss (if you follow someone called ‘Dave’ on Twitter it’ll find someone at random called Dave on Bluesky and be like, hey I think we got him!) but a good jumping off point. As always though, a reliable way to jump start your community building is this:

1) Set up your profile - bio, pic, a first post - BEFORE you start following people, so when they get the notification of the new follow and potentially click on your profile, there’s something for them to see

2) Find a librarian you like, click on the list of people THEY follow, and canabalise it

On top of all that, the way the community is building organically is really nice. Threads felt like a mad rush, with everyone joining and then almost immediately leaving (albeit not deleting their accounts because you can’t without also deleting Insta), while Mastodon felt like a party that had already been going for a while before you got there, and has certain rules and norms you’re not fully up to speed with. Bluesky just builds slowly, and because you get an invite code per week to give out, people are gradually bringing others into the fold and more and more people we all want to see there are arriving.

Here’s the real test of which social network you most identify with - which profile do you put in your speaker bio and on your first and last slides..? I’ve changed mine to Bluesky. I’m all in!

What is the longer-term prognosis for librarian social media?

The answer to this questions is of course that I don’t know, but there’s a couple of things worth bearing in mind. One is that even if, say, something else comes along in two years that we all end up switching to, two years is a long time! Two years of being a networked librarian able to tap into support and ideas beyond your institution, even if imperfectly, is so much better than nothing. But the other thing is, I don’t think we’ll ever get another Twitter. Not in terms of the sheer focus of dialogue in one place - the world and the online landscape is too fragmented now, so we’ll split off into smaller communities.

I’d love to be wrong about this of course. But if we do end up with lots of options, the important thing is not to let that put us off. Pick one, try it, and see if it’s for you. If it’s not, move on. If it is, go all in. Because we’re all better off for having a way to benefit from our professional community online - I hope you find yours!

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Read the Library-focused follow up to this post here: Where should libraries go now Twitter has become a Wasteland

Where should libraries go if Twitter becomes a wasteland?

Elon Musk has bought Twitter, he’s all but guaranteed to make terrible decisions about how to run it, and high-profile users are already leaving the platform due to the already-significant increase in hate-speech and misinformation. Of course this has wider implications for the world at large, but where does it leave libraries seeking to connect with users on the platform? Should we stay, or find a new home?

tl;dr - in a way it doesn’t matter what we want to do, we have to follow the lead of our communites. If they stay put then so should we; if they fragment then it becomes a lot more complicated.

Should we simply leave Twitter on principle?

A quick disclaimer is that I’m focusing on organisational accounts here. When it comes to us as individuals, there’s certainly an argument that we should be getting out - but this post is about libraries, not librarians.

Ultimately, my view is that libraries leaving Twitter on principle is self-defeating and too selective. Facebook is so incredibly problematic and has been for at least a decade, so if we’re leaving Twitter we should probably be leaving FB, right? And they own Instagram so we should leave that too. Which means we’re left with TikTok, which is hardly a bed of ethical roses and is especially problematic around data.

So do we leave all of them on principle? You could certainly make a case for it - but I don’t think most of us will because it would destroy our ability to interact with our communities. So if the answer is ‘no we’re not leaving all of them,’ then leaving just Twitter seems like a misstep: if you’ll forgive the extended metaphor, it’s like cutting off your unethical nose to spite your face, when the cheeks, eyes, chin and mouth are equally guilty.

What are the alternatives? Is Mastodon an option?

There are a few alternatives to Twitter and sadly I’m yet to see any of them as a truly workable solution. The one currently garnering most attention due to a record number of downloads and new members is Mastodon, which is very Twitter-like indeed. Visually and functionally it’s very similar to Twitter but the problem is, we’re not REALLY on Twitter because of the functionality; we’re there because our communities are.

Unlike Twitter’s single giant network, Mastodon is spread across several different servers with different subgroups. There are regional spaces, queer-friendly spaces, climate-activist spaces - and they all stress they welcome everyone (e.g. you don’t have to be from New Zealand to join the mastadon.nz space). The issue with this diffuse approach is no one group is especially big: so there are 5,000 people on the Australian community server at the the time of writing, versus 3.7 million Australians on Twitter. You can interact with people on different servers, but the way it’s set up we could put an enormous effort into Mastadon but not influence enough people in any one place to see any tangible rewards. However I’ve set up an account for myself @nedpotter@mas.to get to know the platform in case it becomes a viable option for the library later.

The same goes for Discord, another platform often cited as a Twitter alternative in recent days - it focuses on several smaller communities, rather than one massive one. This makes it all but impossible to use efficiently as a library.

As things stand, I don’t see a viable alternative to Twitter. That may change, and it will vary according to sector - so for example if a LOAD of health professionals join Mastodon, it could become a useful platform for Health Libraries to have a presence on. But right now, it isn’t.

If we’re staying, what should we do differently?

One of the key things you can do if you haven’t already is mute more. Go to Settings and Support > Settings and privacy > Privacy and Safety > Mute and block and finally Muted notifications. On the resulting screen you can mute default-profile-pic accounts, or unconfirmed accounts, meaning you’ll be less exposed to mass-produced trolling or bots.

Ticking a few of these will probably help

You can of course mute individual words and block accounts too, or even Lock your account - from a comms point of view though that’s a pretty drastic step to take for an organisational account.

One other thing to note is don’t conduct any kind of sensitive conversation via DMs. You can’t trust Twitter with your data, so don’t DM your users and ask for anything you or they wouldn’t want to Twitter to know - just DM them and tell them you’ll be in touch via email instead…

[Hey while you’re in Settings, why not also take the opportunity to revoke access to third-party apps that don’t need access anymore. It’s good practice to do this on a regular basis anyway. And if you’ve got the patience for it, check out this guide for getting rid of a lot really annoying things about the way your Twitter timeline currently works - no more suggested posts, woohoo!]

Should libraries pay $20 a month for the blue tick?

Hell no.

So what happens next?

The slightly frustrating truth is our next steps as organisations has to be: wait. We have to wait and see what our communities do, and be guided by them. If they move en masse, we can move with them. If they don’t, we should probably stay where we are.

In the meantime it’s worth considering things by sector.

• If you’re a law library, pharma library, or other special library, you can potentially use LinkedIn to connect with almost every relevant person in your potential audience, and ditch Twitter if you truly wish to

• If you’re a school library you can definitely get by without Twitter if you choose to

• If you’re a Health Library or an Academic Library keep an eye on the conversations your audience are having on where they might go - Mastadon may become an option worth investigating in time, you never know

• If you’re a public library… I just can’t see any sort of alternative on the horizon for now. At least Facebook is the really key platform in that sector!

If anyone else has advice, guidance, or thoughts on what you might do with your library’s social media presences, let me know in a comment below. Good luck out there, everyone.