Finding the Place + Resilience Community on Bluesky
A Guide to the New "Old Twitter"
Like you, my work benefits tremendously from social media. Tools like Linkedin and Twitter allows me to keep in conversation with colleagues in the disaster and climate ‘ecosystem,’ the swirling mix of researchers, politicians, policy staff, journalists, practitioners, and activists who collectively shape what we know, think and do about environmental challenges. Twitter (re-branded “X” by owner Elon Musk in 2023) was once a valuable space for interacting with other members of the resilience ecosystem. There has been a mass exodus from X in recent years, however, for many reasons not worth summarizing here. Others have tried to fill Twitter’s formidable shoes (who can forget Mastadon and its regrettable ‘retoots’), but this week its first true alternative seems to have arrived.
Bluesky is a clone of the "old Twitter" that you may remember fondly. At its core it is a micro-blogging platform for writing short text posts and liking, commenting on, and sharing other people's posts. As compared to its major competitors there are a few reasons that I think Bluesky will thrive as a place for community building re: climate resilience:
Unlike X and Threads, it is not primarily an algorithmic feed. The default view in Bluesky are the posts of people you are following in reverse chronological order. Along with seeing what you want to see (rather than what the algorithim is trying to bait you with), this setup also allows you to follow in real-time, news and current events.
Bluesky does not penalize or muffle your posts if you share a link, unlike X and Threads (those platforms intend to keep all activity within their walls rather than encouraging outgoing links). This is crucial for restoring what made "Old Twitter" so valuable - it was a wonderful place for sharing work and learning about other people's work.
For that reason I think that journalists and news outlets will flock to Bluesky, another dynamic that made Old Twitter so appealing, i.e. that it was a place for journalists and experts to connect.
Bluesky includes a slew of user-friendly safety and curation features like blocking accounts and muting keywords or topics, i.e. it is very easy to see what you want in your feed and keep bad actors at bay.
It is an open source platform that allows 3rd party development, which means that all kinds of useful tools are being built - like DeckBlue, similar to Tweetdeck that was a vital tool for social media managers that was scuttled under Musk's leadership.
Bluesky seems to be achieving escape velocity of membership and activity after the election, at least for users in the United States. There are more than 18 million users as of this blog's writing, and I am suddenly seeing many of my favorite people and organizations there. I have high hopes.
If you want to join Bluesky and get plugged into the climate resilience ecosystem, there are a few resources to help you get started:
Bluesky's developers have created a tool called 'starter packs' that allow you to see a group of users with specific interests and to quickly follow them. For today's post I created a starter pack of 100 resilience-adjacent accounts that I would recommend you follow.
I would recommend several other starter packs that others have curated in recent weeks and that are resiliency focused or adjacent:
Another neat feature on Bluesky is custom feeds that will serve up content on specific topics. I’ve included a couple in the Place + Resilience Starter Pack to get you started.
One final note…if you are on X and thinking about moving to Bluesky, there are a couple of great resources that can help you to preserve your history and find people you follow there:
Services like Porto and Blueark can help you to copy all your past Tweets and bring them to Bluesky
Use the Sky Follower Bridge plugin to identify the accounts of people you follow on Twitter here (and mass follow them).
And there you have it, a (not so short) guide to joining Bluesky. Hope to see you there.
Thank you for doing this work ... super helpful.