The Twitter alternative Bluesky Social website displayed on an iPhone screen. Photo: Koshiro K/Shutterstock
Microblogging platform Bluesky may still be a relatively small player among the social media giants, but some news publishers seem to see its potential as an alternative to Twitter/X.
Bluesky had an estimated 688,000 monthly active users in July, according to digital information platform Similarweb, but that’s far short of the 200 million monthly active users claimed by Meta’s product Threads and Elon Musk’s X (formerly Twitter), which reported 174 million daily active users in March.
But dozens of publishers of varying size and reach, from commercial giants like The New York Times and CNN to independents and local publications like The Intercept and The Alaska Beacon, submit articles to Bluesky every day.
Press Gazette spoke to publishers who use the platform to find out whether it could be an alternative to X/Twitter, which many see as an increasingly toxic environment dominated by trolls, extremists and bots.
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Firstly, what is Bluesky?
From a user’s perspective, Bluesky is a simplified version of X: it presents users with an infinite scrolling feed of short posts (max 300 characters) from accounts they follow. Users have some control over how these posts are displayed, but in its most basic form, Bluesky gives users a reverse-chronological feed that shows new posts first.
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The main difference is in the backend: Bluesky is a decentralized, federated platform, which means that the accounts you see on it can be hosted on different servers. This is different from traditional social media networks, where all accounts and posts are hosted entirely on, say, Facebook or Twitter’s servers. The idea is to give users more control over their content and audience, and to allow them to move to another federated platform without having to abandon everything they’ve built on the first site.
(Being decentralized has other implications for the platform too, such as making it possible to use a free website to search for users who have blocked you.)
Another difference is that while Threads and X automatically present users with a single chronologically or algorithmically ordered feed, Bluesky allows users to subscribe to or create feeds that aggregate posts from specific accounts. For example, users can follow a news-centric feed, a comedy feed, a fishing feed, or a feed that shows the latest posts from the least active accounts they follow.
For now, Bluesky lacks some of the features its competitors have: it only added direct messaging in May and video isn’t yet natively hosted. It also lacks post scheduling, although third-party services like Buffer are compatible with the platform. Bluesky doesn’t maintain its own post management platform like Twitter’s old Tweetdeck, but another third-party service, deck.blue, is free and has much of the same functionality.
Originally invitation-only, Blue Sky is now open to anyone. It has seen a surge in UK users in recent days. A Blue Sky spokesperson told Press Gazette on Tuesday that around 36,000 UK users have joined in the past two weeks, possibly sparked by concerns that misinformation shared on X may have fuelled the UK’s riots over the summer.
For now, at least, Bluesky seems more keen to work with the news industry than some of the social media giants, with the platform’s spokesperson Emily Liu telling Press Gazette: “Newsrooms and journalists are part of the important communities that power every social platform. So many people use social media specifically for news, which is why we want to support newsrooms in making Bluesky a home. We’re always open to feedback.”
“This is a platform where newsrooms can really own the relationship with their audience and drive distribution.” Liu also posted a blog post on the site touting how newsrooms can leverage Bluesky for election coverage.
That stance may give the company an edge over Threads, the other major potential successor to Twitter for news publishers, whose head Adam Mosseri previously said, “Politics and hard news are inevitably going to end up in threads, but we’re not going to do anything to encourage that.”
Mastodon, another decentralized alternative to Twitter, has not yet proven popular with publishers, despite recently saying it wants to be the “go-to place for journalism.”
How to succeed at Bluesky
The first step for publishers who want to establish a credible, professional presence on Bluesky is to get verified. However, Bluesky doesn’t verify accounts in the same way that Twitter did, nor does it have a paid verification system like X and Threads do today. Instead, Bluesky allows users to self-authenticate by setting their web domain as their account handle.
Having a domain as your handle helps prove that you’re really who you say you are, because you can only do that if you control that domain. For example, to make @pressgazette.co.uk your name on Bluesky, you need to add a specific string of text to the domain registrar for pressgazette.co.uk. (Bluesky provides a more technical explanation of this process on their website.)
Once verified, publishers can request inclusion in Bluesky’s largest news feed, a convenient way to reach an engaged audience. (Unverified accounts are not eligible for the feed.)
This feed is personally maintained by Andra Lijnsland, Senior Data Journalism Engineer at the Financial Times.
Asked how he thought publishers could succeed with Blue Sky, Lin-Insland told the Press Gazette: “Blue Sky readers are quite different to X readers. They’re made up mainly of people who’ve left X.”
“In general, it’s important to treat Bluesky as a serious platform, not as a replacement for X’s dwindling audience. Engage with the Bluesky audience and get journalists to treat the Bluesky audience as seriously as they treat the X audience.”
“If you put in the effort to establish a strong presence on Bluesky, you’ll get a lot of engagement, even though the platform is much smaller.”
She described the crowd there as “very energetic, extremely diverse and generally more left-of-centre than right-wing”.
“Understanding your audience is important no matter where or how you do your journalism, so it’s worth taking the time to understand your readers’ needs.”
What publishers say about Blue Sky
While many FT journalists are based on Bluesky and regularly post to the platform, the FT told Press Gazette that its involvement is currently limited: “Currently the FT has an auto-feed and a feed for journalists that people can follow, but generally we are closely monitoring the performance of the platform before investing further resources.”
Emma Krstic, Politico’s European engagement director, told Press Gazette that the company’s foray into Blue Sky was “experimental”.
“On social in general, I think you have to be on the forefront of any new platform and see if it’s worth investing time and resources into. With any new platform, you don’t know if people are really going to jump on it and be successful.”
Politico isn’t a mass-market publication, he said, but rather “is aimed at people who are genuinely interested in politics and policy, so we’re trying to find the places where those people congregate and where we can reach them.”
When asked if they are finding those people on Blue Sky, Krstic replied, “Based on the number of followers we have at the moment, I’d say we’ve found a pretty engaged audience.”
However, a lack of audience analytics made it difficult to know for sure who they were reaching.
She said: “What I’ve found generally when jumping into a new platform is that it takes time for the analytics side to catch up. It’s still experimental in a way, as you’re just throwing stuff out there and seeing what data comes back or what feedback you get from your audience.”
“So I would say it remains to be seen whether that will be a really beneficial audience for us.”
Krstic’s comments echo those of other publishers. Asked about Blue Sky earlier this year, Travis Lyles, deputy director of off-platform and social at The Washington Post, told Press Gazette that “it’s important for our newsroom to keep an eye on high-profile social media platforms to make the right decisions and meet our readers where they are.”
The New York Times’ director of off-platform operations similarly told Digiday, “If it wasn’t something that was promising for the future and satisfying for our readers today, it wouldn’t be on the platform and we wouldn’t be keeping it on a day-to-day basis.”
Meanwhile, FT engineer and news feed manager Lijnsland suggested that Bluesky could bring about a more fundamental change in the way content is published and consumed online.
She said: “Blue Sky is effectively made up of two parts: the AT Protocol, which is the underlying decentralised technology that aims to facilitate publishing in a variety of formats, and Blue Sky, the flagship product of that technology, a microblogging platform.”
“Understanding how the protocol works and how it makes Blue Sky operate differently from traditional centralized social media platforms should be a top priority for any journalist serious about covering Blue Sky.”
“It would be easy to see it as a less functional Twitter clone, but that would miss a lot of what makes Bluesky so fascinating as a technology. In many ways, Bluesky is like the internet of the late ’90s, with a lot of innovation and experimentation happening at the same time, not just by the Bluesky team, but by many different individuals and groups.”
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