The king is dead; long live the king.
This blog post is both an ode to Twitter and a suggestion for somewhere new.
When reflecting on your career in education, you often consider where you’ve made an impact within the wider educational community. Some teachers might have coached an All-Ireland-winning team, others may have directed a successful musical. For me, it might just be Twitter. At the first CESImeet back in February 2009 at the Maldron Hotel, I presented on Twitter, with Stephen Fry as my herald of this great microblogging tool. Incidentally, he also became my most famous follower! Between TeachMeets and my then role with the NCTE, I was Twitter’s biggest evangelist. All I could talk about was Twitter. According to one regular reader of this blog, Twitter should have been paying me a commission during those heady early days. 😉 (You know who you are!)
Twitter has been good to me. It opened doors in education that I could never have imagined. Excavating WWI artefacts in the Meuse-Argonne battlefield, developing a teacher resource in the home of Thomas Jefferson, doing funded research in the Library of Congress, and working with the best EdTech team in Central Virginia all stemmed from individual tweets. I’ve also made great friends on Twitter, some of whom I’ve been lucky enough to meet in person.
However, during the 2016 Presidential election, the Twitter algorithm began pushing Russian bots and far-right trolls into my timeline for the first time. Unfortunately, things have only deteriorated further since its rebranding as X.
Now, it’s time to strangle its scrawny neck and move on.
Image created using DALL-E ” Create a blue twitter bird moving to a Blue butterfly”
Welcome to Bluesky
Bluesky is designed to give users greater control over their online experience. There’s no algorithm suggesting new content, so your feed is made up entirely of the people you choose to follow. If you’ve been using Twitter, Bluesky offers a refreshing alternative—free of trolls and bots.
For those transitioning from Twitter, many familiar features await: posts (not tweets), hashtags, and powerful blocking tools.
When creating an account, you’ll need to select a username. Bluesky handles are unique, as they automatically include the site’s domain, .bsky.social, at the end. You can add more personalised handles by associating them with your website.
To find new people, explore various starter packs—lists curated by other users. A master directory of starter packs is available at Bluesky Directory. Additionally, topic-based #Feeds like #EduSky and #EdChatIE can help you connect with others in your field. The Discover Feed, the closest to a BlueSky search engine, is another way to explore to find new followers. Alternatively, you can click through the followers of an account and add them to your own following list.
Just a word of caution: some individuals have been cybersquatting on well-known Twitter names, so double-check on Twitter to ensure their Bluesky handles are legitimate.
For more adventurous users, there’s a browser extension called Sky Follower Bridges, which helps you locate Twitter users who’ve migrated to Bluesky. Those fans of Tweetdeck will rejoice in Deck Blue. There is a very useful guide on Bluesky and educators by Jake Miller
I’ve been on Bluesky for a year and a half, and it has really taken off over the past month. It feels reminiscent of the early days of Twitter.
Oh, and by the way, I’m @johnmayo.bsky.social.