Webinar Replay: Bluesky Basics and Beyond

TRANSCRIPT

Sarah

Welcome to today’s webinar, Bluesky Basics and Beyond. Today we’re going to chat about Bluesky, the social network that’s been capturing tons of attention in the last couple of months, and share some best practices that you can put into action as part of your social media strategy. If you have questions, please drop those into the questions box as we go through today, and we will answer those at the end.

Before we get started, just a little bit about us: Social News Desk is the only social media management software that’s purpose built for critical communicators. We were founded in 2010, and since then we’ve proudly supported America’s largest news companies, cities, government agencies, school districts, universities and businesses who require powerful, always-on social media tools.

Social News Desk helps organizations save time with a one-stop shop for social media publishing; take control of their entire social media footprint in a single, easy-to-use dashboard; stay informed and engage with the community around them with social listening tools; demonstrate value to stakeholders with powerful reporting; and gain peace of mind with our always-ready human support team.

And a little bit about me: I’m Sarah Loyd, the Head of Product Success and Evangelism here at Social News Desk. I’ve been with the team for ten years, coming up on 11 years this summer, and prior to joining SND, I managed social media and worked in several newsrooms, and I was actually a Social News Desk customer before I joined the team.

So feel free to connect with me on LinkedIn or, of course, on Bluesky. And with that, I’m also pleased today to welcome Emily Liu, who heads growth and partnerships at Bluesky. This open social network gives creators independence from platforms, developers the freedom to build, and users a choice in their experience. Previously, Emily built election models and visual solutions at The Washington Post, archival tooling at The New York Times, and automated fact checking at the Duke Reporters Lab.

So, Emily, thank you so much for being here. We really appreciate your time today.

Emily

Happy to be here. Thanks, Sarah.

Sarah

Yeah. Of course. So, Emily, take us through a little bit more about Bluesky for folks who aren’t familiar with it.

Emily

Awesome. So I will walk everyone through a short series of slides that just give you a high level overview of what Bluesky is. And I’ll also talk about some features and best practices that I think you should be aware of. All right. So at a very high level, what we’re doing at Bluesky is we’re building an open social network.

So this is actually a core difference between Bluesky and the other social platforms you might be more familiar with. And the core difference here is we want to build this version of social where you, as the user, are actually in full control of your posts, of your profile, of your identity online, of even the algorithm that you choose to see your posts in the app.

I think like a canonical example that comes to mind these days is just what’s happened with Twitter, now X. Maybe you’ve spent ten years there building up your personal profile, or maybe, for the account for the organization you work for. And it has all of these posts you might have, like an audience of thousands and millions of followers.

And if one day you decide you want to leave the platform, you really have no choice but to just walk away from that entire account that you’ve built there. And that’s super frustrating. And it’s also just hard to rebuild your audience. And this is how platforms, closed platforms like this are able to lock users in. They know how hard it is and how time consuming it is to switch to another platform.

With Bluesky, we’re building an open social network where you’ll always be in control, regardless of provider. An analogy for how this works is phone numbers or email addresses. This sounds a bit outdated, but what I mean by this is, for a phone number, let’s say I use AT&T as my carrier, and let’s say Sarah uses Verizon.

Despite having different providers, the two of us are still able to call each other, and have a contact book for all of our friends phone numbers too. And if one day my provider, AT&T, stops providing signal in my area or they start charging way too high of a cost, I don’t have to stick with them. I can switch over to a different provider, but keep my same phone number, keep my contact book.

So Sarah and all my other friends are still able to find me and call me, so I can still stay in touch with my friends. In this way, there’s like real competition between these phone carrier providers to keep providing a great service to users because they know that you can easily switch off. It just feels like that kind of competition has not existed in social media for the last decade.

Really. And so that’s what Bluesky is trying to bring back. So on one hand, we’re building Bluesky, the social app that you might have on your phone already. And additionally, we’re also building this open social network where future competitors can also provide services to users. Because we know that this kind of competition and innovation in the long term is what really benefits users.

So to give you a sense of the growth that Bluesky has been experiencing recently. So I sent this slide deck over to Sarah maybe a week or so ago. And since then it’s already become out of date. We’re now at nearly 29 million people on the network. Bluesky launched the app publicly in just February of last year.

So it’s been under one year. And we’re already at nearly 29 million people. The first week that Bluesky launched the app, we gained like a million new users in Japan. And over the last year, it feels like the sky has been having moments in various countries around the world and picking up users along the way. For example, we had a huge like Brazilian growth spurt in, last fall as well.

And now we’re truly a global app. Over the last couple of months, the top three countries that have been joining Bluesky are the United States, the UK and Canada. But overall, Bluesky is a very global, diverse, our top three countries overall are the United States, Brazil and Japan. Which actually matches what the top three countries were for Twitter back in the day.

So one thing that we take super seriously on Bluesky is making it a really effective place to distribute information quickly. We want Bluesky to be a home for breaking news. We want it to be easy for people on Bluesky to find out what happened literally three minutes ago, and discuss it right on the network. And sure, you can discuss what happened three weeks ago, three months ago.

But we do want to make it easy for you to find out what’s happening right in the moment. So in December, when martial law was briefly declared in South Korea, people on Bluesky were discussing that an hour before people and X were talking about it. And it feels like this kind of moment of like breaking news happening and it reaching Bluesky first has just continually been happening, on Christmas Day.

So under a month ago we added a trending topics feature as well. So the screenshot is also a bit out of it, out of date, but this is a feature to make it even easier for you to find out what’s happening right in that moment and join the conversation.

So with all of this breaking news, we’re also prioritizing getting publishers organizations real genuine engagement too. As an example, some publishers have been reporting a 2 to 10 times increase in the level of engagement that they’re getting on Bluesky compared to what they’re getting on other social apps, including apps where they’ve had accounts for years, so they might have millions of followers.

There. For example, data from the Guardian in that bottom left screenshot, is talking about how in the Guardian’s first week on Bluesky, they gained 300,000 followers, which is already a sizable amount. But over on X they had nearly 11 million followers because they had just been around for many more years. And yet even on their first week on Bluesky, the traffic that they were getting from Bluesky already exceeded that of X.

Same goes for match testimony, from the Boston Globe, that this increase in traffic is also converting to paid digital subscribers as well. And that this isn’t just an English speaking phenomenon. We’re seeing this happen to Italian, newspapers, as seen on the right screenshot, and other publications to I think this is all downstream of the fact that Bluesky does not demote or throttle links in any way.

We really see Bluesky as the lobby to the open social web. We want to make it easier for publishers, organizations, educators to connect their social following with their web presence so we don’t throttle links in any way. I mean, we’re really seeing that pay off in the amount of web traffic and engagement that people are getting. 

So on the note about Bluesky not demoting or throttling links in. Anyway I’ll talk a bit about how our algorithm works. So when you download Bluesky, every new user gets two tabs in the heart. The first one is the following tab. And this shows you all of the posts from people you follow in chronological order.

So it’s very straightforward. If someone you follow makes a post, it will show up there. There’s no fancy ranking going on there. The only thing it takes into consideration is one. If you follow the account and to the timestamp of the post, so it’ll show all of those posts in chronological order. The second tab over is called discover.

This is Bluesky as default algorithm. So you can think of it as our version of the For You page. And the way that discovery works on Bluesky is also pretty straightforward. It consists of three main components. The first one is posts from People you Follow. The second one is posts that people you follow like so things right outside your network that we think you’d be interested in.

And the third one is trending content from across the whole network. So this would include things such as like viral posts, breaking news, moments like that that we think you would be interested in as well. So like I mentioned earlier, we don’t demote or throttle links in any way. I know that on other platforms, people have taken up this habit of being like link in second post or link in bio, but under the sky.

Feel free to add your link to your first post. We do not demote that in any way and really encourage you to share links. Similarly, we don’t upgrade or downgrade content just because of the post format. So whether your post contains an image or a video or a link or anything else that doesn’t affect, how much your post is shown to other users.

So the reason why the discovery algorithm is really so simple and straightforward is because this guy has actually been investing way more of our energy into building out this feature called custom feeds. So custom feeds, is a feature where you can choose your own timeline. You can choose which algorithm or feed you want to use that powers your social experience.

You can kind of think of this as like turning on a TV. If on other social apps, when you turn on the TV, you get a single channel. You don’t know how content shows up there, but that’s just the channel that you have to watch. Then on Bluesky, it’s like when you turn on the TV, you have over 100,000 different channels to choose from, and if one of those channels doesn’t meet what you’re looking for, you can also create your own to and others can tune into your channel too.

So there’s plenty of algorithmic choice here to really customize your experience and turn the sky into the social experience that you want it to be. As an example of some kinds of custom feeds that exist out there already. So there are over 100,000 custom feeds that are on the network now. The vast majority of which are created by people who are not affiliated with Bluesky, the company in any way.

We’re seeing feeds pop up for geographic regions. So I have a screenshot down there of one for the Bay area. It includes all posts that mentioned a SF Bay area keyword. So like Golden Gate Bridge, Alamo Square Park, things like that. We’re seeing feeds pop up for topics. So one that I put a screenshot of is news.

And this includes all posts from verified news organizations. So you can pin that feed and make it, a place where you’re more mindful of your news consumption or you get all of your news in one place. Similarly, we’ve seen custom feeds pop up for specifically gift links. So links to newspapers, news sites, back home with an unpaid wallet link.

We’ve seen users mention that that feed has become one of their favorites and has is basically where they get their daily news now, because for one thing, it’s not paywalled. And secondly, it comes with the user recommendation to read that article. And then another type of feed is like a play on an algorithmic feed. So quiet posters on the left as an example.

And quiet posters shows you posts from people you follow who don’t often post that much. So it’s like now that your friend, who doesn’t really post that much has said something, you want to make sure you see what they say. So quick posters can give you a cozier feel to the social network. So there’s plenty of room to play around with custom feeds.

You can think of them as like super powered lists or hashtags. That can be as simple as just a list of users to as complex as a whole new for you algorithm that you implement. All right. Next slide please.

Now I’m going to talk a bit about how to get verified on Bluesky. So the way to get verified on Bluesky is to set your website as your username. So in line with Blue Skies Open philosophy, this is our way of also opening up the verification system too. So instead of Bluesky, the company arbitrarily deciding, like Sarah gets a blue check and Emily doesn’t get a blue check and so on.

Instead, where, like each organization can choose to verify their own individuals or people affiliated with them. As an example, The New York Times has set their, username on Bluesky to be @nytimes.com. And then over on the right hand side, you can see that they’ve begun verifying their journalists. So Eric Lipton has the username @ericlipton.nytimes.com and that verifies his affiliation with the New York Times.

Though note that Eric still has full control over his account. If he wanted to change his username at any point in time, he could do so. Just because he has nytimes.com and his username doesn’t mean the company has any access to his account. It’s just a username that he can choose to set or not set. So maybe you’re a journalist, who doesn’t want to have your company in your username? Totally fine.

Maybe you have a personal site or a portfolio page. You can make that your username on this guy, too. Same goes for freelancers as well. And so, Nicole, that screenshot in the middle, that’s an example of someone setting their website as their username to, we’ve noticed, we’ve helped senators, government officials set up their official usernames as well.

US senators have taken on the practice of doing last name.senate.gov. The fact that their username has senate.gov. And it means that their account is authentic. And I’ve also included a screenshot of Caltech in the bottom right corner @caltech.edu that verifies their account as well. 

So this is just a quick slide to show you the range of global adoption that we’ve seen, both for the sky and also specifically for the websites as your username feature. We’re seeing a ton of activity from international governments political figures joining Bluesky. And they’re verifying their accounts with their website as well. So for example, the European Commission is using @oecd.edu.

Same goes for various presidents and governments. President Lula of Brazil, in the bottom left corner, was the first head of state to join Bluesky. Probably a year ago at this point, he’s using his website @lula.com for that as well.

And this is just another slide to show you local adoption. So the opposite of the last slide we just saw taking the city of Boston as an example. So firstly they verified their account with that @boston.gov username. Then they’re onboarding all of their city agencies to Bluesky. With that verified username as well. So @streets.boston.gov for example, is one of their usernames.

But I think what is most exciting and interesting about what they’re doing with Sky is the fact that they’ve created a custom feed for the city of Boston too. And using this custom feed, they’re able to share public notices, city information that their residents should be aware of directly on Bluesky. And so let’s say you live in Boston or you want to stay updated with Boston, updates, information notices.

You can pin their custom feed directly to the home page of your Bluesky app and get all of your city notices directly on the home page of your social app. I think this is especially exciting to me because it’s this way for government agencies to reach their residents and reach their citizens. Without worrying that like a tech company’s black box algorithm is interfering with whether or not their posts show up or not.

Instead, they have full control over this algorithm. People in the city of Boston can choose to pin this custom feed and get all of their notices right there. It’s also just a way for the city of Boston to take the real estate of the Bluesky app and make it a place for them to share their public notices, too.

So I’m very excited about this use case. All right. So this is my last slide. And also my top best practice tip for you on Bluesky. And it would be to take advantage of starter packs. So starter packs is a feature on Bluesky that allows you to recommend a list of users and also feeds to other people.

Whether they have a Bluesky account already or not. So you can find starter packs on your profile. It’s a tab that says starter Packs right there, and you can use that to create one. As an example, publishers including The Verge. They create starter packs for that includes their brand account as well as any journalists affiliated with them.

From there, they’ll share their starter pack as a post on Bluesky, and then they’ll pin that starter pack to their profile. I think this is a super smart move because now anyone who visits The Verge is profile immediately sees their starter pack and can follow all of their affiliated journalists in one click. So with every starter pack, you get a preview image, a QR code, and also a short link to make it easy to share.

So we’ve noticed that organizations will take these three sharing materials, and post their starter pack on other social apps in their newsletters, on their website, and in this way, really create this goal of growth that tells their audience to come find them on Bluesky, and they’re quickly able to gain a ton of followers in this way.

I think, because Bluesky is such a young network, our community is extremely organic and highly engaged, and I think that people enjoy following. Other people are like accounts with human faces. So if you’re running an organization account, my top tip would be, to be, like, human and organic and genuine as you can be, if you want to build your audience there.

To drive followers back to your brand account. We’ve noticed that individuals will create their own starter packs. So let’s say, like, a verge reporter wants to make a starter pack for the tech beat that they cover. Maybe I, then they can include The verges account in there. Include any fellow journalist as well as any subject matter experts that they’d like to recommend to other people in Bluesky, too.

So starter pets are just a great way to really grow your audience. There. All right, just one more slide after this. And I think, okay, so this is just a closing slide. There’s an email down at the bottom there. If you have questions happy to answer them at the end of this, webinar. But there’s also a partnership’s email here that you should feel free to reach out to at any time.

Sarah

Thank you so much. Emily and I will second the starter packs concept. I love that so much. I know when I first jumped on to Bluesky, I made it really easy to just start following folks I was interested in. I live in San Antonio. I’m a big San Antonio Spurs fan, so I could find everyone talking about the San Antonio Spurs, with one click and get them all into my timeline, which was great.

So, I really, really love that feature. It’s a really easy way to, you know, build through your following. But also if you end up in a starter pack, your following will grow as well. And I’ve ended up in a couple of my following has gone up a lot. So, you know, if you know of someone who’s started a starter pack, you can always ask to be included with that as well.

All right, so let’s jump into some additional Bluesky best practices. And of course, keep in mind we’re going to have some time for Q&A at the end of today’s webinar. I see we already have quite a few questions in the questions box, so we’ll definitely get to those, at the end and get through as many of those as we have time for.

But first off, we want you to make a great first impression. You should ensure your profile is clear, complete, and visually appealing. Add your logo, a concise bio, and you can also add links to your website or other social platforms. The Northeast Ohio Regional Sewer District has a great page. They establish kind of the tone of their post with their bio.

It’s really relaxed and conversational. It also includes a phone number where residential customers can get help and of course, their websites social media page to encourage followers to find them on other platforms as well. And you’ll also notice, of course, that their username is @neorsa.org which matches their website, which shows, of course, that they have an official account that they have verified.

And as Emily mentioned, verifying yourself on Bluesky is easy. You may need some help from your IC team. I would definitely search how to verify your Bluesky account on the Bluesky blog. It has a lot of very specific steps that you can follow. And as Emily mentioned, if you have multiple affiliated accounts with your organization using that kind of subdomain style, usernames at named newsroom.com, for instance, makes it really easy to make sure everyone affiliated with your organization is verified as well with their own personal handle.

Like with other social networks, we want to create shareable content for Bluesky. You can craft posts that are concise, thought provoking, or humorous to encourage reposting and sharing within the Bluesky ecosystem. And as Emily mentioned, Bluesky users really value genuine human centered posts. So we want to share authentic updates, stories, and even behind the scenes insights again, in a really conversational tone.

We also encourage you to post regularly. Maintaining a consistent posting schedule helps to build visibility and trust with your audience. Frequency matters, but so does quality, and if you’re posting regularly to your other social platforms and makes it easy to add Bluesky to your posting cadence as well. You can also use Cyndi’s Autopilot tool to ensure that you’re posting links regularly and supplement with those manually scheduled posts throughout the day.

Also, diversify your content formats. Mix up your posts with articles, opinion pieces, short updates, events or curated news to keep your audience engaged and curious. And of course, be sure to include videos, images, and links in your content. Mix. As with other social networks, using rich media such as images, videos, or GIFs helps your post stand out in the field.

If you won’t keep in mind again, there’s not an algorithm to prevent users from seeing your posts based on the content format. So our goal here is to stop the scroll and get people looking at your content. Unlike other social networks, as Emily mentioned, Bluesky encourages sharing direct links on the platform. And of course, there’s no algorithm to penalize certain types of content.

And as Emily also mentioned, many publishers are seeing really great traffic from Bluesky links. So we really encourage you to share that link content out that maybe isn’t performing as well on some of your other social platforms. Take the time to engage directly with folks who respond to you. You can reply to comments, repost user content, and start conversations to build a loyal community around your brand.

While hashtags aren’t as central as on some platforms. Using relevant hashtags thoughtfully can help your content reach the right audience. This post from a San Antonio Spurs podcaster uses several popular hashtags in the Spurs community to help surface content. In those conversations. You can also partner with influencers or prominent Bluesky users to help expand your reach and credibility on the platform.

Just like the US consumer product safety Commission did on this post, as Emily mentioned, you might consider creating or promoting custom Bluesky feeds that are tailored to your audience’s interests, such as specific topics or curated collections of posts. The city of Boston, as you mentioned, has created that custom feed with all of the city’s official Bluesky accounts gathered into one easy to follow feed, and those followed feeds appear at the top of a Bluesky user’s timeline, which makes it really easy for users to find content from a particular feed.

Encourage user interaction by asking open ended questions and host discussions to foster community engagement and feedback. This post from nature asks their community of scientists to share their experience on switching to Bluesky from other social networks. You can also leverage Blue Skies decentralized nature to focus on niche topics and foster tightknit communities around specific themes or interests.

This could be a sports team, as we see here, a news topic, a city department’s activities, or really just about any topic you can think of. If available, track engagement metrics to understand what resonates with your audience and refine your strategy. Social new stats can help you gather engagement metrics for your Bluesky content in our Post Manager tool, making it easy to see what’s working well with your audience.

In addition to analytics, our social media management solution also includes publishing, scheduling and automation for Bluesky, making it easy to integrate publishing to Bluesky alongside the other social networks that you work with. And this feature was actually fast tracked due to overwhelming feedback from our social news desk users. 

All right, so now let’s take some time for some Q&A.

Sarah

All right. Let’s see. All right, so this is a question, Emily, on verification. What prevents someone from making my username? Something like, something.whitehouse.gov if they don’t work there or have any affiliation to it.

Emily

Yeah. So if you don’t work at the White House, then you also don’t have access to the white House website. And so because of that, you just would not be able to set that username from a technical standpoint. So if you don’t have access to that website’s management, you wouldn’t be able to make that your username.

This is also how we’re able to verify that accounts that end in.gov, for example, truly are government accounts because only the real government agency would be able to access the website management tools for that domain.

Sarah

Yeah, it’s a really great system for verification. I think. All right, Emily, can you share some information about content moderation? And I bought it on Bluesky.

Emily

Sure. So I can describe at a high level how what, like what our approach to moderation is. So we take a twofold approach to moderation. The first part is likely the approach that you’re pretty familiar with, which is, we provide a 24 over seven, moderation team that provides a strong foundation of moderation across the whole network.

So no spam, spam, hate speech, abuse, that kind of thing. Our moderators, review reports, 24 seven around the clock coverage. But on top of that, we realize that it’s pretty impossible for one single company to get moderation right for every single culture and community in the whole world. So in line with our open philosophy, something we’ve done for moderation is also open it up.

So we have the stackable system of moderation where on top of blue skies, Foundation of moderation, you can subscribe to additional moderation decisions from organizations that you trust. So let’s take an example of AI art. Maybe you have super strong feelings about AI art, as in, you don’t want to see any of it. But Bluesky, the company does not have a stance on AI art, as in, we don’t take down content just because it’s AI generated.

But some artists on Bluesky’s network have created a moderation service where you can subscribe to it. As simple as following an account. And after you do that, all AI art will be filtered out of your experience of Bluesky. So on top of blue skies moderation, you can stack on all of these additional services too.

Sarah

All right, that’s great. I had a question from a university. It says we are a college. At a university, our username is the same one we use across social platforms, not our website, which isn’t descriptive. And I think their website might just be like the initials of the university. Can our faculty be verified if they incorporate our username?

Emily

So your faculty can still be verified with your website, even if you don’t use a site, your website, as your username. I think even if your website, is it even if the domain name isn’t that descriptive, I’d actually still recommend setting it as your website. So firstly, let’s say your username right now just taking like an extremely boilerplate default one is just like school that be sky dot social and you want to update it to school steady after you update your username to school that edu your original username of school that that social will automatically be reserved and tied to your account so no one else can claim it either to also prevent impersonators. 

And then one forward looking feature that we’d like to roll out this year, is an ability for your followers to click into your website directly from your profile. So if your username is @school.edu, then they’d be able to click into your username and get redirected to your website. So that’s just to say that even if your domain name isn’t that descriptive, once we have this feature that allows you to click right into your website, I think it would be super useful for your followers because then they know immediately what school and what website.

You’re redirecting them to. You can kind of think of like the website as a username feature, like, in the same way that people use Link Tree now, or when people say like link in bio, being able to set your website as your username. The sky is kind of like instead of saying, here’s my link tree in bio, it’s just like my link is my username.

So just further close this, that gap between your social following and your web presence.

Sarah

Yeah. And I’m seeing a lot of questions kind of about verification. So I’ll pop this slide back up. I would definitely encourage you guys to check that out. How to verify your Bluesky account. Post on the Bluesky blog. It has everything in great detail. Obviously we’re happy to continue answering questions, but I’m seeing a lot of very similar questions.

All right. So I do have a couple of questions about referral traffic. This one says our analytics team noticed that parsley captures traffic only within the Bluesky app, and SND doesn’t provide as many Bluesky KPIs as it does for other platforms. Are there plans to enhance these capabilities in the near future? So yes, there are plans to continue to enhance the offering that we have within Social News desk for Bluesky.

It’s kind of dependent on the API access that we have. So, once more metrics are available in the API will definitely be including those in post manager and other reporting products that we have.

Emily

And then just to add on to that, the reason why the Bluesky isn’t native. We have like weekly traffic right now in the app. Otherwise it would cause like whenever you copy the URL of a post, it would have like a very long referral at the end of that URL. So we have it on the road map to make this a better service and more privacy preserving service as well.

But in the meantime, you can also directly add a UTM query at the end of any links that you post, Bluesky and be able to see that link traffic too.

Sarah

All right. That’s great. This question, when my profile has the ability to delete comments rather than muting them in cases of misinformation, abuse or general trolling, some platforms have the delete option for such comments, and that would be very helpful.

Emily

Yeah, one feature that you might want to try is hiding replies on Bluesky, so you can hide replies for just yourself, or hide replies for everyone. In this way other people will be able to see that comment on your thread either.

Sarah

All right. And then this question, what is the plan for other Bluesky platforms? Will you guys be unveiling products for the iPad or even something like, like TweetDeck for Twitter? Something similar to that.

Emily

Yeah. I’ll say an iPad app is not currently on the short term roadmap, though we often get requests for that. So we’re thinking about it, in terms of a TweetDeck for Bluesky. So back in the day, when TweetDeck first started for Twitter, it was actually an independent app built by independent developers. Similarly, there are a couple of independent tools out there already for a TweetDeck like experience of Bluesky.

One that comes to mind is called desktop Blue, so its URL is just desktop blue. And you can use that to get a TweetDeck like experience. A Bluesky.

Sarah

All right. This question asks, are branded or sponsored posts allowed and how should those be posted? Are there plans for allowing businesses to monetize the platform?

Emily

Yeah. We don’t currently have any plans or policies for the way that you create your own sponsored posts. We haven’t seen too much of that happen on the app yet. Bluesky does not have any short term plans to integrate our own ads, possibly in the future, but nothing planned for right now. But when we do have monetization plans, for example, subscriptions are coming up.

We are thinking about ways to pass back revenue to creators to and organizations that are posting on Bluesky. But nothing concrete on that front that I can share yet.

Sarah

All right. In terms of users, can you tell if people are using Bluesky for information gathering, entertainment? All of the above.

Emily

Yeah. It was easier for us to answer this question like six months ago. But because the network has gotten so large in the last couple of months, it really feels like every possible use case of Bluesky exists on the network right now. We see a ton of journalists, publishers on Bluesky talking to sources, getting breaking news, sharing their own breaking news as well.

We also see academics, researchers sharing research, talking about conferences that they’re going to. We’ve seen custom feeds pop up, specifically conferences, startup hacks, as well. And so people in person at these conferences are very easily able to find that Bluesky pocket of conversation as well. Lots of sports chatter as well. And then, yeah, I say like, pop culture is also on the rise on Bluesky.

Sarah

Yeah, I would say anecdotally from what I’ve seen, and obviously my feed is going to be unique. Everyone’s feed is not going to be the same, but I use it a lot for, you know, following what’s happening during a sporting event, namely the San Antonio Spurs. Go, Spurs. Go! Also showing off food that I’ve cooked.

I follow some comic book authors. Local news organizations, because I really like keeping on tap on top of what’s happening, you know, locally to me. That’s really important to me. So, that’s what I use it for. And everyone’s going to have their own unique mix. All right. How do we find those developers building extensions for Bluesky?

Is there a directory, or do you have tips for finding them?

Emily

If you’re a developer, there’s an active, developer discord. You can find a link to it at the bottom of our developer documentation site, which is just docs dot b Sky app. Similarly, on that documentation site, there’s a tab for projects that people are working on. But maybe the easiest way to find projects that people are working on is to follow our developer account on Bluesky.

And so the username for that account is just App protocol. App, the name of the open standard that Bluesky is built upon. So at App Protocol, is where you can find developer updates. And we share new developer projects there.

Sarah

All right. Great. Should we be sharing vertical or horizontal videos to Bluesky? Or does it matter?

Emily

Yeah. We don’t have any concrete advice on that front yet. As of was it Monday? Like maybe it was Monday of this week, maybe the Sunday? Very recently we launched a feature where there are video specific custom feeds. And for those custom feeds, they’re prioritizing vertical video, that was launched in response to everything that’s been happening with TikTok lately.

So if you’re looking to get your video included in those feeds, I recommend vertical. But overall, no, it’s not recommended either way. I will note that overall, about 75% of Bluesky users use it on mobile and 25% use it on desktop. So that’s the split. Though it seems like the people who are using Bluesky on desktop are probably people that are on this call journalists, educators, people who always have that Bluesky tab open and are like very online.

Sarah

Yeah, definitely guilty of that. And you know, generally speaking, I would say as you’re scrolling through the feed, that vertical video is going to take up more real estate on the screen. So if you’re looking to stop the scroll, using that vertical video is probably going to be a benefit to you. In the US. Are there geographic areas with high downloads of Bluesky?

Emily

I don’t have this information off the top of my head. We don’t collect that much user data in general. So we’re not often looking at like geographic region. So nothing to share on that front.

Sarah

Okay, great. We had a question. Oh, was that developer site? It was at 80 Pro dotcom PR. Otto is that correct? Okay.

Emily

I don’t have access to the full chat on this webinar, but if I’m able to, I can also just send that directly into the chat box.

Sarah

I should be able to pull a list of questions. So we may be able to get back to you guys with that with some more answers. Did we miss the sizing for photos? No, I don’t think we talked about that. I don’t think there’s a specific size recommendation for photos either.

What should we do if we already open an account but did not do so with our website as our username?

Emily

You can simply update your username to be your website, and then your current username will be automatically reserved to your account. So you can revert back to it at any time. And no one else can sign up for that account.

Sarah

All right.

Emily

Looking for any new questions?

Sarah

I think we may have hit everybody’s question, or at least all the themes of the questions that I’m seeing. So if we did not get to your question specifically, I apologize. Please feel free to, you can email me at sloyd@socialnewsdesk.com. If you want more information about Social News Desk in general, you can go to socialnewsdesk.com/demo or you can email us at info@socialnewsdesk.com

And, of course, be sure to follow some Bluesky. We are social news at social news.com on Bluesky. Also, all right. I did see one more question. Can we revert to our old username once verified? And I think the answer to that is yes.

Emily

Yes.

Sarah

Yes. Okay. And then the final question, which I think is for me, will the recording be sent out for those who may have missed it? Yes. Everyone who has signed up for the webinar, I know people are not always able to make it live. But we will have the recording that we’ll be sending out after the fact, and we’ll have it on our SD blog as well.

All right, Emily, thank you so much. I know this was a big help for a lot of folks. And we really appreciate your time today. And thank you guys again for your time and attention. And we look forward to seeing you again next time.

Emily

Thanks so much, everyone.