Microblogging platform Bluesky may still be a relative minnow among the social media giants, but several news publishers appear to see potential in it as an alternative to Twitter/X.
Bluesky says it has 1.8 million monthly active users – far short of the 200 million monthly active users claimed by Meta’s product Threads and Elon Musk’s X (formerly Twitter), which was reported in March to have 174 million active users every day.
But numerous publishers post daily to Bluesky, varying in size and reach from commercial powerhouses like The New York Times and CNN to independent or local titles such as The Intercept and Alaska Beacon.
Press Gazette spoke to publishers using the platform to find out if it might be a possible replacement to X/Twitter, which many see as an increasingly toxic environment populated largely by trolls, extremists and bots.
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What is Bluesky?
From a user’s perspective, Bluesky is a simpler version of X: it presents users with an infinite scrolling feed of short posts (300 characters maximum) from accounts they follow. Users have some control over how they are presented with those posts, but in its most basic form Bluesky gives the user a reverse-chronological feed showing more recent posts first.
The main difference is on the backend. Bluesky is a decentralised, federated platform, which means the accounts you see there can be hosted on different servers. This differs from traditional social media networks where all the accounts and posts would be hosted entirely on, for example, the servers of Facebook or Twitter. The idea is this gives users greater control over their content and audience, allowing them to move to another federated platform without abandoning everything they had built up on the first site.
(Being decentralised has other implications for the platform – for example it is possible, using a free website, to look up who has blocked any given user.)
Another difference is that whereas Threads or X automatically present users with a single feed that is either chronologically or algorithmically ordered, Bluesky allows users to subscribe or create feeds that bring together posts from particular accounts: a user could follow, for example, a news-focused feed, a comedy feed, a fishing-related feed or a feed that surfaces the most recent posts from the least-active accounts they follow.
For now Bluesky lacks some features present on competitors. It added direct messages for the first time in May, and does not yet host video natively. It also lacks post-scheduling capabilities, although third-party services like Buffer are compatible with the platform. Bluesky does not maintain its own post management platform like Twitter’s old Tweetdeck, but another third-party service, deck.blue, is free and functions much the same.
Originally invite-only, Bluesky is now open to whoever wants to join. It has seen a recent influx of users in the UK: a spokesperson for Bluesky told Press Gazette on Tuesday 20 August that it had seen about 36,000 British users join in the preceding two weeks, possibly prompted by concerns that misinformation shared on X helped stoke summer rioting in the UK.
For now at least, Bluesky seems more eager to work with the news industry than some of the social media giants. A spokesperson for the platform, Emily Liu, told Press Gazette: “Newsrooms and journalists are some of the key communities that bring any social platform to life — so many people use social media specifically for news, so we'd love to support newsrooms in making Bluesky home, and are always open to feedback!
“This is a platform where newsrooms can actually own their relationship with their audiences, and thus their distribution.” Liu also has a blog post on the site making the case for how newsrooms can use Bluesky for election coverage."
This attitude may be a tick in its favour compared with the other major possible Twitter successor for news publishers, Threads. The platform's boss, Adam Mosseri, has previously said that while "politics and hard news are inevitably going to show up on Threads... we're not going to do anything to encourage those verticals".
Mastodon, another decentralised Twitter alternative, does not appear to have taken off among publishers, although it has recently said it wants to become "the go-to place for journalism".
How to succeed on Bluesky
The first step for publishers hoping to set up a trusted, professional presence on Bluesky is to get verified. But Bluesky does not verify accounts in the same way that Twitter once did, and nor does it have a paid verification system like X or Threads do today. Instead, Bluesky allows users to self-verify by setting their web domain as their account handle.
Setting your domain as your handle proves that you really are who you claim to be because it is only possible to do so if you control the domain in question. Making @pressgazette.co.uk your name on Bluesky, for example, would require you to add a particular string of text onto the domain registrar for pressgazette.co.uk. (Bluesky provides a more technical explanation of this process on its website.)
Once verified, publishers can ask to be included on Bluesky’s largest news feed, which can serve as a useful way to reach interested audiences. (Unverified accounts are not eligible for the feed.)
The feed is maintained in a personal capacity by Ændra Rininsland, a senior data journalism engineer at the Financial Times.
Asked how she thought publishers could do well on Bluesky, Rininsland told Press Gazette: “The audience on Bluesky is much different than on X. It is composed primarily of people who left X.
“In general, it's important to treat Bluesky like a serious platform instead of a fallback for X's diminishing audience; engage with the audience on Bluesky, and have journalists treat that audience as seriously as they do X's.
“If you put effort into creating a solid presence on Bluesky, you'll be rewarded with plenty of engagement despite the platform's vastly smaller size.”
She described the audience there as "very vibrant and extremely diverse in composition, generally tacking more to the centre-left than to the right.
"Understanding your audience is important no matter where or how you're doing journalism, so it's worthwhile spending some time trying to understand the needs of that audience."
What publishers are saying about Bluesky
Although its journalists are well-represented on Bluesky and it publishes regularly to the platform, the FT told Press Gazette its involvement is limited for now: “At the moment the FT has an autofeed and another for our journalists that people can follow. But generally we’re keeping an eye on how the platform performs before investing more resources.”
Emma Krstic, Politico’s director of engagement, Europe, told Press Gazette the publisher’s dabbling on Bluesky is “experimental”.
“I think with social in general… you need to try and be at the forefront of new platforms and see whether they're worth investing your time and resources in… When it's a new platform, you never quite know if people are going to really jump on it and it's going to take off.”
Politico is not a mass-market publication, gearing itself instead toward “people who are purely interested in politics and policy… so we’re trying to find spaces where those people congregate and we can reach them”.
Asked whether the brand was finding those people on Bluesky, Krstic said: “We’ve found a quite engaged audience, I'd say, for the size of our following at the moment.”
But a lack of audience analytics made it difficult to say for sure who they’re reaching.
She said: “Something we've in general found with jumping on new platforms is it can take a while for the analytics side of things to catch up… it's still in a way experimental, because you're just throwing things on there and seeing what data you can get back, or feedback from the audience to make a judgement call on.
“So it's still to be determined, I'd say, whether it's going to become a truly useful audience for us.”
Krstic’s comments echo those of other publishers. Asked about Bluesky earlier this year, The Washington Post’s deputy director, social, off-platform Travis Lyles told Press Gazette “it’s always important to keep tabs on up-and-coming social media platforms so you can make the right decision for your newsroom and meet readers where they are”.
The New York Times’ off-platform director similarly told Digiday: “We wouldn’t continue being on the platform and maintaining it every day if it wasn’t something that we thought was promising for the future but also currently delivering on the audience.”
For her part, the FT engineer and news feed maintainer Rininsland suggested Bluesky could represent a more profound shift around the way content is published and consumed online.
She said: “Bluesky is effectively two parts: AT Protocol, an underlying decentralised technology intended to facilitate publishing in a variety of formats, and Bluesky, a microblogging platform that's the flagship product of that technology.
“Attempting to understand how the protocol works and how that results in Bluesky working differently than traditional centralised social media platforms should be a priority task for any journalist seeking to seriously cover Bluesky.
“It's very easy to see it as a less-functional Twitter clone, but that really misses much of what makes Bluesky exciting as a piece of technology; in many ways, it resembles late 90s Internet, with much concurrent innovation and experimentation happening with many different individuals and groups — not just the Bluesky team.”
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