Leon Furze

I kind of missed out on Twitter. By the time the platform was picking up speed, drawing millions of users into the network of short-form content and high speed, frantic exchanges of news (and cat pics), I’d already resigned myself to being a long-form writer.

I’ve had a blog for over fifteen years, and have seen platforms come and go. X is the most recent to implode, with millions of users leaving since the takeover by Elon Musk, and millions more since the US election. But many people – including educators, researchers, and academics – lament the loss of Twitter as a space for free, energetic discourse, and it seems like they’re finding a new home on Bluesky.

I signed up for Bluesky out of curiosity a few months ago, but was left feeling a little confused. It was an almost exact clone of the Twitter platform, right down to the pale blue and white colour scheme pre-X takeover. It also had hardly any users, and given I wasn’t really using X, I didn’t feel the need to start afresh with a new, very similar platform that has next to no one on it.

But over the weekend, along with a few million others, I reopened my account. And honestly, I’m having a lot of fun.

What is Bluesky?

Bluesky is a social media platform that works in the same way as Twitter: short (300 character) posts centred on bursts of text as well as image, video, and link sharing.

To join Bluesky, users register their name which becomes a unique domain name. Mine, for example, is leonfurze.bsky.social. You can see how it has both a username (leonfurze) and a domain name (.bsky.social). If you type the full username into a web address bar or click on it like a link, you’ll go to my profile. Come and say hi!

Once you’re in, you can start posting immediately. The post window will look familiar to anyone who’s used other social media platforms, with options to upload image, video, search for a gif, use emojis, and change language as well as a character count display.

Like X, LinkedIn, Facebook and co, you can tag users with an @ followed by their username, and you can use hashtags to search for and identify topics.

It differs from Twitter in some important ways, however. For a start, it is a decentralised platform, meaning that it runs across multiple servers rather than one centrally controlled authority. There are other decentralised social networks – Mastodon is probably the most widely known – and they exist as a counterpart to corporately owned platforms like Meta’s Instagram and Threads, or Elon Musk’s X. I’ll talk more about this in a moment.

The most important difference, however, is in the algorithm.

The Algo Free Diet

Most people have become resigned to (or are oblivious to) the fact that obscure social media algorithms control their feeds, dictating what they see and don’t see. For years, the complex and opaque algorithms of companies like Meta and X have been hugely influential in deciding the media that comes up on our feeds.

This can be hugely problematic, with “filter bubbles” and social media echo chambers contributing to some of the biggest harms caused by social media in the past decade, from mental health issues to threats against the democratic process.

As educator Alice Keeler – moderator of the popular #EduSky group on Bluesky, as well as other prominent social network groups – writes in this post, it might be time to ditch the social media algorithm. Bluesky, and other platforms with similar values, have made an effort to change this paradigm and move away from the algorithmic bubble.

Firstly, Bluesky doesn’t serve up your content based on corporately owned algorithms. Meta feeds, for example in facebook, use a complex combination of the points acquired about your personality, preferences, location, inferred gender, your likes, comments, scrolls, wait times, and other even more complex demographic and personal data. Bluesky uses your feeds, and the users you follow.

There are algorithms at play, but they’re of a very different nature. Rather than fine tuning for engagement – even at the cost of serving up harmful or divisive content – the Bluesky algorithms are centred on user preference.

Bluesky’s Jay Graber explains it like this:

For users, the ability to customize their feed will give them back control of their most valuable resource: their attention. Life is made up of all the little moments you spend your time on. We hope that the future of social apps is a framework that allows you to express your agency over how you spend your time. https://bsky.social/about/blog/3-30-2023-algorithmic-choice

The platform makes it easy to follow people you actually want to hear from, and minimises others intruding into your feed. It also allows for the creation of follow lists (including this enormous list of educators again compiled by Alice Keeler) and ‘Starter Packs’, which might be one of the best recent inventions of social media.

Starter packs can be curated by anyone with an account, and allow you to quickly ‘follow all’ in a topic or area of interest. Here are some that’s I’ve recently followed:

• AI and writing, AI in education, AI regulation
• AI Educators 🤖
• Art x Critical Tech
• Critical Educational Technology
• Digital Pedagogy
• Education economics and policy
• Electronic Literature and Digital Narrative
• Academic Integrity
• And of course Dog owners in the Sky

If you like a nice curated feed, you can create, share, and pin entire feeds based on multiple topics and hashtags. It’s a little technical to set up, but you can follow my ‘AI in Education’ feed here and get all of the updates on AI in K-12 and Higher Education.

No Country for Old Trolls

One of the first things I noticed when I reopened my Bluesky account was the lack of trolling, ad hominem attacks on posts, and general misery accompanying many other platforms.

For a few years now, I’ve almost exclusively used LinkedIn because I’ve found the level of professionalism generally higher than most places, and the comments more or less reasoned and inoffensive.

But I have occasionally cross-posted materials to X, and they’ve generally been met with at least a handful of dodgy comments. In part, this is due to how the algorithms work on those platforms. Since they prioritise any kind of engagement, including negative, you’ll be fed a steady diet of content from people with incredibly polarising views, and views which are dichotomous to your own.

Some people call this freedom of speech and a way to escape the echo chamber. Generally, it’s an excuse for trolling.

Another feature of social media platforms, including LinkedIn, is the suppression of external links. The owners of these platforms want you to spend your time and attention in-house, and so if like me you’re a blogger, journalist, or author, linking to your own website will lead to a significant dip in “impressions” or views.

Not so on Bluesky. I posted the following a couple of days ago. At the time, I had 200 followers – a percentage of the 19,000 currently on LinkedIn, and fewer than the 700-800 I had before I deactivated my mostly-ignored X account.

There’s one thoughtful comment and a handful of likes and shares. But I can also see via my website stats that this post led to hundreds of actual visits to leonfurze.com. Because Bluesky doesn’t penalise external links, even a post which goes to a minimal number of followers can garner more actual attention than a similar share on LinkedIn or X, and with zero trolls hovering around waiting to fire up their keyboards.

The AT Protocol

The way all of this works is centred on something called the AT Protocol. I’m going to give a brief discussion, because it really is core to understanding the approach of the platform and how it differs from Threads, X, and the others.

The AT Protocol is a federated protocol designed to help decentralise social media. Unlike traditional social platforms, which are controlled by single companies, the AT Protocol allows multiple independent platforms to interconnect seamlessly. This enables users to maintain a consistent identity across different services, move their data freely between platforms, and interact with users from various networks without losing connections. It also offers users control over the algorithms that shape the content they see, making their online experience more personalised and user-centred.

The AT Protocol is important because it addresses key issues with today’s centralised social networks. By reducing corporate control, it’s intended to promote a more open, diverse digital environment where users have autonomy over their online presence. Additionally, it encourages development by allowing others to build new features that work across platforms, creating a richer and more competitive social media landscape.

It’s not all utopian dreams of a publicly owned internet though, and it’s worth pointing out that some – like tech writer Cory Doctorow – are suspicious. In his article Doctorow points to a history of platforms initially promising user-centred principles, only to later compromise them for profit. He calls this process as “enshittification”—where platforms gradually degrade user experience to extract more value.

Doctorow has seen companies he trusted make these compromises under pressure from investors, often resulting in user restrictions and monetisation strategies that prioritise financial returns over user autonomy. While Bluesky’s CEO pledges to avoid this path, Doctorow is wary because similar promises from other platforms ultimately failed when push came to shove.

Should You Join Bluesky?

I’m willing to give Bluesky a go. Like I said at the start of this article, I never really got into Twitter/X. I found the pace too frantic, the hashtags overwhelming, and the firehose of information too much to be useful. As a blogger who tends to write pretty long articles, I also couldn’t find much use for the short-form style of Twitter.

I’ve built a decent following on LinkedIn by posting long-ish content there too, and I’m going to use Bluesky as an experiment to see if shorter, less formal content is something that works for me.

Like Doctorow, I’m not willing to invest too much time and energy into building an audience on a platform that may well decide to change its parameters, ownership, or platform logic at any stage. But Bluesky right now is a lot of fun.

If you’re an educator and you’re wondering whether to jump in, consider these points:

• Community and Connection: Bluesky has quickly become a gathering spot for educators, researchers, and academics who are seeking the energy and dialogue they once found on Twitter. The platform’s smaller user base and current lack of porn bots and trolls enhances the sense of community, making it easier to connect with like-minded professionals and exchange ideas without the clutter of ads or corporate agendas.
• A New Kind of Feed Control: Unlike mainstream platforms, Bluesky’s algorithm prioritises user choice, letting you customise what you see. This gives you control over your feed in a way that can enhance your focus and reduce distractions. The anti-toxicity filters and moderation, including blocking, also stand out as great ways to control what you see on your feed. For educators, this means less time spent filtering out unwanted content and more time on what truly matters—educational resources, discussions, and collaborative opportunities.
• Decentralisation: The AT Protocol makes it easier to take your data and connections with you if the platform’s direction ever changes. Doctorow’s suspicions might be valid, but this federated structure offers more security than most, and certainly more than Threads and X.

So, come and find my on Bluesky if you want to see me trying out shorter, more off the cuff content (and cat pics).