Getting to BlueSky (and CommSky)
“On the off chance you haven’t heard of it, BlueSky is an effort to re-create Twitter but without Twitter’s technological and cultural baggage. When I joined a few months ago, it had fewer than 50,000 users, but recently crossed a million—not bad for a closed beta! This was probably for two reasons:
- Twitter was originally designed as a skin for SMS messages, so all of the extra media handling stuff it does now has been kludged onto the original codebase, like Katamari Damacy but for tech; and
- Twitter has been a toxic cesspool for years but has only gotten worse and worse, and openly anti-semitic, since Elon Musk’s purchase.
So, it’s time for somewhere else!
I am also on Mastodon, which I appreciate for its very different tone (more earnest, mostly), but it is not for everyone and tends to resist self-promotion. In fact, a lot of people I know who are active on Twitter have chafed at the specific cultural markers on Mastodon, and they need a place. BlueSky is that place for me (and, despite Jack Dorsey’s initial involvement with the company, he recently deleted his account in a huff because BlueSky users did not welcome or laud him).
Anyway, so despite a million users, academic communities on BlueSky are growing unevenly, but mostly slowly. I am baffled as to why so few communication scholars are on there! So, I decided to kickstart a community for us by creating a custom feed. Here’s the deal:
BlueSky is invite-only, which does add friction to the process but the invite system allows for users to be organized in “trees” that makes it much easier to root out spam and harassing account networks. I actually hope they don’t change that, but do accelerate the provision of new invites. They are plentiful these days, so reach out to someone on there if you want to join. Once on the site, you should like the Communication feed to help build our central location for communication content. After you do that, Tag me @joshuafoust.com in a post asking to be added to the CommSky list, and I’ll double-check that you have something communication research related in your bio and then add you.
A feed is a custom list of content and functions similarly to how lists or tags work on other social media sites. This CommSky feed is curated, so I am selective in who I allow to join and I reserve the right to boot someone off if they abuse it.
CommSky is the communication research feed for BlueSky. It is meant to be a centralized place where communication scholars can share their work, their wins, and their questions with each other. Content is focused on academic and policy communication research, pulled from a closed list of academics, grad students, and public intellectuals who all work in various communication research fields. For now, I am defining this broadly, as communication is a deeply interdisciplinary field that touches on sociology, anthropoligy, information science, political science, women/gender/queer studies, and critical theory.
I maintain this list (follow me!). The list is open to the people I mentioned above broadly, and I prefer to have a mixture of prestige, position, and positionality on here because otherwise it just ends reinforcing the same popularity structures as every other academic gathering and who needs that? This list only displays posts that users added to the list, and if you are added you can make content appear there by tagging your post with #commsky or using the pager emoji 📟. This limits what populates the feed, so it’s not a firehose of what everyone with posting privileges can say, but rather is what they want to say on there.
To follow content on the feed, make sure to like it. Go on, give it a shot. Anyone can like and follow the list, its content is not closed or private in any way (the only restriction is who I approve to post, which, as I said above, I will grant broadly).
Questions? Happy to answer them. Let’s make this happen!