Can Bluesky become a new Twitter?
Part A: Bluesky – helping to get people to field campaigns and election events
In the 2022 election, particularly in Kooyong, Twitter was used extensively in helping to gather volunteers and getting them to campaign events as well as creating awareness and support for climate issues. Right now X / Twitter has been rendered not just unpleasant, but almost worse than useless due to Musk’s decision to let it rip and change the algorithm to promote right wing disinformation.
We need a new Twitter.
Facebook has an increasingly limited audience and is now subject to Zuckerberg’s decision to allow Meta to become fact check free.
What can you do to help in ten minutes a day?
If we grew a local community within the next month we could not only amplify the voice of Lighter Footprints, but support each other, promoting and celebrating events, mobilising people for street stalls and polling day, promoting the Vote Climate scorecards and clarifying and learning to explain election issues simply and clearly.
There is a flood of progressives moving away from X including local candidates and supporters. Sixty German universities, many of the Australian progressive community and climate organisations, even Chris Bowen, have left X saying it is no longer “a place for respectful debate”.
Join us on Bluesky now, to help mobilise people for election events and street work!
If you are in a local climate group, you could try setting up a directory to share handles and information, to help support each other’s posts with reposting, replies and quote posting.
Not sure how to do this? Part C of this document has easy instructions on how to get started, plus some useful tips on Starter Packs and Lists. Part B explains a little of the urgency, and how disinformation is a really, really big problem.
What would your ten minutes look like?
- Go to your favourite publication, for instance Renew Economy or the Guardian, find an article, scan read it, find a sentence quote and copy the sentence.
- In a separate tab on Bluesky, make a new post with two spaces and your quote. Put a topic phrase right at the top, then add the url from your previous tab underneath and post. Use hashtags like #VoteClimate or #AusVotes25 along with #auspol
- Go to Lighter Footprints Bluesky account and quote post a recent post
- Simply repost another Lighter Footprints post (especially if it is a quote post).
- Support a community member with a quote post or repost (search #VoteClimate etc).
Part B: Why the move to Bluesky now?
Having established that campaigns benefit from a Twitter analogue – fast dissemination of news and opinion, education, insider jokes, the ability to gather an informed community around a common purpose – then is X (previously Twitter) still up for the job?
Musk has pushed X further into a twilight zone of climate disinformation. Why have facts when you can have trolls and bots?
So X has become not very friendly for people who care about clean energy progress or moving away from gas, and even worse for climate science communicators.
Posts from our allies celebrating energy from the sun and wind are showered with inane or patently false comments, hundreds upon hundreds. Just in the last two weeks it has become more and more exhausting to post to X when your major job seems to be turning into blocking bots rather than publicising climate information, field work and campaign events.
Enter Bluesky. Originally a Twitter research project, led by founder Jack Dorsey in 2019, Bluesky became an independent project in 2021. Aiming to give users more control over their experience, Bluesky moved from an invitation only beta in 2023 to a public offering in February 2024. Since then there has been an influx of new users including scientists, now over 25 million, with human engagement being roughly a quarter that of X. Bluesky offers a decentralisation, users can host their own data and create custom feeds, and Bluesky offers enhanced safety and privacy features.
Why not just stick with Facebook and Instagram?
Zuckerberg has decided to remove fact checking from Facebook has made it even more difficult in the climate space. Trolls abound and climate gets no traction. And it is harder to advertise for events that push back on coal, oil and gas. Zuckerberg only cares about one thing, growth, and contentious clickbait surely accelerates relentless growth.
So what to do?
As Katharine Hayhoe says following an examination of her science communication across a large variety of platforms, Bluesky is for learning and X is for fighting. If your aim is to gather together a supportive community that evolves practical solutions and well as deepens understanding, why fight every day? With Bluesky’s tailored feeds you can keep up to date rapidly, make connections across communities of practice and generate tools for when you choose to reenter the fray. Plus academic/climate twitter is deserting Musk’s platform given its accelerating right wing bias, and you want to be where your friends are, right?
Join us on Bluesky, to share information and helpful plans for climate action.
But social media is such a waste now, you say.
Do we dare cede the public square, put off by wading through X/Meta’s new firehose of climate denying racist misogynist trolls?
We are greater and more motivated than these fossil originated bots and influencers. Our love of forests, of the wild places and water, of deep pools, snow and ice, of human health and creativity and of a sustainable world for our children is greater than their damn fossil profits.
We can fight. We can skill up. And we can learn in well-tended garden of Bluesky where you can select your own feeds, learn at your own pace and gather a supportive community to mobilise for Vote Climate this election. It’s time.
Part C: How to get started
Joining Bluesky
For efficiency, it is much easier to work on your laptop especially in setting up or when posting links. Supportive work (eg reposts and quote posts) can be done on your phone at a pinch. Make sure you record your password.
The first thing is to make sure you are using a current, safe long term email, and that you have chosen an appropriate handle which could be your name, or something quirky. Go to the bsky.app and join up. Here is a 4 minute tutorial that touches on feeds and starter packs.
The correct size for your icon is 400px x 400px – it is important to show a photo or graphic, otherwise you can be seen as a bot. It can be a nice image of a bird or tree, or your social media icon or a recent photo, or something more personal.
You don’t have to have a banner image, but it does help – 1500px x 500px but Bluesky will take almost anything. Maybe from an overseas trip, some trees, a group photo or whip up something from a climate science data set if you are really keen.
Your bio should reflect your interests – it may include your Country, pronouns, some quirky details, qualifications or whatever you like. Including hashtags like #VoteClimate or #ProtectNativeForests will make it easier for people to find you.
It is good to bookmark your account’s main profile so that you can get to Bluesky for a quick work session without fuss.
How to support Lighter Footprints and the local climate community network
- Go to Lighter Footprints account and bookmark it
- Choose a recent simple post and quote post it by adding a simple topic phrase or endorsement on top. Make sure you use #VoteClimate or #AusVotes25, probably with #auspol so we can all find your work to support you.
- If you want to improve your quote post, open the article in another tab, select and sentence, and add that into your text using quote marks.
- Search #VoteClimate, #KooyongVotes/Kooyong (or similar) or #auspol or #AusVotes25 and find someone to support with a repost or quote post (quote posts are better for your account).
- Go back to Lighter Footprints account and do another quote post, or repost if you are in a hurry. Lighter Footprint quotes posts do not benefit from another quote post, just use a simple repost.
- If you have time, check your notifications. Check out your interactions and follows, and follow or follow back if they look like quality local accounts or if they are interesting to you. Don’t follow parked accounts (no posts) or bot looking ones. Very occasionally you may be followed by an unsuitable account – just block them straight off. You can like or repost any account quote posting your work or replying to it. In the unlikely event of a hostile reply, try an explanation, if the behaviour persists block the account. Unlike X, blocks actually work.
Starter Packs
How to know who’s who in the zoo? Who do you follow?
This is where starter packs come in.
First up, follow Climate Action Merribek, and check out their great starter pack. The starter pack tab is just under the bio, after posts, replies and media – it is fine to ‘follow all’, all accounts are quality climate NGOs and community groups, including Lighter Footprints.
Then move over to respected climate science Katharine Hayhoe and have a look at some of her starter packs for ideas of who to follow. Unlike the earlier days of Twitter you do not get chopped off at the knees if you have a lot of follows compared to followers, but maybe try out a couple of starter packs at a time. Your number of follows will only impact you if on the Following feed, and it depends on how much you want to scroll. You could start with a few hundred to begin with or up to a thousand if you don’t mind scrolling, and add people as you go from your notifications or lists.
Tailored Feeds
The genius of Bluesky is that you can truly control your own information flow, whether by topic, pace and so on by swapping from list to list. This can be done in two ways, by pinning a List to your home page (it shows up on the top right) or by going to a starter pack and following the second posts tab.
You can also use Discover (algorithmically driven, a bit US oriented at present) or more usefully Followers, which catch nearly everything from accounts you follow in order (just like Twitter used to). Obviously you can search by topic or hashtag, and you can jump on accounts that have good content like The Australia Institute.
- For a gentle, local climate organisation feed, go to Climate Action Merribek’s great starter pack and hit the posts tab. If you like this feed try bookmarking it.
- For a more lively local discussion try pinning @tactwo.bsky.social’s Australian Political Commentators & Think Tanks List to your home page
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For a full, fairly US-centric list try @katharinehayhoe.com, @graocat.bsky.social and Climate Science Impacts and Solutions “physical, life, and social scientists who study all aspects of the climate system and how humans affect, interact with, and are impacted by global change.” This does include some of their personal posts, but is great for hard science news if you are willing to scan scroll for the good stuff.
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For niche topic feeds you can try Katherine Hayhoe’s large set of climate starter packs, hitting the posts tab (and bookmark). Hayhoe has packs on climate and finance, climate and health, two on research centres, educators, comms, nature based solutions and much more.
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@sustainableenergy.bsky.social also has niche topic starter packs:
- Batteries go.bsky.app/GKsPnAB
- EV Batteries go.bsky.app/7oJ9sU7
- Renewable Energy Researchers go.bsky.app/3v7yzoj
- Critical minerals go.bsky.app/CEQEKUN
- EV News go.bsky.app/uWexkd
- EVs go.bsky.app/R4ZUdPE
- Climate Nature Tech go.bsky.app/MkVKB7j
- Clean Tech go.bsky.app/2Um4Ubc
- Electrochemistry go.bsky.app/UzqjkNk
Growing your account
Gaining more followers from quality posts and regular interactions (engagement) benefits everyone in the local climate space.
The more followers you have who are posting and interacting regularly, the easier it is to publicise events, encourage the community and drive positive change. We can do this together by regularly supporting each other, starting from as little as ten minutes per day, with a little knowledge and the right tools.
- Right at the very beginning, it is more effective if your account has several posts for others to reply to, quote post or support with a welcome statement.
- As people interact with you, check out their accounts – if they are reasonable, follow them, and maybe repost, reply or quote post a couple of times – it is much more likely that they will follow you
- During your morning or lunchtime break, leave tabs open of a couple of good articles, and then turn them into posts with the easy sandwich method – finding a great quote, popping it in two spaces down, adding a topic summary phrase at the top (or use a question that evokes curiosity), then hashtags such as #VoteClimate, #auspol or #AusVotes25 below above or below the url. Make sure the image preview shows up before you post.
- You can also use resources from Lighter Footprints information pages to create posts – our new nuclear information page, or the gas and health page contain useful links and arguments which can be easily upcycled into posts. We will be adding other renewables, electrification and energy bill savings in the next month.
- Create a cheat sheet to save time – google docs are effective as you can skip sections with the sidebar – containing lists of handles of key accounts, political targets if you are lobbying, say the environment minister, and often repeated messages – for instance you can cut and past this message and tweak each time for fossil fuel subsidies:
Why are taxpayers spending $14.5B on subsidising fossil fuels when we could be investing in a faster clean energy transition and electrification to lower household energy bills? #auspol #AusVotes25 https://australiainstitute.org.au/post/fossil-fuel-subsidies-hit-14-5-billion-in-2023-24-up-31/
- Bookmarks are your friend for fast effective working. Bookmark your account, several others you are supporting, your cheat sheet google doc and any key sites that you refer to very regularly.
Learn and Post challenge
When working on a new topic or blog, why not challenge yourself to make a post on an account that you can contribute to each time you find a good reference.
- Posting each idea could be as simple as copying your notes. If you are creating a google doc or blog on this topic, the post text could precis or expand from these notes – doubling your impact.
- You can string posts together, especially if you are finding new ideas or references, for instance this small thread on disinformation, prior to a disinformation blog.
- Why wait? Posting immediately lessens the opportunity cost of missing ideas or communications in a campaign, allowing others to expand on your efforts.
- An advantage is that you can use these posts to test out the clarity of the message and how useful the framing is – you may get replies that challenge you or lead you to more useful ways of communicate this particular idea.
- Posting on multiple platforms will give you an idea of how your messaging and framing works with different audiences.
- You can try out different images and messages on different platforms or accounts and see what works – this is particularly useful before any paid advertising eg on Facebook.
Posts – sandwich method, threads
The sandwich method
The sandwich method is a simple, fast way to make a post from an article you are reading. It cuts down work (and fatigue), by restricting you to a simple work flow. Remember this is not a PhD thesis or job interview, both speed and volume matter when it comes to campaigns.
You can’t fail with this method.
- Find an article on a topic you care about, that is relevant to your campaign or audience. It might be from non paywalled good sources like The Guardian or Renew Economy, or from a post in a list you are following on Bluesky.
- Open it in a new tab (this is important).
- Scan read and get a rough idea of the article.
- Understand the topic and start thinking about it while you scan through again to find a juicy quote or clear sentence that would work with the topic heading in your mind, that doesn’t duplicate the article title (which will show up in the image preview).
- Go back to your Bluesky account, press new post (bottom left), hit two spaces and paste in the quote. Don’t worry if it is a bit long at this stage.
- Go up to the top and add your topic phrase/sentence.
- Go to the article tab and copy the url. Wait for the article preview to load.
- Paste in and add a relevant hashtag and either #auspol or #AusVotes25.
- You can cut down the text by using some paraphrases with the rest in quotes if needed.
- Hit post.
Here is an example of a “double sandwich“, collapsing text from two cut and pastes. Don’t forget the use of hashtags to really shorten text and create emphasis.
Building threads
Tweet strings had become a tradition when covering events, conferences, sequential notes with an event hashtag, or when offering strategic insights or mobilising logics within a campaign. We can still do this on Twitter, or take advantage of the more engaged climate community on Bluesky while dodging trolls.
Bluesky works in a very similar way for threads – you go to Profile and post a reply to the last post. Bluesky will display several posts starting with the first.
Good threads add depth to climate arguments and are often rewarded with quality followers or quote post endorsements.
The four images above and below detail how this short thread on disinformation is made, giving examples of how the text is condensed:
- First post – double sandwich method cutting down from two chunks of text
- Second post – single sandwich method extracting a sentence, and making a list (a, b & c format) for the topic
- Third post – single sandwich method using a screenshot instead of preview and a question and answer format for the topic above the quote
- Fourth post – single sandwich method, screenshot and alt text