BlueSky for Scientists

Authors: Steve Haroz and Mark Rubin 
URL: http://blueskyscience.steveharoz.com

Verify yourself by Using your domain name as your handle

It can be important, especially for scientists, to verify that you are who you say you are. Anyone could sign up with @YourName.bsky.social, but only the owner of YourWebDomain.com can use it as a handle. And don’t worry if you already signed up with a bsky.social handle. You can change it and keep your followers and followees, and all your past mentions will update to your new handle.

Setting it up can be a bit tricky depending on who you pay for your domain. Here are instructions.

Find people you follow on Twitter on BlueSky

The Sky Follower Bridge plugin (Chrome / Firefox) allows you to page through your twitter follows and follow the corresponding account on Bluesky. Warning: Its matching is not accurate, so it sometimes matches a twitter account with an unrelated bluesky account, so check that profile photos and account descriptions match what you’re expecting.

Moderation and Filters

While BlueSky has site-wide moderation for egregious violations like bigotry or harassment, you may want to prohibit a broader range of posts from your feed. All of these are in Settings ▶ Moderation. Additional features:

Muted Words and Accounts prohibit certain topics/people from your feed.

Labelers are add-on moderation services that annotate posts or accounts, so BlueSky can warn about or block the content in your feed. These labels are only visible if you subscribe to them. The built-in BlueSky labeler has options for posts with nudity, sexual content, impersonation, and more. Here are some suggested additions:

• XBlock Screenshot Blocker warns about or blocks any post with a social media screenshot. It uses AI to detect the screenshot type, and you can set each social media site differently.

If an inappropriate post slips through the cracks and winds up in your feed, the Report button allows you to choose to report the post to either BlueSky (for a sitewide moderation issue) or a specific labeller.

Feeds

What’s a feed?

A feed shows content that meets a set of filters, which can include simple filters like posts with certain hashtags or more complex collections of filters. The default feed is “Home”, which shows posts from people you follow in chronological order. Another good feed is “Discover”, which is a mix of posts from people you follow, posts they’ve liked, and other related and popular posts.

A feed can have one or more filters, such as:

• Only include posts with one or more specific hashtags, words, or symbols
• Only include posts from people on a specified list (whitelist)
• Exclude posts from people on a specified list (blacklist: helpful for moderation)
• Exclude replies
• Only include posts with images

A feed doesn’t have to use hashtags or be in chronological order. For example, the Psych/Neuro Preprints feed shows all posts made by one of the preprint accounts in the past 7 days, sorted by number of likes.

How to follow a feed

Go to the feed and click “Pin to Home” to add it to your feeds list.

There is no indication of the number of followers for a feed, so please also click “Like” to let the organizer know you appreciate the effort.

How to view feeds

Once you’ve added feeds, it will appear in the list on the right side (web) or along the top (mobile).
The “# Feeds” button (left on web, in menu on mobile) also allows you to rearrange the order of feeds.

A recommended starter set and ordering:

• Following - Default chronological feed of people you follow
• Discover - A wider net. People you follow, posts they like, and other popular posts
• Quiet Posters - Post from people who don’t post frequently
• Topic specific feeds

How to view multiple feeds as columns

Twitter had an alternative UI, called TweetDeck, which would let you see your home feed, searches, DMs, etc. as different columns. A similar alternative UI for BlueSky is available at: https://deck.blue 

How to make your own feed

• Skyfeed.app (guide)
• Code and host your own (for developers)

Please check the directory of field-specific science feeds before publicizing a new one.

Science feed directory

Feeds with a “whitelist” require adding your account to a list for your posts to appear on the feed.

Click here for a Directory of over 200 field-specific science feeds

The directory is maintained by Mark Rubin

General Science feeds:

Preprint account directory

Features you may miss from Twitter or Mastodon

BlueSky is under active development, but some features are missing. Others are recently added. (⏳ = confirmed planned)

• Bookmarks (in discussion)
• Gifs (direct upload support varies by app, Tenor embeds)
• Long posts - current limit: 300 characters (unclear timeline ⏳)
• Polls (on roadmap ⏳)
• Edit posts (long term ⏳)
• Notification filtering
• Drafting an entire thread before posting
• Pin posts on your profile (on roadmap ⏳)
• Direct messages 
• Video upload
• Mute words from your feed
• Clickable hashtags
• Embedded video/audio (e.g., youtube)
• Limit who can reply to a post
• Lists
• See who has quoted a post

Discussions of UX and features for BlueSky

 This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.