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A Quick Start Guide For Bluesky-Curious Epidemiology Lovers

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By Gregg Gonsalves & Aaron Sojourner

 

This Quick Start guide aims to help Epi lovers easily join Bluesky’s growing Epi community. The Bluesky User FAQ covers generic basics, like how to start an account. This guide orients you to Epi-specific resources and strategies. 

Add Follows

Your default feed becomes thick and interesting after you add many hundreds of Follows. Bluesky’s designers aim to give you the experience you prefer, not the one advertisers or management prefers. Unlike on X or Threads, Bluesky’s default feeds are your Follows. As discussed below, Starter Packs and Sky Follower Bridge make it easy to find great accounts to follow. Lists and Feeds help too, as well as offering alternative algorithmic feeds, like the Discover feed. Once you follow many accounts of interest, Bluesky feels more like classic Twitter than X does now.

Set a bio and avatar and post something before you start following people, so they have a signal of who you are and are more likely to follow you back.

Use Starter Packs to easily build a list of follows around themes that interest you. Any user can create a Starter Pack, a list of up to 150 accounts that they curate and recommend on some topic. Follow all the accounts in a pack with a single click and/or browse to select individually.

Two great Starter Packs are the:

  1. Epi Sky Chart pack by Jason Gantenberg that lifts up dozens of excellent epi & epi-adjacent accounts including Peter Tennant, Adam Kucharski,  Daniel Westreich, Sam Scarpino, Miguel Hernan, Joshua Salomon, Maria Glymour, Yonatan Grad, Sherri Rose, Paul Zivich, Matt Fox, Elizabeth Stuart, Chelsea Polis, Bill Miller, and Justin Lessler, and
  2. Global Health, Infectious Diseases, & Epi pack by Saloni Dattini that mixes scientists, journalists, and policy folks including Ellie Murray, Carl Zimmer, Helen Branswell, Kai Kuperschmidt, Angie Rasmussen, Kristian Andersen, Kit Yates, Aris Katzourakis, Flo DeBarre, Eddie Holmes, Marion Koopmans, Saskia Popescu, Jon Cohen, Bill Hanage, Tara C. Smith, Gavin Yamey, Madhu Pai, and Megan Ranney.

Other Starter Packs collect:

Prompt Bluesky’s excellent search function with “Starter Pack Epidemiology” or whatever else interests you to find more.

Find accounts you follow on X that are also on Bluesky using the Chrome extension Sky Follower Bridge. Choose those you want to follow here.

Add Algorithms

Feeds are algorithmic filters based on posts’ characteristics (date, language, hashtags, emoticons…). Any user can create and/or pin Feeds.

Enjoy the #EpiSky feed. If you Pin it, it will show up on your Home page’s Feed ribbon to the right of the “Following” and “Latest from Follows” Feeds.  Each post with “EpiSky”, “#EpiSky”, “epidemiology”  or “#epidemiology” gets displayed on this Feed. Academic Epi discussion is largely here. Add one of those tags to your post and #EpiSky subscribers will see it.

Browse the EpiSky Feed and you’ll discover interesting accounts.

Go to the Profile of someone whose tastes correlate with yours. Browse their Follows.

Adjacent communities use feeds like #IDSky, #SocSky, #EconSky and other tags like #PolicySky, #Causal, and #PublicHealth.

To find Feeds on any topic of interest to you, click “# Feeds” on the sidebar to go to the Feeds page. Scroll down past your Feeds. You’ll find a search bar there only for Feeds.

Bluesky also equips us each with tools to resist toxicity and to cultivate the community we each want. Use them. 

The Popular with Friends feed is useful for discovery. 

BlueSky for Scientists by Steve Harow & Mark Rubin gives more detail than this Quick Start guide.

Network Effects FTW!

This place has strong foundations. The community is small but growing quickly. The more people come, the better it gets. The main thing missing from Bluesky is you!

 

Bonus content

Multi-platform posting: to lower the cost of posting across multiple platforms, use a social media management service like Buffer. You can link accounts on up to 3 platforms (X, Bluesky, Threads, LinkedIn, Insta, TikTok…) for free. Compose once, customize for each site, and post 3 places. I’ve been using it. It’s slick and easy. Fedica and many others are also in this space but I don’t have experience with it.

Identity verification: anyone can start an account and have a username like NAME@bsky.social. If you want identity verification, it will be tied to control of a web domain. My Bluesky account is @aaronsojourner.org and so you know that the account is controlled by the same entity that controls aaronsojourner.org on the web, @nytimes.com on Bluesky is the same entity that controls nytimes.com, etc. If you own a web domain, no one can have a Bluesky account tied to it without your permission. If you want to have an account name tied to your employer’s domain, talk to your IT department.

Organizations: organizational accounts on Bluesky are managed like individual accounts. You’ll need to verify your account with an email from your organization. You can use Bluesky’s default domain or your own custom domain, as described above. Accounts are managed through a single login, as the organization, instead of by granting permissions to individuals (as with Facebook).
Organizational accounts interact with other accounts as individuals, without extra limitations or privileges. Research organizations find Bluesky particularly useful in disseminating new and featured pieces of research. Posting as an organization lends credibility to an affiliated individual’s research, as does reposting an individual’s tweet (post) or thread.
Small but active organizations can have an outsized presence on Bluesky. Many organizations have spread out their short-form social media presence, with some maintaining some presence on X while exploring alternatives and others trying several alternatives. Many organizations cross-post content to all media and may not actively engage with all. Those who actively engage on Bluesky – retweeting others, responding to threads with links to research, offering sources to reporters – will stand out and garner more engagement.
EconSky feed header

Quick Start Guide For Bluesky-Curious Econ Lovers

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This guide aims to help econ lovers easily join Bluesky’s growing economics community. The Bluesky User FAQ covers generic basics, like how to start an account. This guide orients you to econ-specific resources and strategies. 

Add Follows

Your default feed becomes thick and interesting after you add many hundreds of Follows. Bluesky’s designers aim to give you the experience you prefer, not the one advertisers or management prefers. Unlike on X or Threads, Bluesky’s default feeds are your Follows. As discussed below, Starter Packs and Sky Follower Bridge make it easy to find great accounts to follow. Lists and Feeds help too, as well as offering alternative algorithmic feeds, like the Discover feed. Once you follow many accounts of interest, Bluesky feels more like classic Twitter than X does now.

Set a bio and avatar and post something before you start following people, so they have a signal of who you are and are more likely to follow you back.

Use Starter Packs to easily build a list of follows around themes that interest you. Any user can create a Starter Pack, a list of up to 150 accounts that they curate and recommend on some topic. Follow all the accounts in a pack with a single click and/or browse to select individually.

I made two packs:

  1. Individual accounts actively posting econ from academia, think tanks, and media including Daron Acemoglu, Andrew Baker, Michael Clemens, Nick Bunker, Brad DeLong, Arin Dube, Sue Dynarski, Paul Goldsmith-Pinkham, Kirabo Jackson, Seema Jayachandran, Erzo F.P. Luttmer, Paul Krugman, Rachael Meager, Joey Politano, Jesse Rothstein, Ernie Tedeschi, David Wessel, Khoa Vu, and Gema Zamarro, and
  2. Economics institutions with Bluesky accounts such as APPAM, AEA Journals & JOE, CEPR, CSWEP, the IO Society, JAERE, JOLE, JPE, JPubE, NBER, the Peterson Institute, QJE, REStud, the Royal Econ Society, Upjohn Institute, the Urban Econ Association, and RAND.

Other Starter Packs collect:

Gina Pieters’ thread tours through dozens of these packs from econ and related fields.

Prompt Bluesky’s excellent search function with “Starter Pack economics” or whatever else interests you to find more.

Find accounts you follow on X that are also on Bluesky using the Chrome extension Sky Follower Bridge. Choose those you want to follow here.

Add Algorithms

Feeds are algorithmic filters based on posts’ characteristics (date, language, hashtags, emoticons…), A Lists is a sets of accounts. Users can create and/or pin Feeds and Lists.

Enjoy the #EconSky feed. If you Pin it, it will show up on Home Page’s Feed ribbon to the right of the “Following” and “Latest from Follows” Feeds.  Each recent post with “#EconSky”, “📈📉”, or “📉📈” gets displayed on this Feed. Academic economics discussion is here. Add one of those tags to your post and #EconSky subscribers will see it.

Enjoy the #NumbersDay feed.  Each recent post with “#️⃣#️⃣”, “#GDP”, “#CPI”, “#JobsDay”, “#JOLTS”, and other real-time econ tags gets displayed on it. It tends to be a mix of academic, Wall Street, policy, and econ media folks’ posts.

Enjoy the #TeachEcon feed. Each recent post with “#TeachEcon”, “👩‍🏫👨‍🏫”, or “👨‍🏫👩‍🏫” gets displayed on this Feed.

Browse those and you’ll discover interesting accounts.

Go to the Profile of someone whose tastes correlate with yours. Browse their Follows.

Adjacent communities use feeds like #FinSky, #PolicySky, #PoliSci, #EduSky, and #Sociology. 

To find Feeds on any topic of interest to you, click “# Feeds” on the sidebar to go to the Feeds page. Scroll down past your Feeds. You’ll find a search bar there only for Feeds.

For Lists, this Economists list collects 1,000+ economists’ accounts. If you Pin the list, it will show up on your home page and show the aggregated posts from all list members. Use the Browse tab to see the list’s accounts and choose any individuals to follow. If you:

  1. are an economist,
  2. posted recently but it’s missing from the list’s feed (evidence you’re not now on the list), and
  3. want to be on the list, DM me and I’ll add you.

This Econ Reporters list has dozens of media accounts covering economic issues.

Let me know if I’m missing folks. Feel free to DM or @ me with any questions or ideas. Or post them to #EconSky. 

Bluesky also equips us each with tools to resist toxicity and to cultivate the community we each want. Use them. 

The Popular with Friends feed is useful for discovery. 

Econ job market candidates & hiring teams, check out the #EconJMP feed.

BlueSky for Scientists by Steve Harow & Mark Rubin gives more detail than this Quick Start guide.

Network Effects FTW!

This place has strong foundations. The community is small but growing quickly. The more people come, the better it gets. The main thing missing from Bluesky is you!

 

Bonus content

Multi-platform posting: to lower the cost of posting across multiple platforms, use a social media management service like Buffer. You can link accounts on up to 3 platforms (X, Bluesky, Threads, LinkedIn, Insta, TikTok…) for free. Compose once, customize for each site, and post 3 places. I’ve been using it. It’s slick and easy. Fedica and many others are also in this space but I don’t have experience with it.

Identity verification: anyone can start an account and have a username like NAME@bsky.social. If you want identity verification, it will be tied to control of a web domain. My Bluesky account is @aaronsojourner.org and so you know that the account is controlled by the same entity that controls aaronsojourner.org on the web, @nytimes.com on Bluesky is the same entity that controls nytimes.com, etc. If you own a web domain, no one can have a Bluesky account tied to it without your permission. If you want to have an account name tied to your employer’s domain, talk to your IT department.

Organizations: organizational accounts on Bluesky are managed like individual accounts. You’ll need to verify your account with an email from your organization. You can use Bluesky’s default domain or your own custom domain, as described above. Accounts are managed through a single login, as the organization, instead of by granting permissions to individuals (as with Facebook).
Organizational accounts interact with other accounts as individuals, without extra limitations or privileges. Research organizations find Bluesky particularly useful in disseminating new and featured pieces of research. Posting as an organization lends credibility to an affiliated individual’s research, as does reposting an individual’s tweet (post) or thread.
Small but active organizations can have an outsized presence on Bluesky. Many organizations have spread out their short-form social media presence, with some maintaining some presence on X while exploring alternatives and others trying several alternatives. Many organizations cross-post content to all media and may not actively engage with all. Those who actively engage on Bluesky – retweeting others, responding to threads with links to research, offering sources to reporters – will stand out and garner more engagement.