Quick Start Guide For Bluesky-Curious Econ Lovers

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. Narrowing in, this blog aims to orient you quickly to econ-specific resources & strategies.

Add Follows

Your default feed becomes thick and interesting after you add many hundreds or thousands 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.

Before you start following people, set a bio and avatar and post something. Like on X, you can pin a post to the top of your feed. These identifiers give new follows a signal of who you are. They are more likely to follow you back when notified of your follow than if you look like an anon rando account.

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 four packs:

Pack 1 and Pack 2 of 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, Austan Goolsbee, Kirabo Jackson, Seema Jayachandran, Heather Long, Erzo F.P. Luttmer, Paul Krugman, Rachael Meager, Joey Politano, Jesse Rothstein, Claudia Sahm, Ernie Tedeschi, David Wessel, Khoa Vu, and Gema Zamarro.
Econ institutions such as APPAM, AEA Journals & JOE, CEPR, CSWEP, the IO Society, IZA, JAERE, JOLE, JPE, JPubE, NBER, the Peterson Institute, QJE, REStud, the Royal Econ Society, Upjohn Institute, the Urban Econ Association, RAND, and some econ departments.
U.S. econ reporters and columnists: my favorites on here to stay on top of what’s happening in the economy and relevant policy.

Field-themed, mostly academic econ Starter Packs created by others collect:

Economists by non-field themes such identity, institution type, language, or geography:

Policy-oriented packs include economists and others — many in government, NGOs, and think tanks — producing, debating, and using econ policy analysis, are:

Gina Pieters’ thread tours through dozens of these packs from econ and related fields. Anna Goeddeke built a spreadsheet of econ starter packs.

Prompt Bluesky’s excellent search function with “Starter Pack economics” or whatever else interests you to find more. This searchable Directory of Starter Packs has many but not all packs.

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…. In contrast, a List 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 containing “#EconSky” gets displayed on this Feed. Academic economics discussion centers here. Include “#EconSky” in a post and many #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 Econ – Popular Posts feed, which gives econ-research related posts from the last 24 hours ranked on popularity. Accounts must opt in to be included.

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

Enjoy the #EconConf feed. Each recent post with “#EconConf”, or “#AEA”, “#AEA2025”, “#2025AEA”, “AEA25” or similar for APPAM, ASA, ASHE, LERA, SEA, and SOLE over the last week is displayed here. I will update the years over time. It’s a single feed for all big econ conferences rather than requiring many separate conference-specific feeds that would be active only one week a year.

Enjoy the #FundSocSci feed. Each post with “#FundSocSci” gets displayed. It’s for sharing or discussing social science funding opportunities.

For econ job market resources, buy-side postings are at JOE. Sell-side new-PhD intros can be posted or viewed on the #EconJMP feed. Buy- or sell-side folks interested in the pre-doc, RA, or post-doc market, use the #econ_ra feed.

Browse those feeds 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 2,750+ 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. Also, if you:

are an economist,
posted recently but it’s missing from the list’s feed (evidence you’re not now on the list), and
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. 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.

BlueSky for Scientists by Steve Harow & Mark Rubin gives more detail than this Quick Start guide. This complete guide to Bluesky goes into more detail than you need now but is a good reference.

Want bookmarks? The 📌 feed accomplishes that.

Want to know which Starter Packs and Lists include you? Put your account name into Clearsky.app. Note the tabs on the right edge. Third-party developers have developed many other tools too.

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

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.

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.

Claimed versus Actual Posting Date/Time: posts are made at an actual time but can claim a different time. This is how BlueArk can post your old Twitter archive using original dates. The system records both the claimed and actual posting date-time. However, the native UI only shows the claimed time. If you subscribe to this Backdated labeler, it will add a flag onto posts where the claimed and actual posting date-time don’t agree. HT Olivier Simard-Casanova for point me to this solution (& others).

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.