6 Tips: Your Bluesky Onboarding Kit
With Instagram’s hard turn to the right, will anyone in the art world be left on the app?
Instagram has become a sadder, more dangerous place. Meta’s latest moves, including ending its fact-checking program and removing restrictions on hate speech toward trans, queer, and immigrant populations, foreshadow a fate for our beloved platform that resembles that of Twitter. Shadowed by threats of harassment, censorship, tracking, and other nefarious outcomes, art professionals have been fleeing Meta apps.
I’m among those who have decided to stay, at least for now, feeling that my content and coverage perform a useful service. Like many in the industry, I’m reluctant to lose the community, visibility, and business I’ve built over the last decade. That said, having tended and abandoned several popular Tumblrs, along with accounts on Wordpress, Vine, Snapchat, Clubhouse, X, and even Threads, I know that social media isn’t forever. Sometimes the platform moves on; sometimes I do. I’ve always taught students that building professional and personal connections that flourish off the app matters more than follower counts.
Will Bluesky become the art-world alternative?
Judging by the quantity of “Goodbye Meta, find me on Bluesky” posts on my feeds, possibly. Lured by the promise of humanistic community guidelines, options for content moderation, and the potential for a new virtual community space, art professionals have been flocking to the year-old microblogging platform. With complementary photo-sharing apps, including Flashes, just launched, I joined, too. Here are some tips if you decide to jump in:
1. Check out the new neighborhood
Browsing around Bluesky, you’ll notice that many newly joined art accounts have not posted anything yet. That said, various early adapters have built robust followings over the past year, most by sharing information and commentary in the bygone Twitter format. (See Aruna D'Souza; Deborah Kass.) Some museums are tentatively going the humor route, in the style of early Threads. There are artists importing the Instagram aesthetic, posting vertical images of their work. Other people are sharing every link you have already seen with little new context.
2. Curate your feed
First, find people you respect and see who they follow. See who they follow, and so on.
To make the most of Bluesky—whether to track and share news, build your art career, or all of the above—then invest time in organizing your feed. The app has several versions of one of my favorite Twitter features, the list. One, also called list, allows you to organize accounts to view outside your timeline, whether you follow them or not.
Then there are Starter Packs. These shareable lists help newcomers find accounts to follow in bulk, like this one of museums, galleries, archives and heritage sites in the UK assembled by their Museums Association. The art publication Hyperallergic has a pack listing contributors and staff. Creating high-quality lists and Starter Packs is not only a great way to manage content. Because they’re public, they act as a tool to build visibility and thought leadership, providing a helpful roadmap to navigate this new landscape.
3. Consider your content strategy
Who do you want to be on Bluesky? Who are you trying to reach and what are you trying to achieve? Before you invest energy in creating content, think about your resources. Once you’ve determined a strategy that meshes with what you’re doing elsewhere, be sure to adapt it to fit the specific features of this new platform. Be consistent with how and what you post, and provide some kind of value.
4. Design your profile
At up to 300 characters, the Bluesky profile is double the size of those on IG and X.
Use your profile to share your essential qualities, along with your current gigs. Design it with line breaks, emojis, typographical elements. Remember to post not only a profile photo but also a horizontal cover photo that conveys distinctive aspects of your creative practice.
5. Keep yourself safe
Bluesky users can label, mute, filter, and block content in various ways.
6. Try not to worry about the numbers
In case you’re curious, you can’t buy followers or likes on Bluesky. If you want to build your following, see above.
