Bluesky for Science

4 min read Original article ↗

I joined Twitter1 way back in 2009. For nearly 10 years “scitwitter” was an amazing place for discussion, discovery, and engagement with the scientific community. The #Rstats and #pydata hashtags were great places to learn about something new in programming, #icanhazpdf was great for getting papers you didn’t have access to, and conference live-tweeting was common and useful for those of us with FOMO not able to make it in person.

Ever since the platform formerly known as Twitter came under new management the enshittification process has rapidly accelerated. The #Rstats hashtag is filled with spam and content farms. Despite my best efforts and liberally muting and blocking, my timeline is filled with Elon’s disinformation, clickbait, crypto bros (now AI bros), political snark, performative outrage, NSFW spam, bots, and ads — lots of ads. Ads for sportsbooks (I don’t watch, certainly don’t bet on sports), ads for crypto (I don’t and never will own any) ads for women’s adult toys (…not in that market either). I never got into Mastodon — it always felt clunky and fussy, kind of like trying to install Ubuntu on an old Windows XP laptop and toiling to figure out Wifi and sound card drivers. I held on for the longest time thinking that Twitter/X couldn’t possibly keep getting worse. It did. And it did so at warp speed leading up to the 2024 US elections.

Enter Bluesky: https://bsky.app. I joined Bluesky (@stephenturner.us)2 last year when it was in invite-only beta. Like any social network, it’s only useful once you have a critical mass of like minded people you want to interact with. For the longest time posting on Bluesky felt like posting into the void, and I never really spent much time there. However, just over the past month I’ve seen a dramatic influx of new accounts from people I knew on Twitter or IRL. It’s starting to feel like the sci-Twitter of the old days again.3

Bluesky has a nice feature allowing you to create starter packs — lists of individual accounts or feeds4 to follow in bulk or individually. Here are a few starter packs in genomics and bioinformatics to get you started.

There are also a few great starter packs for R.

And a couple for Nextflow (lots of overlap):

Finally, there’s a third-party directory of starter packs where you can search for terms of interest to you. I’d also recommend using the Sky Follower Bridge Chrome/Firefox extension to find people from your Twitter network on Bluesky.

Maybe just as useful as starter packs: moderation lists! These are public lists of abusive or annoying accounts that you can block in one fell swoop. I don’t have a good list of these yet, but here are a few I subscribe to.

I’m sure it’s only a matter of time before spammers or just generally annoying accounts will start polluting the #rstats hashtag or the emoji-triggered feeds like Genomics/Bioinformatics🧬🖥️ or other feeds and hashtags. I’ve already blocked a few but maybe I’ll create my own moderation list if this ever turns into a real problem.

I’m not sure how long the good vibes will last. For now, there aren’t many annoying journalists or companies spamming my feeds and hashtags with advertising content. I’m encouraging my network to keep the politics discussion/outrage/snark over at X to prevent sci-sky from turning into the sewer that X has become, and I’m liberally muting or blocking anyone who insists on bringing X baggage to this new place. So far it’s working, and as more people are coming over to Bluesky the place really is starting to feel like the “old” sci-Twitter.

The Bluesky team is doing amazing work with only a handful of devs and getting millions of new sign-ups weekly. They recently announced a round of VC funding — the original sin that usually kicks off the enshittification process for any social network. Their announcement mentioned plans for a subscription service but it’s unclear what exactly that will eventually mean for free versus paid users. Let’s hope we can keep this place fun, informative, and pleasant for years to come.