What is medical Bluesky—and is it worth engaging with?

What is Bluesky?

In a nutshell, it’s a social network that tries to recreate the “good old days” of Twitter before it was bought by billionaire Elon Musk and became X (Bluesky actually began as a research project at Twitter in 2019 but became an independent company in 2021).

To the user, it works, looks, and feels like Twitter as it used to be, with short posts published to a timeline and displayed chronologically, rather than arranged by an algorithm to show the most popular posts. Users can follow other users—and topics—that align with their interests.

Each post has a character limit of 300 (compared with the default 280 characters on X). Pictures, videos, gifs, and links can be included, and hashtags can be used to mark topics. Users can also set up and follow “topic groups,” which are similar to “lists” or hashtags that could be followed on X/Twitter. #MedSky has been set up by users as one such group for those involved in medicine.

How does it work?

Behind the scenes, Bluesky works in a “decentralised” way, as does Mastodon, a similar social network. This means that profiles are not all held on a single server owned and controlled by one company but on multiple interconnected servers. Practically speaking, this allows users to switch servers without losing their account or followers, and anyone can run their own Bluesky server if they want. Advocates describe this approach as more “democratic” and claim that it lowers the risk of censorship …