The Library Guide to Bluesky

During November 2024, the social network Bluesky underwent a significant transformation. What had been a platform where a few libraries set up experimental profiles with mixed results, suddenly became a space where many libraries were achieving substantial engagement.

In short, Bluesky has reached a critical mass, with enough users leaving Twitter and joining the platform for it be considered a legitimate X-replacement. This shift makes it worth considering setting up an account for your institution. At one point Bluesky saw a million new users joining daily: for libraries—and cultural organisations in general—this presents a unique opportunity to rebuild communities that have become harder to reach elsewhere.

There are plenty of examples of libraries finding success on Bluesky to draw inspiration from. I went from considering Bluesky to be brilliant for librarians but perhaps not yet suitable for libraries themselves, to seeing an explosion of library success that changed my mind. My own library has been on Bluesky for just over two weeks, and we've seen engagement levels far exceed what we experienced on Twitter over the past two years, as shown below.

If you’ve not seen Bluesky before, the first thing you’ll notice is how similar it is to Twitter in look and feel

And it’s not just us: others have posted comparisons showing engagement is much higher - and more positive - on Bluesky, and newspapers are finding click-throughs to their articles are way higher than on Twitter or Threads also, because links are not suppressed on the newer platform (see info on the lack of algorithm, below).

We’ve built a following quickly too, and while it’s not (yet) quite as big as our ex-X community was, it only took us 9 days to reach the total number of followers we had on Twitter after 9 years! Here’s how the first week went:

Our following numbers were helped by a very popular post (shown in the previous screenshot): a researcher’s guide to Bluesky. Being entertaining is good but being USEFUL is what leads to a larger following

So if you’re a cultural organisation and you’re either new to Bluesky, or considering setting up a profile, what do you need to know? Here’s a library guide to Bluesky: 13 tips to help you hit the ground running.

The big picture stuff

1. Learn from the organisations already active on Bluesky

You may be familiar with ‘Starter Packs’ on Bluesky - this is simply a curated collection of accounts, which you can follow all in one go. Use these to get a good idea of how comparable institutions are using the platform, and steal some of their ideas! I’d recommend pressing the ‘follow all’ button then unfollowing selectively as you go.

I’ve tried to think about what would be most useful for a nascent Bluesky library account, and settled on sector-by-sector Packs as the way forward so you can see what your immediate peers are up to, what sort of content works and gets engagement, and who is already having success. If you fall into the categories below and are not on these lists, tell me on Bluesky and I’ll add you!

Here they are:

• The Academic Libraries Bluesky starter pack. Of all the sectors in libraries, the academic sector appears to be having the most success on Bluesky so far. This is not because of the nature of the content they’re posting, I don’t think - there’s just a lot of the academic community moving to the platform already.

  If you work in an academic library, my uncomplicated recommendation is to get off Twitter, and get on to Bluesky.

  Hopefully this starter pack will provide some inspiration from the libraries already making it work. (Please note there are also three other packs particularly relevant to this sector, none of which I created: the Open Research pack, and the University Presses pack, and the Archives and Special Collections pack.)

• The Public Libraries Bluesky starter pack. This sector is starting to make its way on to the platform, although at the moment there’s a few libraries grabbing the username but not actively posting. In UK terms the two social media behemouths in public libraries are of course the British Library who have not been on Bluesky too long but have already amassed 20k followers, and Orkney who have only been here for 4 days but already past 5k! I love both those libraries and their social media output, but would caution against using them for too much inspiration as their huge followings and cultural cache slightly set them apart from an especially copyable model… I’d recommend checking out Hull Libraries as an example of a newish public library account making the platform work well. (I also see some public libraries having success with Threads, and would recommend choosing one platform or the other rather than spreading your time too thin across both.)

• The Health Libraries Bluesky starter pack. Medical and health libraries are starting to arrive now, and I’ll keep adding them to this pack as they do - it will be interesting to see whether Bluesky or Instagram are the best use of the social media time available.

I’m yet to see enough School Libraries, Law Libraries or other Special Libraries to create Packs for those sectors - that will hopefully change over time. You’ll find recommendations for librarian (rather than library) starter packs in this separate guide.

2. Set up your profile fully before engaging

Every Bluesky guide I’ve read (or written!) says this but I still see loads of accounts falling into the trap of following people before doing their profile. I get it, you’re excited to connect… But trust me you’re missing opportunities: accounts with generic avatars and no biography or introductory text are often perceived as likely to be bots, so users often don’t follow back and sometimes auto-block. Please sort your profile, and write an introductory post, before going on that following spree. It’s well worth it.

3. Get yourself into relevant Starter Packs

Getting into Starter Packs is a great way to accelerate follower growth, especially early on. It may happen on its own, but it’s best to be proactive - just ask the owners of packs to add you! That’s not some sort of breach of etiquette; speaking for myself I want to hear from you and make the packs more useful.

A very popular pack which is great to be on if possible is The MERL’s Arts & Culture pack which gets huge engagement; look locally for Packs created by parent organisations or local groups too. You can search for packs to follow and potentially to join, in the Bluesky Directory.

4. Create Starter Packs of your own that will help your community

One of the best things to ensure enough of your community is on Bluesky to make it worth your while to set up a profile, is to help that audience move from Twitter. I’ve done this in a couple of ways for my library - one is to write the Researcher’s Guide to Bluesky, which proved to be a very popular early post with over 500 reposts so far, and which I’ve got into all the relevant staff newsletters etc. The other way to create a University of York Starter Pack, so people from the institution can instantly find and connect with each other.

I’d highly recommend you do one or both of these things early on - create a Starter Pack if the need for one exists, which is helpful for your community; and if applicable write a guide for that community (e.g. ‘the healthcare professionals guide to Bluesky’ or whatever is relevant).

5. Know your target audience, and create content for them (not for other librarians!)

This is essential social media advice regardless of platform. We need to know why we are there, and who we are there for. In my case, I consider Instagram and TikTok to be fabulous ways to reach University of York Students, so I’m crafting the stuff we put on Bluesky specifically for academics and researchers. Other people may enjoy it too which is great, but I’m using the account with a specific target audience in mind - and if I find I’m getting engagement from other libraries or info pros, and NOT from the target audience, I will tweak the content I’m putting out!

6. There’s no centralised algorithm so be proactive. Follow, reply, repost and engage

Bluesky is very Twitter-like in lots of functional ways: you can post up to 300 characters at a time, you can repost, you can Like, and so on. The crucial difference is the lack of algorithm on Bluesky’s default ‘Following’ feed. There’s no endlessly auto-refreshing content, just posts from the people you follow, in reverse chronological order. That’s it. So you need to follow a bunch of people to make your feed useful, and then start getting involved: join in conversations, ask questions, repost useful things, hit the Like button. In essence - this sounds pretentious I know - the aim is to cultivate community rather than just broadcast your library news.

The details

7. Make it accessible

Finally, a platform that offers alt-text for video as well as images! Thank you Bluesky. I’d recommend accessing Settings, find the Accessibility section, and toggle the switch marked Require alt-text before posting and you can create accessible content every time. Here’s a great resource on how to write alt-text descriptions.

8. Don’t be afraid to block and otherwise moderate your experience

One of the reasons for the notable lack of toxicity on Bluesky compared with Twitter is the moderation options are extensive and they actually work. Blocking is very powerful, muting words is effective, you can detach your own post from a Repost you’re not comfortable with, and so on. Make the most of all this baked-in protection.

9. for most libraries it’s probably worth having your Direct Messages open to all

The point above about moderation notwithstanding, ideally users should be able ask you questions via a DM even if you don’t follow them. The toggle-switch you require to enable this is not in Settings, but rather in the Chat area itself.

10. The question you need to ask yourself as a social media admin is not: what should I post about my org? It’s: what is my community interested in?

Often the best way to build community online is to post a mixture of things about your organisation, and things relevant to or adjacent to your organisation. For example, this post was popular among our target audience because it was about York - there was no informational or promotional message involved, and that’s fine.

We’re back! Today in #York aesthetics news, today’s vibe is rainsoaked but sunny.

[image or embed]

— University of York Library (@uoylibrary.bsky.social) November 25, 2024 at 10:29 AM

11. Don’t be afraid to explore ideas in a bit more detail

Brevity is great but it’s not the be-all and end-all - threads work well here. As well as posting a link to our Researcher’s Guide we also explored the contents in a thread and that really helped increase engagement.

We've written a Researcher's Guide to Bluesky! It's a bit like all those other useful guides to Bluesky, but with several useful insights from University of York academics about using the platform, and we'd love it if it was reposted far and wide... >> blogs.york.ac.uk/library/2024... 🧵 below

[image or embed]

— University of York Library (@uoylibrary.bsky.social) November 13, 2024 at 12:17 PM

12. Posting first thing is probably best avoided

You often get organisations posting 8:30 - 9:30 in the morning because it’s the only time the person doing the social media has any time (and as yet Bluesky lacks an in-built scheduling tool) but in my experience so far, it’s best to wait until later in the day as more people seem to be around. At least give it until mid-morning to post anything important, if you can.

13. Images are important, despite this being a (rare) text-based platform

Don’t get me wrong, they’re not essential like they are on Insta - but if you can add context or character to a post using a picture or video, do so. Engagement will likely be higher.

---

I hope the above is helpful, and I also hope it doesn’t make anyone feel pressured to get onto Bluesky if they’re not ready! It seems to be staying the course as a platform and growing all the time, so if you need a few months to get permission and management buy-in and ideas together and all that stuff, it will still be here waiting for you when you’re properly ready. (And of course, if you want a bespoke workshop on it, get in touch with me…)

There are various versions of this guide aimed at different audiences. If you’re looking at Bluesky more as an individual, this blogpost on ten top tips for joining may be helpful.

I’ve already mentioned the Researcher’s Guide To Bluesky above - a leaner, more efficient and less Yorky version of this appears on the LSE Impact Blog here and lots of people have said the tips apply to more than just researchers and academics.

I may yet produce a Uni Department’s Guide to Bluesky just to complete the set, but for now do leave a comment or get in touch if you have any further advice to add, or any questions.

And finally, whilst I have some caveats when recommending Bluesky to libraries (especially if you’re not an academic library) I really have no hesitation in recommending it to librarians and anyone who works in libraries. It’s proving in some ways to be better than Twitter ever was, and I really value the community there. If you haven’t already, join us!

The Pros and Cons of Hybrid Freelancing

Is there a word for people who are both employed and self-employed? There's a group of us who work the majority of our time in a normal job and also do freelance work in the remaining time: I'm going to call us Hybrid Freelancers, for want of a better term. I love being a hybrid freelancer, and a new change has got me reflecting on the pros and cons.

Today I start a new regime of compressed hours: I'm now doing my 90% FTE hours over 4 days rather than 4.5. I reduced my hours to 90% 12 years ago when I first started doing freelance training & workshops as well as my regular day-job at the University of York, and it has worked really well - taking either a day each fortnight, or half a day each week since Covid hit and things moved online, to prepare and run training sessions.

I literally never run the same session the same way twice. I will always, always revise my materials in some way before each session, either to tailor them to the sector or the organisation, or update them with new information, or just tweak them based on something which went well or less well the previous time I ran it. Up until now, I’ve tended to do that at the end of my regular working day, and the morning of the workshops – 45 minutes here, an hour there, and the materials are updated and ready to go.

Just under a year ago I changed roles at York and became a Faculty Engagement Manager, and I’ve found the new position to be much more intense and to take up a lot more emotional energy than my old one. I’ve noticed I’d get to 5pm or so and simply be too knackered to change gear completely and work on freelance materials, so I’ve found myself working at the weekends or evenings occasionally to prep for workshops - something I absolutely do NOT wish to be doing.

As a result of this, I’ve made the change to compress my hours. 5 days compressed across 4 has always been a mystery to me – the days seem so long I don’t get how people manage it… But to fit less than 4 additional hours into 4 working days, and then have a day off a week, seems very doable. It will mean on a regular workshop day where I run something online from 10am – 1pm, I will have the afternoon completely free to prep the NEXT workshop after that, and so on and so on. I think this will really help.

It also means I can potentially take on more freelance work, although by some miracle I have almost always had the same amount of demand for freelance work as I have time do it in, and I don’t expect demand to double just because my availability has! But hey, if you’re reading this and wondering if I can fit in a larger 2-day workshop or whatever, the answer is, yes, by all means get in touch…

Anyway, one of the cons of being a hybrid freelancer is also one of the pros: dividing your brain in two. On the one hand, the con is that it can be hard to switch gears and fit those two different worlds into a reasonable number of working hours. One the other hand, the pro is that both worlds benefit each other: I’m better at my day-job because I learn so much from my freelance work, and my freelance work is anchored in the reality of what is achievable in a library, because I work in one…

What else is there in the pro column, and does it outweigh the con column? First of all I’m going to talk about money. Even though I *know* it’s better when we’re open about financial matters when it comes to jobs, I still feel awkward and gauche! But here we go, anyway.

The Cons of hybrid freelancing

Part of your income is not guaranteed. I’m starting with the obvious one – for 10% of my time I’m relying on generating work, and if I don’t get any work I don’t get any salary. And of course if I’m ill I don’t get sick pay. This is inherently stressful, although much less so as a hybrid than as a full freelancer. On the upside, if you DO get work, it generally pays better than the day-job: my annual income is greater than if I was 1.0 FTE in my day-job.

Continuing on the subject of financial matters, you’re paying less into your pension. You can of course supplement your day-job pension with a private pension if you choose to, but you won’t get any sort of employer-matching type offer. You also have to get good at guessing what your tax bill will be, and putting aside that amount, because you’re taxed annually rather than at-source on your freelance income.

Here’s a tricky one: what does being a hybrid freelancer do for your reputation at your place of work? I’ve heard ‘oh they’re never there, really’ about people in other libraries who also do freelance work: I really, really hope my colleagues at York have never said that about me! Of course, I wouldn’t know if they did. What I do know, however, is I put absolutely everything into my day-job: I make sure I personally make a difference not just to the library but the actual student experience, and I hope this ensures no one ever thinks I see the day-job as lesser in any way to the freelancing.

The Pros of Hybrid Freelancing

I don’t want to be cheesy but the main pro is the people. As a freelancer I’ve run over 300 workshops across four continents (five if you count working online!) and I must have spoken to getting on for 10,000 people across that time: it is an absolute privilege to interact with so many professionals in my field and others, and to get so many different perspectives and experiences shared with me. It makes me better at both my jobs and it helps me understand the world from viewpoints other than my own, which is especially important as a cis, white, straight male.

The work itself is incredibly rewarding. I can only speak as a trainer, but I completely love it – working with engaged professionals who want to learn and share ideas and really get something out of the workshops. I’ve met people years later who’ve told me in detail about how they implemented ideas I’d given them in workshops and that is an uncomplicatedly brilliant feeling!

You get to travel, without travel becoming the only thing you do. I’ve had amazing opportunities thanks to freelancing, to visit South Africa and New Zealand and Australia and all sorts of places in Europe, which I’ve loved. But, I’ve also turned down a lot of overseas trips because they didn’t work for my family - as a ‘hybrid’ I can say no to things, but if I was fully freelance I may well have felt like I had to take on the trips to make ends meet.

Your worklife is inherently varied. I stayed in my previous job (Academic Liaison Librarian) for 13 years, which is a long time. Mainly it was because I hadn’t found a job I wanted to do more, but a big reason I didn’t get itchy feet was because I had constant professional *variety* and change in my freelance life.

All in all I’d say to anyone considering going freelance, try the hybrid system first to see if it suits you – the additional security it provides is really beneficial, especially when you’re first starting out!

Bluesky is the one! 10 top tips for joining the growing social media platform

Bluesky is great, and it’s really starting to build now: in fact in under two months it has doubled to 12.5 million users [edit - since I wrote this 5 weeks ago it’s doubled again, to 24 million!]. It’s especially good for individuals seeking to rebuild their professional and personal networks away from the toxicity of Twitter. If that’s you, or you’re just new to the platform and wanting to make the best of it, here are ten top tips.

1) Fill out your profile first.

Generic avatars and profiles without bios give off bot vibes and generally won’t be followed - so before you start showing up in people’s notifications feed as you follow them, give them a reason to follow you back. Put in a bio, put in a pic (even if it’s not of you), put in a link if you have a website or another social media profile you’d like to highlight, and ideally write a post or two as well so people know what you’re about.

2) In some ways, it works just like Twitter.

You can post up to 300 characters in one go, you can post videos, images, links, gifs and emojis. You can reply, you can Like, you can repost, you can direct message. It looks just like Twitter too.

3) In this crucial way it does not work like Twitter: there’s no algorithm.

You know how on every other platform, you think: why oh why can’t it just show me posts from the people I follow, in reverse chronological order? Well I have good news for you: that is exactly what Bluesky’s default ‘Following’ feed does. However, it is a complete outlier in this respect: nearly every other popular social media platform does some version of showing you content you’ve not asked to see, and it actually takes a lot of getting used to when that isn’t provided. There’s a slower pace of life than on Twitter or Insta where your feeds have a literally ENDLESS auto-refresh going on - this reduced activity is something I’ve really learned to enjoy. But when you’re new, if you don’t get out there and follow a bunch of people, your feed will be completely dead. So with that in mind…

4) Be proactive: follow people.

For Bluesky to be of any value to you at all, you need to follow people whose posts make your feed interesting and worthwhile. There’s a number of ways you can find people to follow:

• Use Skyfollower bridge to follow the same people on Bluesky you used to follow on Twitter: I actually wouldn’t personally recommend doing this but a lot of people find the option very useful

• Find people who post content you like, and look at who they follow. I’m a big fan of cannibalising people’s follower lists, it both helps you find people you know and opens up new horizons

• Use Starter Packs. These are curated sets of accounts, usually on a theme, which anyone can create. If, like me, you work in the library industry, a Starter Pack like Alice Cann’s UK Library and Information People would be a great way to follow lots of relevant industry people in one go. The MERL have created a pack that includes libraries, museums and galleries too. I’ve now created Starter Packs for Academic Libraries, Public Libraries and Health Libraries.

• Make the most of custom feeds - these are curated feeds on a given topic. Unlike a List which is just all the posts from all the people on the list, posts only get added to custom feeds when people use the right emoji and have been added to the feed: so for example the ‘Skybrarians’ feed is a great place for info pros to find each other and share relevant posts. There’s even a custom feed for gifted articles (gift links that bypass journalistic paywalls for e.g. the New York Times). You can also use the ‘Discover’ and ‘Popular with friends’ feeds (both default tabs on your Home screen) to find new people to follow

• Simply search for topics you care about, and follow the people posting interesting things about them

Whatever you do, do SOMETHING. There have been people who join Bluesky and simply wait for something to happen. Because of the lack of algorithm, nothing does happen without proactivity, so they say ‘Bluesky is dead’ and then leave. This is a real shame! Cos it’s great.

5) Be proactive. Like, reply, and engage.

All those cliches about how you get out what you put in really apply here. You have to go beyond broadcasting and truly engage: reply to other people’s posts, join in conversations, cultivate discussion. I follow an author and illustrator called Debbie Ridpath Ohi on Bluesky, and she wrote a great post of tips for those new to Bluesky, which I’d recommend you read here. In it she posted this cartoon which sums up the whole thing perfectly. Be the two on the right!

Thank you to Debbie for giving me permission to reproduce this here. Click the pic to go to the blogpost it appears in

6) make the most of the moderation tools.

Good moderation and the ability to control who you interact with has been baked into Bluesky from the start, and it makes such a difference. Unlike on Twiter (even good old days Twitter) when you block someone they are gone completely - if they leave a comment on your post and you block them, you won’t see the comment and no one else will see the comment either. And it’s not just that you can’t see the posts of the person you blocked; they can’t see yours either, or even replies to them. And if someone Quote posts you and you don’t like it, you can detach your post from theirs so they’re no longer associated. Same with Replies. Not only that, you can subscribe to blocklists (e.g. this one) which really do starve problematic groups of the oxygen they need. It’s basically the opposite of Twitter, where, famously, hope goes to die.

7) make your own alt-text mandatory.

We all know it’s essential to add alt-text to images but sometimes you can be too quick to post and forget. Access Bluesky’s Settings, find the Accessibility section, and toggle the switch marked 'Require alt-text before posting’ and you can create accessible content every time. You can also add alt-text (and indeed captions) to videos - finally a social network which offers this! Here’s a great resource on how to write alt-text descriptions, if you want to brush up.

8) A mix of professional and personal is good.

This is by far the most subjective of these tips, so feel free to ignore it completely. But for me I think this kind of social media works well when you use it for professional purposes, but with a little personal thrown in too. If it’s all work, people don’t get to see who you are so you may not build relationships. If it’s all personal, you miss out on that fabulous opportunity for peer-support and ideas and discourse beyond the walls of your office. So, if you feel comfortable doing so, post some stuff about your hobbies as well as your job!

9) give it time.

You will not get instant results on Bluesky, but it’s worth the wait. It really feels a lot like Twitter before it went bad. Don’t give up too early; it takes to rebuild a community and spending two desultory months here and then two more distracted months on Mastodon and then giving Threads a half-hearted go is really the long way round…

10) enjoy it while it lasts!

I don’t want to end on a negative but listen: enshittification comes for us all. To quote Wikipedia:

Enshittification (alternately, crapification and platform decay) is a pattern in which online products and services decline in quality. Initially, vendors create high-quality offerings to attract users, then they degrade those offerings to better serve business customers, and finally degrade their services to users and business customers to maximize profits for shareholders.

Right now Bluesky is in the ‘creating high-quality offerings to attract users’ stage, and they genuinely seem to care about things like moderation and protecting us all, and it’s a great place to be a part of. The more popular it becomes, the more expensive it will be to run, and we may start to move down the curve marked ‘enshitify’ - so let’s make the most of this phase. We’ve probably got a good few years, and the community is worth your time. Let’s do this.

---

Notes:

• as always I’ve love this post to become more useful by other people contributing ideas. If you have more Bluesky tips, leave them in a comment!

• this is about using Bluesky as an individual - I’ve since written a few other guides for different audiences. Here’s the Researcher’s Guide to Bluesky on my library’s blog, here’s Getting Started On Academic Bluesky for the LSE Impact Blog, and here’s the Library Guide To Bluesky (aimed at institutions) on this site

• the particular blue sky at the top of this blogpost was captured by me in the Pentland Hills near Penicuik, a town in Scotland, where the landscape is beautiful and the sheep look quite angelic when backlit

It's time: how to get your organisation off Twitter / X

In previous posts on becoming ex-X I’ve stopped short of saying *everyone should* leave the hellscape formerly known as Twitter. Mainly because people have built up networks which may not be re-creatable elsewhere, and they were there before Musk came along, so why SHOULD they have to move? But recent events have made me question this, especially when it comes to libraries, museums, archives and Higher Education.

I saw this post from Kevin Gannon on BlueSky which sums it up about right:

I have been leery about unilateral declarations on what people should or shouldn't do about Twitter, bc I know there are networks that have been built there which are irreplaceable. But at this point, I just don't see any way one can ethically use that site. www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/poli...

[image or embed]

— Kevin Gannon (@thetattooedprof.bsky.social) Aug 7, 2024 at 15:15

Musk is actively encouraging division, and helping to incite riots. He’s spreading far-right conspiracy theories. He’s talking about civil-war in the UK. There is simply no other circumstances in which our organisations would be complicit in using, and therefore encouraging use of, a platform whose owner not only espouses such dangerous views but uses the platform itself to amplify them. Our presence on X is an implicit endorsement. We shouldn’t be there.

So how do you get off Twitter? For what it’s worth here’s what I’ve done with my library.

1: Set a date, and tell people

As tempting as it is to leave now, we need to give our users time to hear that we’re leaving, digest this, and make alternative plans to get news from us. In January this year I decided @UoYLibrary would leave Twitter by the end of August, so we had a clean break for the new academic year.

The long lead-in time has been helpful. I wrote a briefing paper for senior leadership in February explaining why we were doing this, and shared it with the comms group, which led to some really good suggestions as to how to mitigate the impact, more on which below. We also announced our intention to leave Twitter on Twitter itself in July, so our audience there had time to get used to the idea and follow us on alternative platforms. It says it in our bio as well as our pinned tweet.

We’ve since reposted about this news, and have now done a nice little ‘favourite twitter moments’ round-up thread of some semi-viral tweets and nice interactions we’ve had over the years. These were nice to revisit in and of themselves - we’ve loved being there for 99% of the time - and will also serve to get the word out to more Twitter users before we go.

2. Consider creative ways to mitigate the impact on your Twitter audience

What do we lose by leaving Twitter? You can think about it in terms of both content (we tweet about this, and that) and audiences (those people will be fine because they follow us on Insta, these people won’t because they don’t see messages elsewhere).

Content-wise, we’ve had some lovely creative times with Twitter over the years, but as it’s become more broken and less functional we’re really reduced use of it to basic status updates - building A is closing early today, resource B is now available, service C launches today etc. So we’ve built a library status page (which we’re encouraging people to bookmark) that tells them this info without needing Twitter.

@uoylibrary So is #SatisfyingLibraryUpdates going to catch on? Well here’s one: with info on student curators, 24/7, a new exhbition and our sensory rooms which are opening soon. #unifyork #library #sensoryrooms #libinspo #librariesoftiktok #studytips #UoYTips #satisfying ♬ original sound - Uni of York library

We use Instagram Stories (see the pinned examples on our profile here) to say the sort of things we’d previously have put in Tweets, and occasionally use TikTok for general updates too, so of course we’re encouraging our Twitter audience to follow us there if they use those platforms.

[Sidenote: I’ve invented - actually I’m sure I didn’t really invent it and lots of people to do this - a way to get news updates via the video medium called ‘satisfying updates’ where I use the duet function on TikTok to give the students something satisfying to look at whilst sticking around long enough to hear key updates from me…]

Then we come to audience - in very simple terms almost all of our undergraduates are on Insta and TikTok between them so we know they’re well covered. PGTs are increasingly on Instagram too, and more and more Researchers are heading there. Academics are, for us, the problem audience that we can’t reach easily without Twitter - they’re not all going to the same place when they leave Twitter, and while BlueSky shows promise it isn’t there yet in terms of a critical mass of York academics using it. So we’ve spoken to the central University comms team and asked if they’d be willing to tweet perhaps three or four really important things about the library each year (things like 24/7 opening for exams) which they’re happy to do, and we’ll make sure our more internal marketing routes, such as the ones offered by the Faculty Librarian Team I co-manage, step up too.

Obviously your audiences may be completely different to ours if you’re not an academic library - so use all the data you have to try and work out which demographic is most reliant on Twitter for info about your org, and see if there’s any other way to reach them. Don’t rule out non-social media options too - one of the things we’re going to do is put more posters up in the colleges where all the PGRs are!

3. Make sure you turn off Grok data sharing

Twitter recently activated an on-by-default, unannounced, data-sharing setting where everything you’ve ever tweeted can be used to ‘train’ Grok, Twitter’s stupid LLM AI bot thing. You don’t want that. No one wants that. Get it in the bin.

If anyone's wondering how things are going on the hellsite: This setting was just turned on by default for everyone. if you still have an account with content, go log in and disable this so Grok can't use your tweets as training data. Direct link: twitter.com/settings/gro...

[image or embed]

— Corey (@coreyjrowe.bsky.social) Jul 26, 2024 at 03:17

Here’s the direct link to the Settings to turn data sharing off - it works on desktop but not, I hear, on mobiles.

4. keep the account

I’ve wrestled with this a bit - any social media account that is out there in the world is, in effect, a front window for your organisation. So keeping an account alive even when it’s not active is problematic - people may still send DMs which will go unanswered; people could find old tweets and reply to them and we wouldn’t see it, etc. However, I don’t want to lose the account name and let someone else take it and potentially impersonate the library, and there is of course a tiny, tiny possibility that Twitter may one day be habitable again, so I’ve decided it’s better to keep the account.

A final decision I need to make on this whether to lock it when we leave. At the moment I’m leaning towards locking, to reduce the chances of new people seeing the account, missing all the ways we’ll try and flag that it’s not active, and then trying to get help or guidance we can’t give by asking questions on the platform. Which brings us to…

5. Make it really, really obvious the account is no longer active

Subtlety is not your friend here. I’ve seen professional accounts who’ve left without changing their bio - we really need to make it unquestionably obvious we’ve left.

Here’s what I did with my own account when I left Twitter:

So that checklist of ways I’ve tried to flag I’m not there, in full:

• Says it in my name

• Says it in my bio

• Says it in the banner pic

• Says it in the pinned tweet

I must confess I don’t know if this has worked or not, because I’ve not logged back in since I left. I tried recently, to disable to the Grok AI LLM thing mentioned above, but it requires 2FA I can’t get without logging in, so I’m stuck… I don’t know, therefore, if there are loads of DMs or people @ing me and thinking I’m rude for not replying - I hope there aren’t, and I’ve done everything I can to avoid that. I’ll be doing the same with @UoYLibrary in a couple of weeks.

finally: How much do we explain why we’re leaving?

A decision I’ve not yet made is, do we write a library news post where we fully go into the details of why we’re leaving? I’d be genuinely interested to know what people think about this, if you fancy leaving a comment below.

Obviously the pro is, we’re a library, we’re taking an ethical stance, and we want our users to know about it. We want them to get the reasons why. I was speaking to a librarian at another organsiation whilst doing some social media training recently, and she said as a parent she’d be really proud of her kid’s University doing this.

The con is, quite honestly, opening up the possibility of a prolonged debate with some Musk fans, and using up comms bandwidth we REALLY need for other things on the sort of conversations where everyone gets angry but no one changes their mind. (Classic Twitter-these-days conversations, in fact.) It’s also hard to talk about why you’re leaving without sound judgemental towards the people choosing to stay, and we have no wish to be judgemental. So as of right now, I don’t know if there’ll be a big rationale-reveal type post, or we’ll just leave it at ‘Twitter is no longer working for us’.

---

Since we announced we’re leaving Twitter we’ve not had any negative feedback about it. We left Facebook a couple of years back - with not a single complaint from anyone - and it is genuinely freeing to be on one less platform. As pretentious it sounds, social media benefits from your creative energy needing to be split fewer ways, in my experience. I was confident becoming ex-X was the right thing to do for our library when I first decided it at the start of year, and I’m still confident now - what’s more we’ve done some really useful things to lessen the negative impact on our users.

I’d recommend taking the steps above, and doing the same. If anyone is interested in the rationale briefing paper I wrote for our Leadership Team send me an email and I’ll share it with you; here’s how it ends.

By stopping our use of X from September, we will be upholding our values, adapting to the changing landscape of social media by jettisoning a platform no longer delivering value, and freeing up capacity to work on more impactful communications. 

Nomadic Librarian Social Media in the post-Twitter age

Do you remember that feeling when Twitter first started working for you, and you were suddenly tapped into this seemingly infinite network of other people in your profession, who shared experiences and ideas and perspectives and guidance? What an amazing time that was; I absolutely loved it.

I got into librarianship in 2006, but it only really came alive for me in around 2010 when I got online. In 2011 I joined Twitter (thanks as ever to Bethan Ruddock and Laura Woods for persuading me that my doubts about it were misplaced!) and really everything changed. It led to all sorts of opportunities, but the thing I appreciate most about the platform is the sheer number of voices it has allowed me to hear - I got so many useful insights I wasn’t getting within the walls of my own institution. My eyes were opened, my knowledge was expanded, my politics moved even further to the left and I changed. Twitter changed me, for the better.

Twitter is now untenable

However, since Twitter became X it has become untenable and it is only the sheer power of the relationships I built over 12 years that has kept me there this long. There is no other brand or organisation run by a white supremacist that I would consider giving my time to; it feels deeply uneasy to be part of something so incredibly toxic, because you feel complicit.

I’m not deleting my account (yet) mainly because I don’t want anyone else using the alias, but I am officially leaving the site from Christmas - no longer logging in or posting. I wouldn’t presume to tell anyone else what to do but if you’re still there, I’d recommend at least considering getting out too.

Need some reasons to leave Twitter?

1. Hate speech, harassment, extremist content and misinformation have all spiked since Musk took over

2. Musk himself has said some abject things, including describing antisemitic conspiracy theories as ‘the absolute truth’, and threatened violence against his enemies

3. Musk has reinstated previously-banned white nationalists and whole host of incredibly toxic accounts which he’s now actively promoting, whilst deleting accounts of journalists he doesn’t like and reducing traffic to news sites

4. Honestly there’s just an endless list of things. Even just researching enough to list points 1-3 above is so bleak, I don’t want to do any more; every day there’s something else awful he’s done, just google his name and you’ll see the latest

So what happens next for libraries and librarians? Originally this one post about both those categories, but it got ridiculously long so I’ve moved the bits about libraries into a separate Part 2. Let’s focus first of all on us, the people working in the cultural orgs, which is the slightly less complicated side of the coin in some ways.

Social media for librarians, information professionals, and others who work in cultural organisations

So here’s a massive disclaimer about this section: it is VERY subjective. (The bit about libraries and social media in part 2 is far more objective.) It’s based on my experiences and my preferences. Your mileage may vary.

I have now been actively looking for and posting on Twitter alternatives for over a year, and this is what I’ve concluded. (tl;dr Bluesky is the closest equivalent to early Twitter, and I whole wholeheartedly recommend getting yourself an invite code if you can.)

Threads just isn’t quite happening for librarians

I wanted Threads to work, so I joined early and optimistically. I followed lots of library friends, plus a few larger accounts, newspapers and the like. And what I’ve found is, my feed is 90% posts from the Guardian etc and hardly any from the library people. (There is apparently loads of book-chat on Threads, but not so much library chat.)

Part of the reason for this is that Threads is unavailable in the EU. So the entirety of European librarianship, pretty much, is absent from the discussion. I love European librarians and want them in my network! [EDIT: since I wrote this post, Threads as become available in the EU! This may change everything and make Threads a viable network for librarians over time, we’ll have to wait and see.]

Threads famously became the fastest growing new social network ever: while Facebook and Twitter both took over 2 years to reach 10 million users, Threads took just 7 hours. There are now 137 million people with accounts - but that doesn’t matter. What mattes is active users. There are around 10 million active Threads users, who only spend 3 minutes a day on the app. (Obviously, 10 million is a large number - but compared with 200 million active Twitter users, or 2.35 billion active Instagram users, clearly there is simply less conversation to be had there.)

So my Threads account lies dormant, with a post basically saying: I’m putting my eggs in the Bluesky basket.

Instagram is essential for libraries but potentially less so for librarians

I enjoy Instagram but I am there as a drummer, not as a library professional. I do follow some librarians on there and enjoy their posts, but they tend to be about their lives rather than their work.

My experience has been that Instagram’s primary focus on video, then on image, and then on words, means it’s not as suited for a professional network in our particular profession (and a lot of info pros aren’t there on principle because it’s a Meta product) - but actually this is probably too limited thinking on my part. Naomi Smith is making the @blackandgoldeducation critical librarianship account work on Instagram, and points out:

There are many people, organisations who are interested / amazed by ideas of #critlib and share similar values especially younger audiences which is the main instagram demographic

LinkedIn is actually pretty good after all!

I have been so sneery about LinkedIn over the years, put off by some performative posting I saw in the early days, and the (rightly earned) reputation the platform has for being a home to the ‘I get up at 4am and have already done 3 workouts and boosted productivity in my companies by 6% by the time you have breakfast!! hashtag #stayhumble’ brigade. HOWEVER I was basically wrong, because like almost all communities, the thing it’s most famous for is not what it’s actually like for most people there.

Connect with the right people (oh hi!) and LinkedIn is a friendly, supportive place where you get useful updates about what is going on in the industry. It’s also a good place to share ideas, with decent numbers of people reading posts on there, and people actually leave comments and ask questions - posting on LinkedIn feels like blogging felt about 10 years ago!

The only downside is it’s almost all professional, and I love a little bit of personal mixed in - I want to know about who we all are as people, as well as what we achieve in our jobs. But basically if, like me, you’ve written LinkedIn off in the past, give it another go because you can be part of the good bit of it…

Mastodon is good, but it’s not quite the Twitter replacement I craved.

When I joined Mastodon I initially really enjoyed it, but several small things have meant that optimism was short lived. It doesn’t look great or feel that good to use - it’s a little clunky - and there’s well documented issues with finding people across the federated servers. There are also lots of examples of being people scolded for doing the wrong thing on Mastodon, though I’ve not experienced this myself.

More than that though, the biggest issue for me is I just find myself scrolling for a long time on the platform before I find content I’m interested in. The conversation just doesn’t quite seem to match up to what I need from a professional / social network mix - and that’s very much a personal thing so you might find the chat absolutely hits the sweet spot for you.

I had an interesting chat with a BlueSky user called Mx Vero who said Mastodon DID work better for them than Bluesky - in particular the code4lib.social server, which leads me to speculate that the info pros at the more technical end of librarianship are more likely to find Mastodon useful, because the are less likely to be put off by the technical hurdles to getting set up on the platform in the first place. So there’s a greater amount of conversation to be had in that area of libraryworld, on Mastodon.

Someone on Bluesky asked ‘why didn’t Mastodon work for ya’ll?’ and one of the answers was this:

“It felt a little like eating something because it was good for you but not something you enjoy”

This sums it up well: Mastodon has a great community but the vibe - I’m bringing out all the scientific terms now - is just slightly off, for me personally. Which brings us to…

Bluesky. I’m all in: Bluesky is the one.

I am only two months in to being part of this platform, but I really, really like it. It feels VERY twitter circa 2015 - not least in visual style as it is made by the same people who made Twitter in the first place, but just in terms of the way it feels and the conversations we’re having there.

The hit-rate of stuff I’m interested in versus total posts to scroll through is much higher than anything since several-years-ago-twitter, and there’s a real sense of a community sharing updates and ideas. It seems to have a good mix of serious and fun.

You need an invite code to join (which is part of the reason it’s not overrun by far-right people) - just ask on your other networks and chances are someone will message you with one. We all get one a week to give out to people. When you get there, say hi!

Click the image to view my profile (if you're already on Bluesky!)

I asked others why it worked for them: Alice Cann said:

“I found library and related people here on BlueSky immediately and there are a core amount of people posting quite often”

Selena Killick said:

“Ease of use and the fact that Librarian twitter seems to have moved here has helped”

…and several others chimed in with similar views. Arianne H. said:

“Once I figured out how they work, I have found the feeds to be a really useful way to keep up with library related conversations, especially Skybrarians. I like that feeds are created by users.”

Feeds are, I think, like Twitter lists but intended as a much more public-facing thing rather than a personal one. Here’s the skybrarian feed link for those already on the platform - thanks to Andromeda Yelton for setting it up!

manu schwendener said:

“Best feature for me: that their roadmap and issues are public”

…and also has some useful guidance on first Bluesky steps, including using Follower Bridge to reconnect with your Twitter contacts. It’s a pretty manual process that will take a while if you follow a lot of people, and it’s a bit hit and miss (if you follow someone called ‘Dave’ on Twitter it’ll find someone at random called Dave on Bluesky and be like, hey I think we got him!) but a good jumping off point. As always though, a reliable way to jump start your community building is this:

1) Set up your profile - bio, pic, a first post - BEFORE you start following people, so when they get the notification of the new follow and potentially click on your profile, there’s something for them to see

2) Find a librarian you like, click on the list of people THEY follow, and canabalise it

On top of all that, the way the community is building organically is really nice. Threads felt like a mad rush, with everyone joining and then almost immediately leaving (albeit not deleting their accounts because you can’t without also deleting Insta), while Mastodon felt like a party that had already been going for a while before you got there, and has certain rules and norms you’re not fully up to speed with. Bluesky just builds slowly, and because you get an invite code per week to give out, people are gradually bringing others into the fold and more and more people we all want to see there are arriving.

Here’s the real test of which social network you most identify with - which profile do you put in your speaker bio and on your first and last slides..? I’ve changed mine to Bluesky. I’m all in!

What is the longer-term prognosis for librarian social media?

The answer to this questions is of course that I don’t know, but there’s a couple of things worth bearing in mind. One is that even if, say, something else comes along in two years that we all end up switching to, two years is a long time! Two years of being a networked librarian able to tap into support and ideas beyond your institution, even if imperfectly, is so much better than nothing. But the other thing is, I don’t think we’ll ever get another Twitter. Not in terms of the sheer focus of dialogue in one place - the world and the online landscape is too fragmented now, so we’ll split off into smaller communities.

I’d love to be wrong about this of course. But if we do end up with lots of options, the important thing is not to let that put us off. Pick one, try it, and see if it’s for you. If it’s not, move on. If it is, go all in. Because we’re all better off for having a way to benefit from our professional community online - I hope you find yours!

---

Read the Library-focused follow up to this post here: Where should libraries go now Twitter has become a Wasteland