How newsrooms, scientific institutions & governments can best use Bluesky

Large organisations need dedicated tools and processes to manage their Bluesky presence and get the most out of ATproto.

This is version 4 - more version control info in the footer.

v1 of this post was a proposal for a workshop at the Ahoy conference (the 2nd ATproto conference) in late April, 2025. The workshop was accepted and went well, so I developed the ideas, created a startup with Bart-Jan and presented the concepts at EuroskyLive in November 2025 (see Politics meets protocols in Berlin) :

ATProto Communities for Newsrooms, Scientific Institutions and Governments (see also: AI-generated Berlin 2025 transcript)

This version of this post therefore explains what I explained in Berlin, just without the animated slides. But firstly...

Why am I focusing on this?

As set out in Bluesky Adoption Challenge, one way to encourage the transition from X to Bluesky is to help large organisations efficiently organise and manage their Bluesky presence. The better they use Bluesky, the quicker they can accelerate their eXit Strategy.

I've been helping large organisations innovate online for 30 years: the emergence of the ATmosphere actually reminds me quite strongly of the mid-90s, when I tried to explain to the EU Institutions how important the Web would be.

Back then, communicators in these Institutions were focused on press and publications, so they looked at the Web through the paradigms of media gatekeepers and print. Today, when they look at Bluesky, they see it through a "Twitter but fewer people and Nazis" paradigm. They fail to see what sets it apart, and don't see the ATmosphere at all (despite my efforts).

But even if they could see Bluesky's unique features, the tools aren't available to help make the most of them. And that means investing in the ATmosphere is probably not, in their view, the best use of their limited resources.

Helping them move to Bluesky, in other words, means both making the benefits clearer and reducing the costs of reaching those benefits.

The rest of this post is covered in the above video.

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Starting point: wrong paradigm

Consider the plight of a social media manager (SMM) of any large organisation.

An unknown number of their colleagues, spread across multiple departments, have X accounts, each interacting with their network "on a personal basis only". While their collective network is actually incredibly valuable to the organisation, the SMM can barely tap a fraction of that value.

The SMM's focus is the "official" accounts of the institution itself, and probably some of their celebrity bosses'. It is through these "Crown Jewels" accounts that they manage their organisation's official voice on X - the only way they can tap their colleagues' networks is to ask them to like or repost the Crown Jewels' posts.

! Fig 1: Typical large organisation's X presence: a social media manager broadcasts from the org's "Crown Jewels" account(s), and gets almost no value from their colleagues' networks.

Moreover, they can only treat X as a broadcast medium. While lots of people follow the Crown Jewels accounts because they're the organisation's official voice, the SMM can only publish the official news - they can never reply, or like or reTweet anything remotely interesting, because they're under a constant barrage of bad faith and trolls.

And not only are they limited to broadcasting, they also cannot broadcast links, because including a link to actually useful or persuasive information is a great way of ensuring noone sees it.

So they're reduced to broadcasting memes - as if that convinced anyone of anything on X - focus on sterile, simplistic metrics that don't actually measure value, and try to ignore the bots and trolls.

When that's your social media paradigm, moving to Bluesky makes little sense: after all, Bluesky has a fraction of X's population, and the organisation's Bluesky network is a tiny fraction of that, why bother?

I guess when you've been immersed in X since forever, it can be hard to see that X is not the only way social media can work. Perhaps therefore it's not surprising that few if any SMMs see that Bluesky offers something different. But it does.

Science and Media already love Bluesky

It's not a coincidence that my Berlin talk focused on newsrooms, scientific institutions and governments - not only are these the sectors I know, but two of them have already discovered that they can get more value out of their Bluesky network than they can from their larger follower networks on X - see all the stuff on my Hub tagged media & bluesky, and tagged science & bluesky.

both sectors are full of terminally online people who've been trained to not publish content they can't back up with evidence

I find it really interesting that media and science are at the forefront of getting good value out of Bluesky. After all, both sectors are full of terminally online people who've been trained to not publish content they can't back up with evidence - journalists have the Journalistic Method, which has been a key support to liberal democracy for decades, while the Scientific Method basically created the modern world.

Advanced tactics

But these sectors' promising results are just the beginning. Any large organisation can combine key Bluesky features to create productive online communities on Bluesky, and then deeply integrate them into in their ATmosphere-enabled websites.

This section assumes you know the following features:

• custom feeds: anyone can use a variety of competing tools to create a custom feed, which shows all Bluesky posts filtered and shorted by the creator's criteria. And they can share these custom feeds with friends, who can "pin" it to their app for easy access (see everything tagged bluesky custom feeds .
• Starter Packs: "These package a list of up to 150 people, a feed of their posts plus (optionally) custom feeds relevant to the Pack's topic." - Three things you probably didn't know about Bluesky

Structuring your Bluesky presence

The building blocks of a good Bluesky presence for large organisations are to have, for each "thematic area" the organisation is active in, a Starter Pack highlighting the most relevant custom feeds.

!

Fig 2: This SMM manages two Starter Packs, each including selected colleagues, some of whom are labelled as official spokespersons. Each Pack has a few custom feeds (2 shown), each sourcing content from selected colleagues and trusted external accounts , according to a variety of algorithms and moderation processes. Not shown but also possible: additional custom feeds existing outside of starter packs.

"Where our experts hang out with experts they trust"

It's difficult to overstate how valuable these custom feeds could be for many organisations.

While the organisation's official Bluesky accounts set out the organisation's "official line", each custom feed provides a space where the organisation's experts (journalists, scientists, civil servants) in a particular theme hang out with external experts they trust.

where the organisation's experts in a particular theme hang out with external experts they trust

These conversation spaces are troll-free, and so hosts an extremely high-value, noise-free conversation. And because the feed is public, the organisation is sharing that conversation with everyone, and is being transparent about Who it's talking to about What.

Moreover:

• inclusion in a custom feed is a consecration of an external account's expertise, so they are unlikely to break the feed's rules and lose their place
• these feeds can grow: trusted experts already in the feed can suggest people they trust (in most feeds, simply by quoteposting someone's post and including the required hashtag - see below).

Build your audience, build your reach

The more trusted experts in the feed the more valuable it becomes, so more people interested in the feed's topic will pin it.

Pinning a feed is the Bluesky equivalent of bookmarking a website, and ensures the user will come back to it frequently. So the more people pin it, the more they'll see the content in it. Including yours.

you don't need to go viral to reach your audience

In Bluesky, in other words, you don't need to go viral to reach your audience - you just need to create a useful, troll-free custom feed, and they'll come to you.

Enlarge your networks, insource knowledge

Apart from ensuring reach to the audience you want to reach, finally, these feeds enlarge your networks.

As the people you trust suggest people they trust, you encounter organisations and people and knowledge you would not have otherwise met, bringing new knowledge into your organisation in a true multi-directional conversation, in stark contrast to X's broadcast-only mode.

Did I mention they're easy?

A final bonus - they're easy to make.

There are plenty of complex algorithms you can build with powerful tools like graze.social, but for the above purposes a simple "list + hashtag" feed is sufficient:

• create your list of trusted experts (internal and external)
• set the feed to include their posts if they include a specific hashtag
• pin a post to the top of the feed providing guidelines
• let the experts know they're in the list, what the hashtag is, and tell them to follow the guidelines if they want to stay there.

So they're easy to set up. The challenge is to maintain them as people in your organisation change. More on meeting that challenge later.

Integration with online communities

Since Ahoy, however, I realised that Bluesky custom feeds are just the start - integrating them with your website-based online communities makes them even more powerful.

Seamless social media integration

I saw my first hint of this in 2024, when I logged into Whitewind (the first ATproto-based blogging app), using my "Bluesky account", published a post, and saw Jerry Michalski share it on Bluesky:

! Fig 3a: Jerry's Bluesky post about my Whitewind blog post appears as a comment on my Whitewind blog post.

And then, when I commented on my Whitewind blog, a little checkbox appeared. I clicked it, and hit Publish:

! Fig 3b: Bluesky users can one-click share their blog comment to their Bluesky followers.

This is seamless integration between different forms of social media. This particular example shows close integration between micro- and longform-blogging, but the principle holds for any ATproto-compatible website, including website-based online communities.

Magnify your online community with custom feeds

This matters because it means social media can support, not undermine, online communities, which have been struggling since the conversation moved to Meta and X around 15 years ago.

The problem is that Meta and X don't share. But protocol-based social media simply can't not share - everything is public.

protocol-based social media simply can't not share - everything is public

Which means that you can build a website-based online community for any number of purposes, using any number of content forms, and use Bluesky custom feeds to magnify its impact.

The next two slides are really best explained from 11m41s - 14m12s in the video, but here goes:

! Fig 4: Bluesky custom feeds can act like a lens, magnifying the impact of an online community and make it more valuable to join.

! Fig 5: Online community members can one-click their content to their Bluesky networks. These posts also appear in the community's custom feed, and so reach wider audiences.

The custom feed therefore drives community discovery and membership, not least because community membership also brings inclusion in the custom feed. The two systems therefore reinforce each other.

The catch

There's always a catch.

While an advanced Bluesky presence can bring a lot of value, the costs can also rise without the use of smart tools, as building these communities will require a lot of internal coordination.

Without that coordination, each colleague on Bluesky will create My Own Personal Ultimate Starter Pack and several custom feeds, resulting in the same 300 accounts repackaged 6000 different ways:

! Fig 6: Each colleague promotes his/her own Starter Pack and custom feeds. It's fun, but the noise risks drowning out community.

Organisational challenges

You can argue that the above chaos is good - it's creative, flexible, and even competitive (although less popular feeds stay in place, rather than being retired). But:

• a lot of these feeds may be launched and then abandoned, but not taken offline
• users could easily get lost in the noise, undermining the development of productive communities
• and the social media managers will feel out of control, and so could simply put a stop to everything.

But managing a well-coordinated Bluesky presence comes with its own challenges:

• positioned at the centre of the organisation's comms team, the SMM does not have the subject matter expertise to manage a custom feed, as only a specialist can judge whether an external account should be added to it.
• While the SMM needs to build a network of experts to manage these feeds, many of the above benefits - useful conversations, valuable new contacts and knowledge - will accrue to those experts, rather than the SMM, reducing the SMM's motivation
• Moreover, custom feeds are built using a variety of 3rd party feed generators, which in turn use a combination of tags, lists, labels and algorithms (and probably verifications), and may be moderated (pre- and/or post-publication). That's a lot for a network of specialists to master.
• Finally, the organisation will need workflows where people are removed from packs, lists, feeds, labellers etc., when they leabe the organisation, and added at the request or command of other people.

How's an organisation to cope?

Minimal Bluesky presence management

At the very minimum, they will need tools to support a variety of tasks:

! Fig 7. Key elements of the minimum required tool for Bluesky presence management

A minimal Bluesky presence management system will need to:

• track all official starter packs, lists, custom feeds and labellers:
  • which person and which feed is in which pack?
  • who manages each pack, and each feed?
  • how is each feed built: what lists, tags, labels etc are used? And who manages those? Is there pre- or post-publication moderation, and who does that? etc.
• allow authenticated users to request/suggest/upvote account inclusion and exclusion for each starter pack, list, custom feed and labeller, with requests forwarded to the appropriate managers according to organisationally-defined workflows
  • (what "authenticated" means will depend on the organisation)
• guide those requests to the right people
• provide organisation-grade analytics.

Such a system could be built in a few days using standard internal comms & collaboration software, but all it will do is make the necessary message-passing more efficient. It won't ensure that accounts are actually added or removed; it won't ensure new hires are automatically added to the right Packs, Lists and Feeds; nor will it ensure others are removed when they leave your employ.

ATConnect: lower the coordination cost

Since the Ahoy conference I've been developing solutions for this problem with Bart Jan Schuman (@schuman.de), who's spent 30 years working on enterprise infrastructure for the financial sector.

It was BJ who realised that the best way of reducing the coordination cost of a powerful Bluesky presence was some software linking the organisation's HR software with both its IT infrastructure and with Bluesky and the wider ATmosphere.

! Fig 8. ATconnect links your HR data with your IT system and your Bluesky presence.

When someone joins your organisation, you already give them an email address. With ATconnect:

• you set up an EO-OK PDS either on your own infrastructure, or on hosted providers
• if a new hire doesn't have a Bluesky account but want one*, they can then get a digital ID and a PDS right from your HR software, along with their email address
  • (*) And they will want one when they realise that their new employer will massively boost their personal profile via the strategies set out here, and that'll be able to take their social graph and content with them when they leave
• their position in the organisation defines which Packs, Lists and Feeds they are added to automatically - it's driven by your HR system
• and when they leave your organisation, they're removed automatically, for the same reason
• create and manage simple custom feeds, and assign individual feed management to subject matter experts throughout your organisation
• access 3rd party feed generators and analytics providers.

ATConnect, in other words, will make it much less expensive for organisations to reap the huge benefits from developing a well-structured presence on Bluesky. That will encourage them to transition themselves and their followers away from X, which is something they probably want to do but currently cannot — see X Strategy or eXit Strategy? A cost-benefit analysis framework.

Extending the model further

Finally, the next stage in these organisation's presence on Bluesky may be more collaborative:

! Fig 9. Multiple organisations collaborate to create a shared custom feed and - perhaps - even a shared community site

The above figure shows several partners convening a shared custom feed together. They could be:

• several universities' physics departments - after all, many Unis across Europe have been collaborating via the EU's research programmes for decades.
• different newsrooms in the 12-country EurActiv network, bringing together journalists and the sources they trust in a series of thematic custom feeds (EurActiv's founder, Christophe Leclerq, for whom I've worked twice, followed me onto the stage in Berlin)
• governmental departments and agencies from multiple countries, discussing common policy priorities.

Or many other types of organisation from civil society, business or industry. Whatever they are, this is what the European online public sphere looks like - people and organizations across Europe collaborating on high quality conversations about the issues they care about.

people and organizations across Europe collaborating on a high quality conversation about the issues they care about.

This is not an optional extra for Europe - like every democracy, the EU needs a demos. And as I concluded in Berlin, this is not something we can build on infrastructure owned and abused by the workd's richest nazi, or any infrastructure in the crosshairs of the current US administration.

Fortunately, with the ATProtocol, we can just build it.

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Revision Notes

This is one of this wiki's pages managed with the permanent versions pattern described in  Two wiki authors and a blogger walk into a bar…

• changes in this version:
  • rewrote to include the EuroskyLive presentation and surrounding context
• version control
  • this is version: 4
  • this is the current version: how could a large organisation best use bluesky
  • here is the previous version: how could a large organisation best use bluesky 3