Guide | How museums can thrive with a little Bluesky thinking

Bluesky, a new social media platform that’s growing by millions of users per day, presents remarkable opportunities for museums to engage digital audiences.

The Museum of English Rural Life (MERL), a small university museum, enjoyed huge success on Twitter (@TheMERL) now known as X.

Tweets bridged the gap between our heritage collections and pop culture, opening surprising doors to the countryside’s history through storytelling, trends, and humour. At our highest, we had over 155,000 followers and reached tens of millions of users per month.

In October of this year, we posted on Bluesky for the very first time. The results were astonishing. Within 30 days, we had 30,000 followers (a fifth of our total Twitter/X audience from 11 years), generating tens of thousands of likes and reposts while becoming the most-followed museum on the platform."

Below, discover what Bluesky is, learn how it’s similar and how it’s different to X (and why), and read our top recommendations for getting started and thriving on the platform. 

What is Bluesky?

On the surface, Bluesky works, feels, and looks like X. That’s because Bluesky began its life as a Twitter side-project (back when X was still known as Twitter).

Posting on Bluesky is much the same as X (although posts are "skeets" instead of "tweets"), and so is the interface for viewing and sharing content: a newsfeed timeline that will be instantly recognisable to any former X user.

Under the hood, Bluesky’s main difference to X is its decentralised approach to social media. In layman’s terms, Bluesky gives users more control, ownership and flexibility over their data and their experiences than they had on X.

For example, while Bluesky has a centralised moderation team that handles trust and safety, users can also add custom levels of moderation to safeguard their experience. Bluesky’s documentation gives the example of a user-made "spider shield" service, which anyone could use to hide posts or images containing spiders.

Our Bluesky experience

If you heard of The MERL through Twitter, you may well have encountered us next to a photograph of a very impressive sheep ("look at this absolute unit"). Since 2018, the tweet has been shared tens of thousands of times, catapulting our university museum to internet fame.

I decided to make our Bluesky debut by restaging the absolute unit (word for word) alongside an announcement of our arrival. The response was rapturous. Within hours, the post had been reposted over 1,000 times, gaining us 8,000 followers, with hundreds of messages of excited welcomes.

That elation has remained core to our Bluesky experience.

The atmosphere is one of hope and positivity, as so many users – and museums – rediscover why we all loved social media in the first place: as an invaluable technology for sharing our work and stories with the general public and other museums and museum professionals.

So, how do you make the most of Bluesky and capitalise on the unique features that make it stand out among its social media peers?

Tip one: Starter Packs

Bluesky provides a feature for getting started that I think every other social media platform will wish they thought of: Starter Packs.

These are curatable lists of accounts that anyone can make and share, and you can follow all the accounts listed in a Starter Pack in a single click. You can even sign up to Bluesky through a Starter Pack, making you feel extra at home upon arrival.

At The MERL, we created and shared a Bluesky Starter Pack for arts and culture, containing Bluesky-using museums, galleries and libraries from around the world.

The pack has been shared thousands of times and features many organisations that you’ll recognise – from the Getty to the Ashmolean – as well as local archives and smaller galleries.

The Museums Association also created a great Bluesky Starter Pack for UK-specific museums.

Tip two: links are free!

In recent years, social media platforms have grown hostile to hyperlinks – for example, when you tweet a link to an event on your website. That’s because these platforms are driven by advertising revenue and it’s not in their financial interest for you to click off to another site. So, they downrank and "deboost" posts with links, which is a pain for users trying to share and promote web content.

In contrast, Bluesky does not deboost posts with links. Instead, Bluesky has actively encouraged people to post the content that suits their needs, not stifling users’ creativity for Bluesky’s benefit. As Jay Graber, Bluesky’s CEO, says: "We love links because we love the open web."

This is a massive boon for online creators. Be sure to make the most of this in the content you create by adding relevant calls-to-action containing website links, without having to worry that your posts won’t be visible.

Tip three: control your scroll with custom feeds

In recent years, the Twitter then X news feed became controlled by an algorithm, filling up with posts from people you don’t follow (and perhaps never even engaged with).

Bluesky is a refreshing return to normality, with a home feed that only shows accounts you follow.

But you can also be more selective in what you see. You can use custom feeds like the "pinned" feed to save posts for later by replying to them with a pin emoji.

You can create lists and turn them into custom newsfeeds using tools like Skyfeed, or access a Tweetdeck-style interface for managing your inbox with deck.blue (which is particularly useful once you start to grow).

Tip four: remember to use alt text

Alt text is a way of describing images on the internet that makes those images accessible to people who are blind or partially blind, and may be using the internet with assistive technologies like screen readers, which can’t interpret images. It’s recommended to always use alt text whenever you’re sharing an image.

You can also select a setting to require you to use alt text whenever you post an image, which is a great way of making sure you never forget to make your content accessible. To set this feature up, go to settings, then accessibility, and then check "require alt text before posting".

Tip five: don’t just join, join in!

One of the unique advantages of social media is that it’s a tool for broadcasting information and for having dialogue with audiences. This can lead to surprising engagements with people you might never have expected to hear from – whether interested members of the public or other museums, archives and collections.

As Bluesky continues to grow, the atmosphere remains extremely positive and collegiate. If you join, be sure to announce your arrival and use Starter Packs to find other organisations to connect with. There you’ll find an active heritage community, ready to welcome you and hear the stories you have to share.

Joe Vaughan is the marketing manager for the University of Reading’s Museums and Special Collections, including the Museum of English Rural Life