Center For Practice Management, Marketing, Social Media

What Lawyers Need to Know About the Bluesky Social Media Platform

Butterflies against a blue sky with flowersThere is a lot of buzz about Bluesky (pronounced blue sky). The new social media darling, which started in 2019, grew to 2 million users in 2022 and now has surpassed 22 million users. It is still by no means one of the larger social media sites, however lawyers do need to understand what it is, a little about how it works, and how they might be able to use it.

What Is It?

Bluesky is a social media platform that functions a lot like X (f/k/a Twitter). It was backed by former Twitter CEO and co-founder Jack Dorsey in 2019, though he left the board in 2024. It is now run and predominantly owned by chief executive Jay Graber as a US public benefit corporation. Until early 2024 it was invitation only. While very similar to X, one distinction is that it is a “decentralized” social media platform, which means users can create their own servers on which to store data.

Users of many social media platforms are shown posts from a feed selected for them by an algorithm, though you can influence that by following or blocking certain accounts. But Bluesky wants to give you a chance to pick from a variety of different algorithms to determine what you see.

A couple of features, like being able to hide replies to your posts and detach your posts from other users’ posts that quote yours, are designed to help you maintain control over a thread you started to decrease toxic behavior.

Bluesky is free to users, which begs the question how will it survive? Paid services, such as custom domains, are on the roadmap. The Bluesky Privacy Policy describes is a microblogging app and service that runs on the Authenticated Transfer Protocol. To create an account, you will need to provide an email and date of birth, which may be shared with third parties. However, this information is not currently being shared with advertisers, rather they suggest that your personal information may be disclosed “in connection with corporate transactions, such as a merger”.  They currently do not train generative AI on user data.

Bluesky has grown very quickly and has a Trust & Safety team working to ban evasion, removing fake accounts, reducing scams and spam, and allows user reports for inappropriate behavior. However, as the platform grows (from 13 million in October to nearly 24 million in early December), so do issues with impersonation, third party scraping of user content, and other issues.

Why Should I Get on It?

For lawyers, Bluesky represents an opportunity for lawyers on the platform to stand out in the fledgling space before it becomes overcrowded. You can establish your firm’s brand early, getting the best handle without cluttering your usernames with numbers and underscores, and stand out while shaping the platform’s culture. You can connect with clients, potential clients and colleagues on a less noisy and cluttered platform, where the algorithm doesn’t promote paid ads so your content is more readily seen.

One unique advantage of Bluesky is the ability to create branded handles. “For example, a newsroom like NPR could set their handle to be @npr.org,” the Bluesky Social company blog notes. “Then, any journalists that NPR wants to verify could use subdomains to set their handles to be @name.npr.org. Brand accounts could set their handle to be their domain as well.” To set up a custom domain as your Bluesky handle you will need to add a TXT record in your domain’s DNS settings along with a verification code provided by Bluesky. Domain host GoDaddy explains that using your domain name on Bluesky also has the advantage of portability, moving to a new federated server without a duplicate username affecting your account. This blog post from GoDaddy explains step by step setting up a custom domain on Bluesky.

How Do I Get Started?

Users create a handle, like @catherinesreach.bsky.social (or create a custom domain), and add a profile that includes an avatar (your picture or an image), a header image and a brief description. In the description you can add links to your website by pressing Shift+Enter to put your cursor on a new line and then type your website URL e.g., www.mylawfirm.com. You can post links, images, videos, gifs and up to 300 characters of text.

If you are currently or formerly on X (Twitter), Bluesky will be an intuitive experience. For those new to microblogging platforms Buffer, the social media management application, has step by step instructions to get you started. For those who want to just focus on what is different in Bluesky, Buffer also has an article outlining Bluesky’s features so far and how to use them.

“Imagine you want your timeline to only be posts from people with mutual interests, or only posts that have cat photos, or only posts related to sports — you can simply pick your feed of choice from an open marketplace,” a blog post on the site says. A longer post goes into more detail about custom feeds and algorithmic choice. Click the hashtag icon on the bottom of the app or #Feeds on the browser interface to add and discover new feeds.

Developers can use the site’s feed generator starter kit to create a custom feed, and the site promises that eventually, the tools will be easy enough that the rest of us can build custom feeds.

An easy way to get started following handles with mutual interests is to follow a Starter Pack. Starter packs are custom feeds that compile users who typically post about a particular topic. If you click on a starter pack, you can choose to “Follow All”. You can see who is included in the starter pack under the “People” tab, or see the posts for those people under the “Posts” tab. You can always unfollow or mute any person. Many times, those who you are following will follow you back. This is a very easy way to get curated lists of great follows. For lawyers here are a few starter packs:

If you want to create your own starter pack here are the instructions from Bluesky.

Conclusion

There is a lot of buzz about Bluesky. You may miss the old Twitter and find this to be a great community, or you may just want to reserve your handle in case you decide to take part later. You may not feel like the effort is worth the return, and that may be the case. However, Bluesky is currently refreshingly free of ads and algorithms so you can curate a following and see what your follows are talking about distraction free.