Join us on Bluesky
As more and more people leave Twitter, a University of York community is growing on the Bluesky platform.
Bluesky is a relatively new social network that is very Twitter-like in look and feel, but does not suffer from the toxicity associated with the platform now known as X. As the mass X-odus continues more and more of the community in Higher Education appear to have chosen Bluesky (perhaps more so than Threads and Mastodon) as their preferred replacement, and the Library (having left Twitter a while back) have created a @UoYLibrary profile there.
We'd recommend staff and students at York have a look at the platform, to see whether it would be right for you. Posting as the library we've found the atmosphere exponentially more positive than on X, and engagement much higher - in fact it took us 9 days to reach the same number of followers we had 9 years into our time on Twitter...
We are trying to make it as easy as possible for people to switch in several ways. First of all we have created a University of York Starter Pack: this is an ever-expanding list of University-of-York-related accounts: both individual staff and academics. If you're looking at this on a desktop or laptop, scan the QR code below to straight there (mobile users can follow the link above):
We've also created the Researcher's Guide to Bluesky. We don't want to brag but it's safe to say people have found this really useful (it's been reposted over 500 times in 2 weeks) and the vast majority of the advice would be applicable to anyone, whether you're an academic or otherwise. Although close to Twitter's functionality in some ways, Bluesky differs in others and this will really help you hit the ground running.
There's a shorter version of the guide on the LSE Impact Blog, also.
Our content on Bluesky is primarily aimed at researchers and academics - the reason for this is that our Instagram and TikTok channels allow us to reach students effectively, but often there is far fewer lecturers and researchers on those channels. That said, we think anyone at York who is on Bluesky will get useful info from following the library, so: join us!