Freedom of the Press Foundation (FPF) on Dec. 12 launched a “starter pack” for press freedom organizations active on the social media platform Bluesky. We did so to curate a unified feed dedicated to press freedom, facilitate mutual following among community members, and contribute to the health of the conversation on the nascent platform.
What is Bluesky and why do we like it?
FPF joined the microblogging social media platform in July 2023, just a few months after Bluesky launched as an invite-only service in February 2023. The site opened registrations publicly in February 2024 and has seen exponential growth since the U.S. presidential election in November. Its user base is now inching toward 25 million, with daily active users increasing rapidly.
Bluesky was established in 2019 as a research effort within the company formerly known as Twitter to explore open communication protocols, and developed what later became known as the Authenticated Transfer Protocol as a result, which was released publicly in 2022.
In 2021, Seattle-based Bluesky became an independent company primarily owned by its chief executive, Jay Graber. Despite its ownership model, the key difference between current mainstream social media platforms — like Meta, X, and TikTok — is that Bluesky is based on an open communication protocol for distributed, or decentralized, social networks. The goal is, essentially, to shield the platform from being owned and controlled by just one person or group (like an enthusiastic, Trump-supporting, free speech-hypocrite billionaire), a concept that we hugely admire here at FPF.
What else are we doing?
Since the site allows independent developers to build apps and extensions on top of Bluesky's network, we will be exploring and experimenting with various ideas, including creating a custom press freedom feed. Feeds allow the site’s users to search for and save a stream of posts around a specific subject to their account without having to follow individual accounts. We hope to share more in 2025 about our work on this.
What can you do?
In the meantime, if you are on Bluesky or plan on creating an account, follow us and our press freedom reporting project and database, the U.S. Press Freedom Tracker. You can also follow the accounts on our press freedom starter pack, plus FPF’s staff, board members, and projects on this separate starter pack.
And if you are a press freedom organization on Bluesky, verify your domain, if you own one, for a couple of reasons. First, doing so confirms your identity on the platform, and second, it makes it easier for other members of our community, journalists, and the public at large to find you there. We did our best to locate press freedom organizations and add them to the starter pack, but if you are active on the platform and not in our press freedom pack, send us a message or contact us here and we will add you.
We are not leaving X anytime soon, because we think it’s still important to reach users there, but we’re excited to deepen our presence on Bluesky. We hope others will join us there in facilitating the conversation around press freedom and other issues critical to our democracy.
