Let's build a tool to help large organisations coordinate their Bluesky footprint, helping them get the most out of the platform.
This is one of the topics I want to discuss at the Ahoy conference in late April, 2025. All ideas are available on my Hub, tagged #ahoy2025. If you're interested, comment below, sharing your comment to Bluesky in the process.
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. In fact, the emergence of the ATmosphere is reminding me 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, publications and events, so they looked at the Web through a print publishing paradigm.
And today, when they look at Bluesky, most see Twitter without the Nazis, and don't see the ATmosphere at all (despite my efforts).
How can we help?
Consider the plight of the social media managers (SMMs) of any large organisation. An unknown number of their colleagues, spread across multiple departments, have X accounts, but the SMMs don't care: they control the "official" accounts of the institution itself (plus probably some celebrity bosses), and so are their organisation's official voice on X.
But if they apply that paradigm to Bluesky, they'll miss out on everything that Bluesky offers that X doesn't: Starters Pack, custom feeds, and even labellers.
To make the most of these features, however, they'll have to do something they gave up trying to do on X years ago: herding cats. If they don't, each colleague on Bluesky will create Their Own Personal Ultimate Starter List, and the same 300 accounts will be repackaged into 600 different custom feeds. Users will be lost in the noise, and that's good for noone.
The SMM needs a tool to at least coordinate, if not outright manage, their organisation's presence on Bluesky. This tool should:
- track all official starter packs, lists, custom feeds and labellers: who manages each? which person and which feed is in which pack? how is each feed built?
- allow authenticated users to suggest accounts for various starter packs, lists, custom feeds and labellers, and at least forward those requests to the appropriate manager
- and much more.
At Ahoy and beyond
If there's interest in this idea, let's discuss it in Hamburg. I'd suggest a few goals:
- scope out the features: I have a few slides to kickstart this discussion, but what I need is an idea of how much work it would be
- discuss a plan for creating it: should this be an online business, an OS github repository, both, or something else? Do we need funding, and if so from where?
- start assembling a team
- outline next steps.
Depending on how it goes, I'll then write up the discussion in the form of specs and/or business plan, and follow up with all interested.
More reading
Other things I'd like to talk about at Ahoy:
- European research funding opportunities
- How putting myhub.ai on the ATmosphere will help decentralised collective intelligence
- Everything about Ahoy on my Hub.
