The legaltech Twitterati is ditching Elon Musk’s X in favour of social media platform Bluesky, which now has over 22 million followers, up from 13 million in October.
Put off by the restrictions and rules and adverts on X that weren’t there in the good old days, plus a new Terms of Service document, which took effect on November 15 and enables X to use your data to train its AI, commentators have been left with trusty old LinkedIn to chat to one another. Document automation expert and BamLegal founder Catherine Bamford, whose handle is @bamlegal.bskyb.social, summed it up perfectly on 27 November with the comment: “I’ve missed being able to write my thoughts in few than 3 sentences and being “allowed” to have more than one thought a day.
The CMO of She Breaks the Law, marketing specialist Helen Burness, announced her move to Bluesky on LinkedIn on 28 November, following it up with a post that conveys the sense of joy of many: “Frosty morning grass makes me unspeakably happy. I am so happy to have a place I can share absolutely inane thoughts again.”
Jason Plant, lead enterprise architect at DLA Piper, describes himself on Bluesky as ‘An X evacuee since Aug 2023,’ while iManage’s senior director of global search and AI product lead Alex Smith, who has six thousand followers on X, says on Bluesky ‘Used to have Twitter game.’
In terms of practical tips, users can create starter packs – personalised invites to help your community find one another. You get started in the Starter Packs tab on your Bluesky profile.
Clicking “make one for me” generates a pre-populated starter pack of suggested users and custom feeds or “create” enables you to add users and feeds to your starter pack yourself. Every starter pack comes with a link and QR code that you can share with your network.
See you there. Bring photos of your dog and your breakfast, maybe your grass too, to intersperse between any intellectual observations. Be warned though, Mashable reported this week that Bluesky is already facing its first major AI scrape, despite the stance of its owners that it will never train generative AI on user data. Bluesky also faced controversy when its founder, Twitter co-founder and former CEO Jack Dorsey, quit the platform earlier this year. It has subsequently been written that Dorsey intended Bluesky to be an open source protocol that Twitter could use, but believes that Bluesky is making the same mistakes Twitter made. For now, it’s the place to be.