A Guide to Bluesky for the AMIA Community

Welcome to Bluesky! This guide is designed to help you get started on the platform, connect with colleagues, and build our community in a new and exciting space for scientific discourse.

Why Bluesky for Informatics?

AMIA is encouraging members to connect on Bluesky because it has quickly become a significant hub for the scientific community. This trend is supported by a Nature article, an academic paper on the subject, and the fact that Altmetric now tracks Bluesky posts related to academic papers.

We encourage all AMIA members who want to be active on social media to convene here and help build a strong informatics community.

Getting Started

Sign Up & Get Started

Create your account. Then follow AMIA and the "AMIA starter pack," a curated list of informatics-related accounts, so your timeline has relevant content from the very beginning.

Customize Your Handle

You can use a website you own as your handle. For example, you can purchase any domain name (for example a .phd, .md, .social, or .me extension) and use that instead of the default .bsky.social handle.

Note: Using a personalized domain handle is not required for any Bluesky function.

How Bluesky is Different from Other Platforms

Bluesky began as an internal Twitter project in 2019. Its goal was to create an open, decentralized protocol for social media. It became an independent company in 2021.

The biggest difference from other platforms is control.

• Think of a platform like X as an automatic car. You get in, and the "For You" algorithm does the driving, shifting gears for you behind the scenes. It’s simple, but you have little say in how the car performs.
• Bluesky is like a manual car. You start with your basic "drive" gear (a timeline of people you follow), but you also have a gearshift: Feeds. You can shift into a "Medsky" feed to follow conversations across a wide range of medical topics, downshift into a “Biomedical Informatics" feed for more topic focused content, or cruise with the "For You" feed to find topics of interest or new accounts to follow. You are in direct control of the content you see.

Feeds are timelines curated by different users or organizations. You can subscribe to as many as you like to customize what you see. This control allows you to cut through the noise of a general timeline and create focused spaces for specific topics, like medical AI (#MedAI), bioinformatics , or conference discussions. Anyone can create and launch a feed using open source tools or by hosting one from their own server.

Recommended Feeds for Informaticians

Add Your MedSky Label

To identify yourself as a healthcare professional, you can add a MedSky label to your account.

1. Go to the Medsky Network & Labeler profile and subscribe.
2. Once subscribed, find the post with the labels that best describe your role.
3. "Like" that post to add the labels to your account. You can select up to four.

Important Things to Know