Greensky
A custom climate-focused feed for Bluesky
(bluesky is a rapidly growing social media site similar to Twitter)
It delivers chronological posts from users on an opt-in list, filtered for keywords. If you are active in the climate space on Bluesky, please join!
I made Greensky initially as a wayfinding tool for ex-Climate-Twitter folks. Now I hope it functions as a lively, diverse and intense firehose of the work of the finest academics, activists, communicators and fighters on the platform.
Key links
External
Google Sheet with full list of accounts + keyword filter
Statistics for the Greensky Feed
On this page
What is Greensky?
Bluesky is one of the first social media sites that lets you create, share and subscribe to algorithms. On sites like X, Facebook or Instagram, your main feed delivers posts based on a secret and ever-changing formula. Bluesky lets you choose your feed, and if you make one, you can openly share the algorithm underpinning how posts appear, and let other people remix and replicate it too.
I started Greensky in early 2023, shortly after joining Bluesky (when the site only had a few thousand users). It started out as a public Google Sheets file of Bluesky accounts focused on climate or energy, to help other joiners locate friends from Climate Twitter.
Since then, I’ve turned that list of accounts into the Greensky feed, added keyword filtering, created a submission form. I used “Skyfeed” to create and publish the feed, and it’s shared under a EUPL-1.2 public licence, meaning you are free to remix and recreate the feed however you like, with attribution.
You can read an interview I did with the very nice people at MotherJones, here, about Greensky, and the project of public feeds more generally.
Greensky works by returning the posts from everyone on the manually-curated list, and then filtering them through a list of keywords. You can also find feeds that return all posts from the unfiltered list, or feeds that use a second layer of filtering that returns posts based on popularity.
Remixes + other feeds
Greensky unabated – just every post from everyone on the list, without any keyword filtering. Very noisy and intense (some of us like it that way)
Greensky Climate Posts – by the lovely David Sacerdote, a remixed version of Greensky that returns posts based on popularity, in addition to the keyword filter
Climate Science, Impacts and Solutions – curated by climate scientist Katharine Hayhoe and managed by Grey Cat, this is a huge list of climate physical, life and social scientists – highly recommended!
Climate Change Sciences – by Vladimir Kesma, a feed that compiles posts about climate from a wide list of more than 13,000 scientists, science communicators and journalists (this is a version that includes sorting by popularity)
EnergySky – a feed that shows posts tagged with a specific emoji set / hashtag relating to energy, by Patricia Levi
What’s Ecology – focused on ecology and conservation, by Ethan Freedman
GoodFeeds – a tool for searching for feeds
Rules and moderation
Joining Greensky
Please follow the instructions carefully when submitting your name and handle!
Each month, I go through new submissions and manually check for these things:
- Does the account feature at least one of the key topics in either bio or recent posts
- Has the account been active (at least one post a week) since joining Bluesky
- Does the account look genuine and not spammy (no ‘follow back’ accounts, excessive hashtags or follower farming), or suspicious (chatbot-style auto-responses etc)
If it’s yes to all three, I approve the request. If it’s ‘no’ for any one of these items, I reject the application. If you aren’t sure why your posts aren’t showing up and you do meet the criteria, please email me or ping me on Bluesky.
Ban triggers
These are the simple rules I set last year for the content feeding into Greensky (aka, your posts):
- No mis- or disinformation of any kind
- No abuse, bigotry, discrimination etc. Transphobes of all flavours get insta-blocked.
- Obviously climate deniers, delayers, fossil fuel advocates etc won’t make it here.
If I’ve blocked you on Bluesky, or you’ve blocked me, I can’t add you to the list (Bluesky won’t let me). Bluesky blocks are public: you can check here to see mine.
Key topics
- Climate change
- Ecology
- Activism
- Environmental / Climate justice
- Climate tech, energy tech
- Climate politics and policy analysis
- Environmentalism
- Climate social science / humanities
Shoutouts
Farhana Sultana helped quite a lot, by promoting this list and finding climate folks
Vladimir Neskovic Kesma gave me lots of help with the keywords filtering – thank you mate!
Cheers to David Sacerdote for his Greensky remixes
Patricia Levi suggested the name (Thank you Patricia!)
Ketan Joshi 