Nothing but Blue Skies Do I See (Thinking about Social Media)

To achieve this benefit, SWOG has focused a good deal of its social media energy over the years in building community on the Twitter/X platform. But other “microblogging” platforms have emerged recently, which have grown their own communities and that bring their own attractions. 

These include Mastodon, Threads, and Bluesky. In recent months, a sizable group of emigres from #MedTwitter (including many in oncology and hematology) have been trying out this last alternative as a venue for professional interaction and for engaging with the public, advocates, and patients. 

As evidence of how broadly popular Bluesky has become across all the sciences, a January poll of Nature readers found that about 70 percent of the roughly 6,000 readers who responded said they use this emerging platform.

SWOG, while by no means abandoning the Twitter/X community, has also recently established a presence on Bluesky.

Like the other platforms listed above, Bluesky allows brief posts (in this case up to 300 characters), and it supports many of the same features, including the use of #hashtags, the posting of short videos, and the ability to direct-message other users. 

One of its key attractions is that it offers users relatively more control over the content and people they interact with. Unlike a growing number of other social media platforms, BlueSky does have a team of content moderators, but it also has a content moderation system with numerous controls users themselves can set to make their feeds more productive and … inoffensive.  

The platform’s #MedSky and #OncSky communities are expanding, and the number of professional societies represented is also growing and now includes ASCO and ASH, for example. In fact, several oncologists among the “Featured Voices” group ASCO has assembled to provide social media coverage of the 2025 Genitourinary Cancers Symposium – now underway in San Francisco – are posting to Bluesky.

Numerous journals and cancer advocacy organizations also now have a Bluesky presence (including Lungevity and Friends of Cancer Research), as do a growing number of our member institutions (such as the Fred Hutch, Yale, Huntsman Cancer Institute, and others). And Altmetric, a service used by a number of peer-reviewed cancer journals to help track the reach of our published papers, recently added Bluesky to its list of tracked social media.

A key factor in convincing SWOG to expand to Bluesky was the movement of a number of our patient advocates to the platform. In November, we became the first NCTN group on the platform, although our colleagues at ECOG-ACRIN have since set up an outpost.

Have I piqued your social media interest in Bluesky?

If so, creating your own account on the platform is pretty straightforward. You can download the app on your phone, or you can jump in to bsky.app via a web browser. Consult the user FAQ for guidance.

The platform uses a somewhat longer naming convention for accounts, with most handles in the form @supportingswog.bsky.social (this is The Hope Foundation’s handle).

But organizations can also mark an account as legitimately theirs by using their web domain as their BlueSky handle (after completing an authentication process, of course). Hence, SWOG is on the platform at @swog.org.

“Starter packs” can help you get your bearings and find your community as a new user. They are curated lists of users and feeds in a specific area of interest, and they’re a great way to quickly follow and get connected to the users you’re most likely to be interested in.

Pop open a starter pack to see a list of accounts that regularly post on the given topic. You can then click the “Follow all” button at the top of that list, or you can scroll through the profiles and select those you’d like to follow.

For SWOG members interested in exploring the platform, we’ve assembled a SWOG starter pack of some key clinical and translational cancer researchers, advocates, institutions, organizations, and others worth following on Bluesky (it’s the list we follow).

Here are a few others we can recommend for specific areas of interest (we’re not endorsing all of the accounts listed in these packs, but these can help you find valuable content):

• oncology advocates & allies starter pack (still missing a few of our Bluesky advocates)
• GU oncology starter pack
• #BCSM of MedSky starter pack
• the OncoAlert faculty starter pack

 Visit the Bluesky starter pack directory to find others of interest to you.

The Bluesky experience today is reminiscent of the early #MedTwitter years – there’s a certain excitement, a sense of community, sometimes even a hint of fun (remember when social media was fun?). Kind of like being back under a clear blue sky.