Building Urbanism+ on BlueSky

An email interview with @fema.monster about cultivating communities

Online urbanist conversations often focus on policy. But how are the digital spaces where they happen actually built and nurtured, particularly on emerging platforms like BlueSky? Creating a cohesive community requires deliberate effort beyond debates – connecting individuals, fostering productive dialogue, and navigating unique online dynamics.

This interview goes behind the scenes with @fema.monster, creator of Urbanism+, a key custom feed for urbanists on BlueSky. We explore the practical strategies and philosophy behind cultivating this community from the ground up, delving into:

• Genesis & Strategy: Why BlueSky was chosen, and the hands-on tools (like Skyfeed, regex) and specific tactics used to bootstrap the community and connect early members.

• Evolving Vision: The plan to move beyond simple connection, leveraging BlueSky's potential to foster deeper, localized, and more challenging urbanist discourse.

• Community Health & Impact: Approaches to moderation, critical reflections on the need for greater diversity within the movement, and the potential for real-world effects.

Join us to understand the motivations, methods, and challenges involved in shaping a focused online community dedicated to better cities in the dynamic environment of a new social platform.

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1) What specifically motivated you to start Urbanism+ on BlueSky? Was there a particular gap you saw in urbanist discourse on other platforms like Threads or Mastodon? Was there something unique about BlueSky that appealed to you for this purpose? Can you describe the initial steps you took to curate the community and content?

I can’t say if there was a gap in urbanist discourse on other platforms–I don’t use them. I had wanted to talk about urbanism online but Twitter was a dumpster fire and I didn’t want any part of that. I’m a certified Mastodon hater and Threads didn’t exist, so the at-the-time invite-only Bluesky seemed to be the most promising option.

I started Urbanism+ because nobody was talking about it when I first joined. I would repost content and try to find other like-minded individuals to follow, but it was tough finding connections. Custom feeds were instrumental in connecting folks together in the early days of the platform. Today with recommended follows, starterpacks, and more, custom feeds like Urbanism+ are less vital to connecting a community and I think that’s a good thing. The community shouldn’t be too reliant on any single platform. And that’s what I’ll say I like about Bluesky, or rather the ATprotocol, is the openness. We have a lot more power here to shape our experience in this digital space.

This openness is what allowed me to create Urbanism+. I don’t come from a coding background, so I used Skyfeed, a feed creation service. I did need to learn more advanced regex (regular expression) to get the most out of this tool and then it was only a matter of rigorous testing of urbanist terminology and tweaking things to prevent as many false positives. I spent a lot of time tuning things to ensure the feed picks up the correct posts.

From there, I created an alternate account, the Urbanism+ Feed Assistant. I would use this account to like nearly every post that came across the feed. This was a particularly useful advertising tactic and it brought a lot of curious folks to the feed via a convenient link in the profile bio. I still do this sometimes on occasion.

2) How do you perceive the urbanist community and discussions on BlueSky to be different from those on established platforms like Twitter/X, Reddit, or dedicated urban planning forums (besides being, you know, more polite)? Are there unique dynamics, types of interactions, or content formats that thrive particularly well on BlueSky?

I do rarely browse urbanist content on Reddit, but otherwise I have no idea what the climate is on those other platforms. I hear from others that Bluesky is becoming the premier hangout for urbanists and I’m happy to have played some role in that, but if I’m being honest, the discourse on Bluesky could be better. There’s plenty of entertaining content and I love that, but I would like the discourse to become more challenging. This is one area that I’m investigating how I can help make that happen. Even if I’m unsuccessful, I think we have tools to make this a reality and that’s what makes Bluesky powerful.

3) Could you elaborate on the specific tools, strategies, or criteria you use to discover relevant urbanism content and identify influential voices within the BlueSky ecosystem? How do you decide what to amplify or feature through Urbanism+, and what impact do you think this curation has?

For now the feed is still largely based on matching terms. Nearly every term was evaluated in a test feed to determine:

1. Match frequency

2. Match quality

3. Percent of false positives

Terms which produce too many false positives were reworked or abandoned if they were too unreliable. A good example is “third place” which expectedly did not produce many urbanism results, however, “a third place” is almost exclusively urbanism related.

When bigger influential voices joined the platform, like the War on Cars (a personal favorite) who were here pretty early on, I would manually add them to the feed and bypass the terms altogether so that all their posts made the feed. Influential urbanists that post more varied content were put on a different list that allowed more of their posts to make the feed with a less strict term matching. The feed has continued to move away from this approach as the feed is full of content daily and I want everyone to have an equal access and opportunity to the feed. That’s why the main version of the feed is sorted chronologically. Big and small accounts can have their voices heard. I don’t see much of a point to the feed if it’s largely serving up content from larger accounts which already have an audience.

In terms of what I decide to amplify, I suppose I just touched on that, I want to provide a platform for anyone to get exposure. The content itself is really up to everyone else. Of course, the terms the feed uses does play a role here but I don’t really include/exclude anything based on any personal agenda. In fact, I have been very vocal that I’m happy to add any terms or hashtags that may have been missed. There is a group of us in discord that I frequently run ideas by too and I defer to their judgements all the time. I don’t really want this to be something where I have the only say.

But I do take a hard line on moderation. This is a welcoming place. I think the rules in the discord sum things up:

• Be respectful

• No hate speech or discrimination

• Stay on topic (mostly)

• No excessive self-promotion

• Follow Bluesky's Community Guidelines

The feed uses many block lists that support these rules and also includes MAGA & right wing extremists block lists. I don’t see any value in pretending these hateful people have valid perspectives. This is not the feed for these people.

Most users are not using custom feeds, which is disappointing since I think that’s Bluesky’s killer app, but I understand why: most custom feeds are honestly not that good. And I want to say that, as much work as I’ve put into Urbanism+, I still feel like it’s in beta. This is in part because bluesky hasn’t provided the APIs needed to take custom feeds to the next level, but also the tools that we use to create custom feeds are still very new. Urbanism+ has been able to grow and expand after the feed was migrated to graze.social and new features are rolling out all the time. I expect a lot more feedmakers will take advantage of these new features and as the baseline quality of custom feeds rise we will really start to see the impact of curation. I have a lot of future plans that I believe will take the feed to new heights.

4) Given that custom feeds are now less vital for simple connection, how do you see Urbanism+ contributing to community building on BlueSky by fostering more challenging discourse? What specific types of challenging discussions or deeper dives into urbanist topics do you feel are currently missing and could be fostered more effectively through Urbanism+?

My hope is that Urbanism+ can optionally tap into location to elevate local voices in a users area with the hope that these users become mutuals, which is another area I hope to tap into. I like the idea of a static version of the feed that remains the same for all users and a dynamic version which factors in location, mutuals, and more. Modern algorithms factor in a lot of this stuff and more, but none of them give users the power to choose these levers and Urbanism+ would.

I think the biggest conversation that is rarely explored is just how homogeneous the urbanism movement is and why that is. I think for any movement to be successful there needs to be diversity and that's lacking here. I think most urbanists, myself included, are well-meaning, but it's a privileged movement and it can show.

I use urbanism as an umbrella term (that's really where the plus in urbanism+ comes from, to highlight the broad scope of the feed), but certain movements like the safe street movement enjoy a lot more diversity and I have a lot of faith in the work that they're doing.

I think we can do better here and we need to talk about it more. I don't want great cities only wealthy white folks can afford to live in. I don't want beautiful infrastructure that doesn't fully understand the needs of people with disabilities.

5) You noted that you're waiting for specific APIs from BlueSky to take custom feeds "to the next level." What are some examples of the functionalities or data access you hope these future APIs will provide that would significantly enhance the Urbanism+ feed?

I'm going to answer your API question now. Bluesky needs to give users an options menu for custom feeds with parameters set by feedmakers. Location and mutuals could be opted into to tailor the Urbanism+ experience. Additionally, these options could be weighted, with some users preferring their version of Urbanism+ to serve up a higher percentage of local voices. What sets this approach apart from other social media is the users are deciding what they see, not the algorithm.

Another API we need is something to replace the sticky post menus. Filtering and sorting should be done in app, without the need for several feed variants (chronological, trending, pics, with replies, video, etc).

Without the proper APIs, the way you would go about this would be to just make more feed variants–one with location, one with mutuals, one with both, and that has several disadvantages and technical headaches.

All of this is to say, by better connecting folks locally, more challenging and productive conversations can happen among those who want to make their communities better. Non-locally though by better connecting us with our urbanist mutuals, the goal is for these online relationships to be strong enough to handle the challenging conversations. I don't know how much I can, or even want to, direct what topics get discussed, but I want to create a platform that enables healthy discourse.

6) Since you don't actively use urbanism communities on other platforms like Twitter/X or dedicated forums, what makes you feel confident that BlueSky is becoming the "premier hangout" for urbanists? Is this based on direct feedback, the types of users you see joining, or other indicators?

Most of the big urbanist creators, with the notable exception of notjustbikes, are using bluesky as their primary platform, though from what I hear mastodon is pretty active as well. Users have also expressed that Bluesky is the place for urbanists and I'm inclined to agree. I think all movements should shift to platforms that have more tools for control.

7) Considering the goals of connecting local voices and fostering discussion online, what unique value or additional tangible impact do you envision the BlueSky urbanist community bringing to real-world urban environments and policy, specifically because it operates and connects in an (relatively new) online space, complementing existing offline efforts?

I think we need to be realistic about the limitations of online activism. Even under ideal conditions, the value any platform provides to the real world will always simply be a small support role. I can’t say how all of this will translate to the real world, but I do hope that the feed keeps people connected in ways the other social media has failed.

8) You've mentioned wanting more challenging discourse. To help the urbanist community on BlueSky deepen its collective understanding and increase its real-world relevance, what specific topics or types of critical self-reflection do you think are most needed right now? As the urbanist community on BlueSky potentially grows into that 'premier hangout' you mentioned, what identity or reputation do you hope it cultivates? And looking ahead, what do you see as its single biggest opportunity—or its most significant challenge—in shaping the future of online urbanist discourse?

It’s really the lack of diversity that concerns me the most because I think that impacts so much, big and small. Housing is probably the biggest specific topic. Gentrification concerns are not as valued in many urbanist circles. That’s a red flag for me. I am admittedly not a housing expert and I have a lot to learn here, but if history has taught me anything…

The Bluesky community as a whole has really put in the work to try to shape the platform from the very beginning. Early on I learned that Alt-Text is good and I’ve now been using it for the last two years without thinking about it. It’s just natural. Plenty of third party alt-text tools exist as well. Megathreads attempting to onboard new users with these best practices are common too. There’s a real effort to lead by example and I think there’s been real success here.

But as the platform continues to grow, we’ll continue to see these efforts lose their effectiveness. Smaller communities (feeds) and custom moderation labeling services are invaluable tools that allow us to shape this identity. My primary goal is to connect the right people together and provide a safe and healthy platform. The actual content is largely up to everyone else.

The biggest challenge is time. If only I had more of it. Donations help greatly as well as volunteering. And feedback. I want as much feedback as possible.

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