Trapped in Broken Systems

Healthcare workers are no strangers to working within broken systems. We see it every day when we work through buggy EMRs or attempt to communicate across hospital networks. It's a fragmented, flawed system that can feel crushing for the people trapped within it.

In many ways, social media users have been trapped within that same system.

Social media used to lock you into a single app. You didn’t have much say in what content or advertisements you saw, and the algorithm was usually something outside your control. Meanwhile, people behind the scenes had an immense amount of control when it came to shaping content seen by millions of people, which we already know can have very serious implications regarding the spread of misinformation and impacting the views held by people in our community. 

That's why when I first received an invitation to try Bluesky in April 2023, I saw the promise this new protocol held.

As a healthcare worker, I've seen firsthand how important access to reliable information and a community-centered social network can be for ensuring the health of our patients and community. Communities like #MedTwitter became the central hub for conversations around healthcare policy, practice of medicine, and as a way for healthcare workers to connect during the tumultuous years of the COVID pandemic and afterward. When I first arrived on Bluesky, I saw an opportunity to avoid making a carbon copy of #MedTwitter. We had –and continue to have– an opportunity to build something more centered in care and community. And that experiment is still unfolding today.

Welcome to Medsky

Since Fall of 2024, Medsky has been an evolving system for healthcare workers within Bluesky and the Atmosphere (the open protocol that Bluesky is built on). We started with a feed built by the community member @rabbitholer.bsky.social, and since that time a number of additional resources have been built.

• Medsky Moderation Labeler – A labeler that lets healthcare workers on the Atmosphere add medical specialties to their accounts, as well as report medical misinformation
• Medsky Specialty Feeds – Over 70+ feeds that healthcare workers can "pin" to their profiles so they can see content tailored to their medical specialty
• Medsky Topics – Feeds designed for specific topical content, like the recent Ebola outbreak, or updates on the Affordable Care Act, and even international health news such as the UK's NHS.

All of these projects were efforts to create community, share valuable health information, and carefully moderate medical misinformation and other harmful content.

We're now taking the next step to build a better social media platform for healthcare workers.

Medsky 2.0

Thanks to Acorn, a new innovative tool built by the team behind Blacksky, a community-centered on Black identities and mutual aid, communities across the Atmosphere now have the ability to craft spaces designed to specifically serve their needs. There seemed no better fit for this model than Medsky. Through Acorn's tools, we now offer accounts on Bluesky the ability to access a medical specific platform through medsky.social, and the ability to migrate their account using move.medsky.network to a Medsky-specific Personal Data Server (PDS). And what's unique about this feature is that even with using a Medsky PDS you can still log in to the Bluesky app. Your experience remains the same, but you get to decide who is the person hosting your personal data.

And this is only the beginning for the many new features available to healthcare workers on the Atmosphere. Here's just a small sample of what's on our developer's roadmap:

• A Medsky-Specific Explore Tab on medsky.social
• A new personalized healthcare feed that identifies your account's medical labels to show you content from your medical specialty
• Providing more feed content outside of the healthcare field, that includes content from other STEM specialties, built from the @stemlabels.xyz labeling system.

There's still more updates to come as we explore this new chapter of the Medsky community, but we're excited to share this experience with all of you.

In the future, you can expect to see more long-form updates on Medsky's future through this new blog.

Share Your Feedback

As always, please don't hesitate to reach out with questions or concerns through DMs or by emailing us at support@medsky.network.

And are you insterested in joining the Medsky Team? Consider joining our Discord to get more involved in the conversations helping to shape the Medsky Experience.