Meet the Mayor of GreenSky

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Ketan Joshi did not mean to become the manager of all things climate on Bluesky, the fast-growing social media platform that’s trying to compete directly with Twitter.

The 39-year-old Australian expat who now lives in Oslo, Norway has spent his career writing about green energy as a communications specialist for renewable energy companies and author of Windfall: Unlocking a Fossil-Free Future, but found it especially hard to share climate information on platforms like Instagram and Twitter. Those sites seemed built toward sowing discord and had secret rules about what posts would do well. Immediately, he noticed that Bluesky was different.

Joshi created a feed that congregated all the posts climate users. It, like many other early Bluesky feeds, like Blacksky and BookSky, combined a keyword with sky—"GreenSky"—each varying in capitalization. The result was a unique space where everyone was talking about the environment.

GreenSky is now a “Top-50” feed with near-constant engagement and frequent debates as those in different climate camps come face off on policy disagreements in real time. In the midst of devastating fires in Los Angeles, these days, many posters are using the feed to stay up to date, grapple with how climate led to their ferocity, and sift through misinformation.

"That really stands out to me, where there's a lot of sharing of work, there's a lot of sharing of reports, people link to other places on the internet. Bluesky is a conduit," says Joshi.

#climatechange #bluesky #climate

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