‘A place of joy’: why scientists are joining the rush to Bluesky
Researchers say the social-media platform — an alternative to X — offers more control over the content they see and the people they engage with
Bluesky has been growing rapidly since 2023.Credit: Matteo Della Torre/NurPhoto/Shutterstock
Researchers are flocking to the social-media platform Bluesky, hoping to recreate the good old days of Twitter.
“All the academics have suddenly migrated to Bluesky,” says Bethan Davies, a glaciologist at Newcastle University, UK. The platform has “absolutely exploded”.
In the two weeks since the US presidential election, the platform has grown from close to 14 million users to nearly 21 million. Bluesky has broad appeal in large part because it looks and feels a lot like X (formerly known as Twitter), which became hugely popular with scientists, who used it to share research findings, collaborate and network. One estimate suggests that at least half a million researchers had Twitter profiles in 2022.
That was the year that billionaire Elon Musk bought the platform. He renamed it X and reduced content moderation, among other changes, prompting some researchers to leave. Since then, pornography, spam, bots and abusive content have increased on X, and community protections have decreased, say researchers.
Bluesky, by contrast, offers users control over the content they see and the people they engage with, through moderation and protections such as blocking and muting features, say researchers. It is also built on an open network, which gives researchers and developers access to its data; X now charges a hefty fee for this kind of access.
Several similar social-media platforms have also sprung up, including Mastodon and Threads, but they haven’t gained the same traction among academics as Bluesky.
Mass migration
Daryll Carlson, a bioacoustics researcher at the University of New Hampshire in Durham, says she noticed the largest influx of users on Bluesky after the US election. Musk has become closely aligned to president-elect Donald Trump. For Carlson, Bluesky offers a space to engage with other scientists, as well as artists, photographers and the general public. “I’d really like it to continue to be a place of joy for me,” she says.
On the platform, users scroll through feeds — curated timelines of posts on specific subjects. Users can like feeds, pin them to their homepage or request to share content on them.
One of the most popular is the Science feed, where scientists and science communicators share content. It’s been liked by more than 14,000 users and gets 400,000 views a day. So far, it has 3,500 contributors, from ecologists and zoologists to quantum physicists, but those numbers are increasing rapidly.
To become a contributor, users need to share evidence of their research credentials with a moderator. Mae Saslaw, a geoscientist at Stony Brook University in New York, vets requests to post on the feed from people in geoscience and has seen an increase from one a week to half a dozen per day. As an early-career researcher, Saslaw has found Bluesky useful for learning about new software, finding interesting papers and applying for jobs.
Safe space
For many researchers, the move to Bluesky has been about gaining back control over what appears in their timelines. Feeds are one example, but the platform also offers options to filter out content such as nudity and spam, or specific phrases, from appearing in their timelines.
Bluesky also offers a feature that users have nicknamed the ‘nuclear block’, which prevents all interaction with blocked accounts — an option no longer available on X. And users can create and subscribe to regularly updated collaborative block lists, such as lists of offensive accounts. If a user subscribes to one of these, no content from those accounts will appear on their timelines.
Clíona Murray, a neuroscientist at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, says the protections offered by BlueSky are appealing. Murray was very entrenched in X. She co-founded an organization to diversify neuroscience, called Black in Neuro, which started in part there. But she began to feel that X was not a safe place.
Bluesky offers ‘starter packs’ — user-created custom lists of accounts for new joiners to follow. Murray created one called Blackademics U.K.; she also notes the work of Rudy Fraser, an open-source developer who created a collection of feeds called Blacksky. This pack includes a moderation tool with which users can report content that is racist and anti-Black or contains misogynoir — expressing hatred particularly against Black women — and filter them out.
But as Bluesky grows, the problems that plague X could come to haunt it, too, say researchers. “There’s definitely a risk that bad-faith actors will move in; bots will move in,” says Davies.
“With any huge wave of growth, there’s going to be a wave of spam and scam as well,” says Emily Liu, who manages growth, communications and partnerships at Bluesky in San Francisco, California. “We’ve scaled up our trust and safety team; hired more moderators to help combat all of this.”
Leave or stay
Some researchers, such as Axel Bruns, a digital-media researcher at Queensland University of Technology in Brisbane, Australia, are keeping their Twitter accounts to avoid losing them to impersonators. Others have shut their accounts down.
Madhukar Pai, a tuberculosis researcher at McGill University in Montreal, Canada, says he has lost some 1,000 followers in the exodus (he still has 98,000). But he is reluctant to leave. “If good experts quit X, who will offer evidence-based input on X?”
doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-024-03784-6
This story originally appeared on: Nature - Author:Smriti Mallapaty
