A Place of Joy: Why Scientists Are Joining the Bluesky Hype

A Place of Joy: Why Scientists Are Joining the Bluesky Hype

Researchers are flocking to the social media platform Bluesky in hopes of reviving the good old days of Twitter.

“All the academics suddenly switched to Bluesky,” says Bethan Davies, a glaciologist at the University of Newcastle, UK. The platform has “absolutely exploded.”

In the two weeks since the US presidential election, Bluesky's user base has increased from nearly 14 million to nearly 21 million. Bluesky has broad appeal because it closely resembles the former Twitter – now known as X. This platform was extremely popular among scientists, who used it to publish research, collaborate, and network. One estimate suggests that at least half a million researchers had Twitter profiles in 2022.

That was the year billionaire Elon Musk bought the platform. He renamed it X and reduced content moderation, among other things, which caused some researchers to leave the platform. Since then, the presence of pornography, spam, bots and abusive content on X has increased while community protection has declined, researchers report.

Bluesky, on the other hand, offers users control over the content they see and the people they interact with through moderation and protections such as blocking and muting, researchers said. The network is also designed to be open, giving researchers and developers access to its data; X now charges high fees for this access.

Several similar social media platforms have also emerged including mastodon and threads, but these do not have the same appeal among academics as Bluesky.

Mass immigration

Daryll Carlson, a bioacoustics researcher at the University of New Hampshire in Durham, reports that she saw the largest influx of users on Bluesky after the US election noticed. Musk has allied himself closely with President-elect Donald Trump. For Carlson, Bluesky offers a space for exchange with other scientists as well as with artists, photographers and the public. “I really want it to remain a happy place for me,” she says.

On the platform, users scroll through feeds – curated timelines of posts on specific topics. Users can like feeds, pin them to their homepage, or request to share content to them.

A particularly popular feed is the science feed, where scientists and science communicators share content. This feed has been liked by more than 14,000 users and receives 400,000 views daily. So far he has 3,500 contributors, from ecologists and zoologists to quantum physicists, and that number is growing quickly.

To become a contributor, users must submit evidence of their research expertise to a moderator. Mae Saslaw, a geoscientist at Stony Brook University in New York, reviews requests from people in the geosciences who want to post to the feed and has seen an increase from one request per week to half a dozen daily. As an early-career researcher, Saslaw has found Bluesky useful for learning about new software, finding interesting work and applying for jobs.

A safe space

For many researchers, switching to Bluesky means taking back control of what appears in their timelines. The feeds are an example of this; The platform also offers options to filter out content such as nudity and spam or certain phrases from its timelines.

Bluesky also offers a feature users refer to as "nuclear block" to prevent any interaction with blocked accounts - an option that is no longer available on X. In addition, users can create and subscribe to regularly updated, collaborative blocklists, for example for abusive accounts. If a user subscribes to one of these lists, no content from these accounts will appear in their timelines.

Clíona Murray, a neuroscientist at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, says the protections Bluesky offers are appealing. Murray was deeply rooted in X. She co-founded an organization to diversify neuroscience called Black in Neuro, which in a sense originated there. But she began to feel that X was no longer a safe place.

Bluesky offers “Starter Packs” – user-created lists of accounts that new members can follow. Murray created one entitled Blackademics U.K.; she also points to the work of Rudy Fraser, an open source developer who created a collection of feeds called Blacksky. This package includes a moderation tool that allows users to report and filter out content that is racist, anti-black, or contains misogynoir - expressions of hate, particularly against black women.

But as Bluesky grows, the problems that plague X could plague it too, researchers say. "There's definitely a risk that malicious actors will set up shop there; bots may move in as well," says Davies.

“With every big wave of growth, there will also be a wave of spam and fraud,” says Emily Liu, who leads growth, communications and partnerships at Bluesky in San Francisco, California. “We have strengthened our trust and safety team and hired more moderators to address all of this.”

Go or stay

Some researchers, like Axel Bruns, a digital media researcher at the Queensland University of Technology in Brisbane, Australia, keep their Twitter accounts to protect them from imitators. Others have deactivated their accounts.

Madhukar Pai, a tuberculosis researcher at McGill University in Montreal, Canada, reports that he has lost about 1,000 followers in the exodus (he still has 98,000). But he is hesitant to leave the platform. “If good experts leave X, who will offer evidence-based insights on X?”