Since the US presidential election, the number of users on the decentralized social platform Bluesky has increased from nearly 14 million to nearly 21 million in just two weeks.
"All the scholars suddenly 'moved' to Bluesky," said Bethan Davies, a glaciologist at Newcastle University in the UK, adding that the platform has "absolutely exploded."
According to (Nature), Bluesky was founded by one of the founders of Twitter (now X), Jack Dorsey, in 2019 to explore the establishment of decentralized platforms. The wide appeal of Bluesky is largely due to its appearance and user experience being very similar to Twitter.
Twitter is very popular among scientists, used to share research findings and collaborate. It is estimated that at least 500,000 researchers had profile pages on Twitter in 2022. However, that same year, billionaire Elon Musk bought Twitter and renamed it X. The reduction in content moderation and other processes led to some researchers leaving the platform.
Researchers have noted that since then, there has been an increase in pornography, spam, and other issues on X, while community protections have decreased. In contrast, Bluesky offers users ways to control what they see and filter their interactions through protective features like blocking and muting.
Additionally, as a decentralized social platform, Bluesky is built on an open network that allows researchers and developers to access its data. In contrast, access on X incurs high fees.
Although several similar social media platforms like Mastodon and Threads have emerged, they are not as attractive to scholars as Bluesky.
For Daryll Carlson, a researcher at the University of New Hampshire in Durham, Bluesky provides a space to interact with other scientists, artists, photographers, and the public.
Among the many subscription feeds offered by Bluesky, the most popular is the science channel, loved by over 14,000 users, with a daily view count of 400,000. The channel gathers content shared by scientists and science communicators from various fields, including ecologists, zoologists, and quantum physicists.
However, researchers point out that as more people flock to Bluesky, the issues that plague X may also arise here, such as scam content and spam. But Bluesky's management has stated that they will expand their safety management team and hire more moderators to help clean up harmful information.
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