Bluesky is teeming with researchers – here’s why

Social media platform Bluesky is relatively new, but it’s been growing exponentially as another platform experiences an X-odus. According to Altmetric, Bluesky may already favor a particular community: researchers. 

Also: If you convert to a domain name on Bluesky, you MUST do this right away

On Tuesday, the data company, which specializes in tracking how published work gets shared, shared on Bluesky that mentions of research on the platform have now passed 500,000. Last week, Altmetric posted that it has been monitoring the platform since late October and found that attention for academic articles is higher on Bluesky than on similar sites.

“The academic community and the general public have clearly adopted Bluesky as one of its core places to disseminate and discuss new research,” the company said. 

As of December 3rd, Almetric had already found “395,000 Bluesky posts that link to a research paper or other research object that has a scholarly identifier like a DOI, PubMed ID, URN etc.,” the thread explains. “This is enormously high for a platform that has only been open since Feb to general sign-ups.”

Also: 8 Bluesky tips every new user should know

That research mentions have gone up by over 100,000 in just a week is promising for the burgeoning #Academicsky community.  

By contrast, Altmetric pointed out that the #AcademicTwitter audience on what is now X posted research a mere 18,000 times in June 2011, when the platform was already six years old and had 100 million users. In that sense, Bluesky’s growth rate among academics appears to be exponentially higher. 

Altmetric found that Twitter (as X was known then) didn’t reach more than 300,000 posts about research until January 2014, three years later. 

“Bluesky has become a favored social media channel for research communications professionals and academics,” said Amye Kenall, vice president of product, data & analytics hub at Altmetric parent company Digital Science, in the thread. 

Also: How to migrate from X to Bluesky without losing your followers

“In our own research we found over 22% of researchers were using Bluesky over any other social media channel.”

Altmetric has some theories about how this trend has happened. For one, microblogging is no longer new or unfamiliar to internet users, thanks mostly to legacy sites like X. Because of that familiarity, groups like #AcademicTwitter had to migrate and reconnect on Bluesky rather than form naturally from scratch over time. 

Additionally, Bluesky has optimal formatting. Altmetric noted in another post that X has de-prioritized posts with links — one user called these posts “throttled” — because of the company’s ad models. This approach may hinder researchers who try to share their work. 

Also: How to use Bluesky starter packs to find greener social media pastures

Lastly, Altmetric credits Bluesky’s “Open Platform foundation, which allows users and their data to enter or exit their service freely, customising everything from relevance algorithms to blocklists and moderation.” However, while Bluesky doesn’t train artificial intelligence (AI) with user posts and data (unlike X), that openness also doesn’t protect your data from public scraping. 

How to get traction on Bluesky

For scientists, researchers, and academics curious about how to optimize sharing their work, Altmetric explained that it uses the same scoring metrics for Bluesky as it does for X. “Original posts are 1 point, reposts are 0.85, and while we capture all posts, we cap the score after 200 reposts of an original post,” the company said in the thread. 

Altmetric noted that it cannot track research shared via short links. However, the company is working with Bluesky to rectify this issue. It also advised researchers against adding a link to a post and then deleting it once the link has auto-embedded, as this process cuts off Altmetric’s ability to track the results.