Bluesky's science takeover: 70% of Nature poll respondents use platform

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-025-00177-1

by ironyman • 1 year ago

126 137 1 year ago

BlueSky has its problems, but the problems are more bearable than Twitter. You can have conversations about science and technology without weird angry people/bots popping up in the replies and shouting at you.

Twitter used to be great that way as well, but now it isn't. Losing those communication channels is a big loss, no matter what you think of social media.

TechDebtDevin• 1 year ago

Bluesky also doesn't show me videos of people dying every 10 minutes.

jeffhuys• 1 year ago

X doesn't do that for me either... If you see posts you don't like, block/hide them. X learns.

That's the cost of a free platform though. Rather have that than being banned for thinking wrong.

Vaslo• 1 year ago

Literally never had this issue on X.

TheChaplain• 1 year ago

Because there are no algorithms yet.

I try to follow the situation in Ukraine and I see lots of videos on X with russians murdering ukrainians as well as their own.

TiredOfLife2• 1 year ago

Bluesky doesn't have a working only followed feed.

duxup7• 1 year ago

Yeah the typical issue of "they could go bad" is always present.

Really that's internet services history in a nutshell. You use the thing, you move when you feel motivated.

diggan6• 1 year ago

Yeah the typical issue of "they could go bad" is always present.

It's at least refreshing to see Bluesky PBC try to prevent it by setting up guardrails themselves, like allowing people to host their data somewhere else, which seems to work today already.

Here's to hoping the federation stuff shapes up nicely too.

davidw• 1 year ago

I have friends on Blue Sky that I first met online on IRC in the 1990ies. You just keep migrating and finding your people over time, I guess.

cma2• 1 year ago

But now your municipal water supply only puts out boil water notices on Facebook..

Maken4• 1 year ago

The downside is the constant 'rot' of online content. I know most of it was not very valuable, but I find sad how little of our small scale, daily life record will be left after the walled gardens inevitably go down and the server data erased.

itsoktocry5• 1 year ago

You can have conversations about science and technology without weird angry people/bots popping up in the replies and shouting at you

There's a guy on Twitter who posts about AI and has been reposting his Bluesky interactions on Twitter.

Absolutely unhinged people going off on his benign takes. It's hilarious.

People who have moved to Bluesky like to tell themselves it's the "smart place", but it's really just the place where you agree with the politics.

peterpost2• 1 year ago

I'm not sure if I would agree with that, definitely a lot of political arguments going on in bsky. It definitely used to be an echochamber though. But with Twitter being packed with Nazi's and every other comment being a sex-spambot I would guess plenty of non-traditional bluesky users have come over.

pmarreck3• 1 year ago

Second this. I apparently got broadly listbanned and accused of promoting "hasbarah" (a word I had to look up at the time and which is basically used more as a cudgel than a valid accusation) on Day 1 of Bluesky membership, simply for correcting misinformation being pushed by a Quranic-literalist* supporter.

No thanks. Not interested in echo-chamber echoing; I only care about the best truths I can find.

* that's my politically-defanged term for "terrorists"

afavour5• 1 year ago

Got a link? If all he's doing is posting about AI I'm not sure why he'd provoke such responses but I'd be interested to see.

People who have moved to Bluesky like to tell themselves it's the "smart place", but it's really just the place where you agree with the politics.

I migrated to Bluesky and I don't regard it for one second as a smart place. No social media is. My experience is that it's a quiet place, in the sense that a lot of people are talking but there are way fewer raised voices than there are over on Twitter, where people get monetarily rewarded for making viral content so they scream for attention.

paulgb3• 1 year ago

People who have moved to Bluesky like to tell themselves it's the "smart place", but it's really just the place where you agree with the politics.

I don't care if it's the smart place, but it's nice to have a feed that reminds me of pre-2015 internet spaces where people talked about things other than politics. I just did an experiment and opened up the for-you page on X, and out of 18 random posts of people I didn't follow, 10 were political in nature (ranging from MAGA to far left).

I open Bluesky and I see art, technical projects, people's pets, etc.

fnord77• 1 year ago

You can have conversations about science and technology without weird angry people/bots popping up in the replies and shouting at you.

If the conversation is about climate science, no you cannot unless your POV is the oceans are going to boil off in the next 5 years.

eightysixfour3• 1 year ago

I wish there was a bluesky with less moderation. I don’t want bots and spam, but since I can control my own feeds and the mute functions actually work, I can shape it better than the other networks let me. I think that should be the real goal.

pjc505• 1 year ago

You can actually unsubscribe from default moderation, and there's quite a lot of NSFW on there if you want it.

There are some things they won't host, but it may be possible to work around that with your own PDS.

immibis12• 1 year ago

How would it be different from Mastodon?

pjc505• 1 year ago

The blocklists systems can often be over-broad and sneakily include personal beefs, but overall the bluesky norm of "block on sight on first aggressive contact" is having a positive effect against engagement-baiting.

Hostile actors seem to be trying something else: LLM "reply guys", which make superficially plausible conversation in your replies.

Twitter is really the King Log/King Stork parable writ large. It had problems under Jack, as absentee owner, but getting an owner who is interested in making it his personal platform is much worse.

Edit: this post has already been flagged off the front page, lol

concerndc1tizen2• 1 year ago

It's an interesting arms race, where an optimal bot has better chances of surviving than a normal person that will naturally have diverse opinions.

As I pointed out in another comment:

The right can pretend to be antagonizing extremist LGBTs to get more centrists to support their agenda - while undermining the LGBT movement itself also from within.

diggan6• 1 year ago

The blocklists systems can often be over-broad and sneakily include personal beefs, but overall the bluesky norm of "block on sight on first aggressive contact" is having a positive effect against engagement-baiting.

Yeah, it's kind of inspiring to see even the common person is getting used to just block trolls on sight, rather than engaging in it. Something we veterans been doing for 2 decades or more, but good to see others are catching up on how to save your sanity :)

That said, the other day I ended up on a "Transphobes, Genocide Enthusiasts, and Crumbums" list for some reason on Bluesky, while I haven't even posted anything about those topics or engaging in anything like that. Makes one wonder how many others on a list like that actually even discussed the supposed topics?

I kind of wish people had to justify additions to lists somehow, like adding a reason or at least linking the post that made you add this user to the list, or something similar.

optionalsquid2• 1 year ago

The blocklists systems can often be over-broad and sneakily include personal beefs, but overall the bluesky norm of "block on sight on first aggressive contact" is having a positive effect against engagement-baiting.

The block system also being being weaponized at the moment. I've personally been added to a "MAGA Trolls", a "Porn Bots", a "Zionist Allies", and a "84 second automobile extravaganza" block-list in the last few days. I even got added to a list because I subscribed to the Listifications [1] service, which is what notifies me about these additions. But all these lists, as well as their creators, have subsequently been banned.

[1] https://bsky.app/profile/listifications.app

clumsysmurf• 1 year ago

BlueSky has its problems

I had this same problem with twitter - I would like to follow a person, say Joe, that talks about X, Y, and * ... but I'm only interested in X.

I would like more granular pub/sub so I could follow Joe/X.

Of course, Joe would have to set up those channels.

boringg• 1 year ago

Thanks for marketing push for bluesky via nature!

pgryko• 1 year ago

Can anyone recommend good science or ml people to follow on bluesky? I've moved from twitter, but haven't quite found as interesting content yet, especially with ML - seems like they are still posting on twitter

kawera• 1 year ago

Maybe try this: https://blueskydirectory.com/starter-packs

ykonstant• 1 year ago

Ditto for any mathematics or applied maths feeds.

grajaganDev4• 1 year ago

Here is a big mathematics starter pack:

https://bsky.app/starter-pack/miniapeur.bsky.social/3lc4zmcf...

add-sub-mul-div2• 1 year ago

This is in line with the ideal scenario of Twitter remaining online as a quarantine for spam and culture war stuff, but real traffic migrating slowly elsewhere, hopefully without any single "winner" ever becoming big enough to attract what was left behind.

diggan6• 1 year ago

Is that expected to last though? As far as I understand, the reason Twitter got popular for all the "culture war" stuff was because there was more people engaging with it there, otherwise they would have kept themselves to Social Truth or whatever it's called.

These people thrive on reactions, if there is no reaction to what they say, they'll get bored and move over to the place where the people who'd react is.

rsynnott4• 1 year ago

Not forever. I’d be rather surprised if Twitter still exists in a decade. And then maybe Bluesky will get bad. But, well, that is how it goes. No social network lasts forever. You move every five to 10 years.

aredox3• 1 year ago

We already have 4chan/8chan for that.

Maken4• 1 year ago

Even 4chan have actual bot filters and moderation.

Epitaque• 1 year ago

A bit off topic, but does anyone know why there's only one Bluesky relay, or can direct me to an article? Even if the hardware requirements are high, I'd think someone would've made a second relay by now.

immibis12• 1 year ago

The relay stores a copy of everything ever posted by anyone, that's why.

verdverm8• 1 year ago

https://bsky.app/profile/skyseed.fund is looking to fund efforts to run 3rd party instances of the critical services

grajaganDev4• 1 year ago

You can read Bluesky posts without an algorithm, just like the good old days.

verdverm8• 1 year ago

You can read them without an account too

add-sub-mul-div2• 1 year ago

You can also write your own algorithm.

ritcgab• 1 year ago

Doesn't Twitter provide that as well?

jeroenhd2• 1 year ago

In my experience, they pretend to, but they try as hard as they can to prevent you from doing it and the timeline is still filled with algorithm guff.

zzleeper• 1 year ago

Being in academia (or very adjacent to it), there are two types of BlueSky users:

1) The ones that moved because of ideological reasons 2) The ones that moved b/c Twitter became a desolate hellscape.

I'm closer to (2) than to (1), and the difference between 2024 and 2020-2022 twitter is stark. Before, if you had an interesting tweet about a new article you would get lots of engagement (retweets, discussions, people disagreeing and pushing back).

Now? Nothing, just a few random retweets or comments from non-academic people that almost feel LLM-generated. Compound this with network effects, and even my right-wing pro-Trump colleagues (and there are some) decided to at the very least dual-post.

pjc505• 1 year ago

The ideology and the desolate hellscape are strongly connected, in that one has caused the other.

subsection1h2• 1 year ago

non-academic people that almost feel LLM-generated

I don't understand why this isn't talked about as much as the MAGA garbage. I occasionally read tweets by a couple prominent Rubyists who've been using Twitter since 2006 (because Twitter was written in Ruby, which attracted Rubyists) and none of the replies to their tweets are written by familiar Rubyists like back in the day. Most of the replies are from accounts created in the past few years with AI-generated profile images.

lexlambda• 1 year ago

Important to note:

Although the survey is not statistically representative of Nature readers or the scientific community at large

I found that the survey seems to have been advertised for with "Has Bluesky replaced X for scientists?" according to this article from Jan 14 [1]. This attracts people who switched more I think. So the 70% figure is nothing than hot air.

It is still interesting seeing the positive sentiments and reasons for switching analyzed.

[1] https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-025-00037-y

hn1986• 1 year ago

Unfortunately, this is a result of twitter censorship directly caused by harassment of the science community. A specific type of censoring people that is often ignored. In this way, Twitter practices more censorship than most platforms!

mayneack6• 1 year ago

I don't understand all the comments promoting the openness of twitter/x. There's a ton of friction to interact with X without an account. Meanwhile, the alternatives mostly allow third party apps, cross posting, and logged out access.

I can follow mastodon and threads accounts on my bluesky timeline using one of many bridge services: https://fed.brid.gy/

I can merge mastodon, bluesky, nostr, and threads one timeline using one of many third party apps: https://openvibe.social/

I can unsubscribe from the default bluesky moderation service and choose one run by a third party: https://bsky.social/about/blog/4-13-2023-moderation

The only differentiator for X is the content, and that's an easy choice.

jeroenhd2• 1 year ago

Twitter used to be open, but being open doesn't make you a lot of money. Thanks to the upcoming AI industry running on (scraping) user generated content, being open costs more and cuts into profits. The service went downhill fast once they needed to make a healthy profit.

pjc505• 1 year ago

That's certainly a risk, and bluesky STILL has no user funding, sustainable or otherwise. But making your site a heavily walled garden is bad for any kind of open Internet.

epistasis• 1 year ago

Have any of the X changes been positive for the investment, though?

They all seem to have diminished audience, lessened influence, and resulted in less ad revenue. It's very clear that X has a far smaller burn rate than Twitter did, but it also seems to have lessened revenue, and it's really unclear that there's any profit at all.

mayneack6• 1 year ago

"used to be" being the operative part of that phrase. I see no reason to stick around because of a thing that is no longer true.

wink• 1 year ago

Twitter seemed to have some cool engineering going on but the number of developers always seemed kinda ridiculous, I suppose they added so many features the vast majority of users never used or needed. Most people I know used it just the same as when they signed up pre 2013 (maybe with the addition of lists).

EA-31673• 1 year ago

When people say that X is "Open" they often mean "Open to people like me saying whatever I want." IMO It's often a wink and a nod, a dog whistle, not a serious argument. For all of the reasons you laid out, especially on a site like HN, it's hard (even being charitable) to assume that people mean "X is more open, as in accessible, free to use, etc".

What X has become is a place where you can pay to have your "views" promoted into other people's feeds, a place where bots run rampant, and a place where extremists can share their views without any fear of consequences.

mardifoufs3• 1 year ago

Yet X is still way more diverse, whereas bluesky is mostly white, upper middle class westerners. It is funny to see the least diverse community I've come across pat themselves on the back for somehow being more tolerant. And also accuse users of other, more diverse platforms of "dog whistling".

I'm sure that a platform policed by said privileged groups is somehow better morally or something. Who was dogwhistling again?

josephcsible2• 1 year ago

There's a ton of friction to interact with X without an account.

That's the case on Bluesky too: https://github.com/bluesky-social/social-app/blob/355c50fc0f... https://github.com/bluesky-social/social-app/blob/355c50fc0f...

optionalsquid2• 1 year ago

That only applies to Bluesky users who opt in, which in my experience is only a small minority of users. Bluesky also does not have a notion of a (fully) private profile, like Twitter/X does

mayneack6• 1 year ago

Logged out, I can only see about 80% of tweets when I'm sent the link. I can see almost 0 profiles (only very large brands and verified?), can't search, can't see replies, etc.

I think bluesky only hides people who opt in to hiding their posts.

mardifoufs3• 1 year ago

It's open as in "diverse" imo. Blue sky is still mostly white, mostly western, mostly technical people. X on the other hand has so many different communities and is much more open for "average users". It's a similar problem on mastodon

mayneack6• 1 year ago

I think that's probably right. The difference is the content. I don't fault people for preferring the X content. It's not even all nazis.

However, this is exactly the argument that people use to criticize bluesky. What is an echo chamber if not going to a place where you get the content you want. 99% of people who think they're taking a principled stand on moderation or openness in either direction are lying to themselves.

throw0101d• 1 year ago

There's a ton of friction to interact with X without an account.

Anyone else here remember when Twitter had RSS/Atom feeds for each account? You could read Twitter with a news aggregator.

cmxch• 1 year ago

But at some point they will have to interact with people outside the hermetic filter bubble(s) of BlueSky - even if it relates more to the results and byproducts as opposed to the raw research.

krapp• 1 year ago

How is it Bluesky a "hermetic filter bubble?" I'm not aware that anyone only interacts with people on Bluesky, nor do I see any indication from the article that this is the case.

Choosing not to interact with Twitter is not equivalent to sealing oneself away from the world.

josephcsible2• 1 year ago

Bluesky as a whole isn't a hermetic filter bubble, but most people on it set up blocklists so they never have to see anyone with opinions they disagree with.

Bluesky's science takeover: 70% of Nature poll respondents use platform

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