“Bluesky users are exiles from Twitter, mostly left-wing, which means there is little conversation between different ideological positions,” says Dorian Quelle, researcher at the University of Zurich (Switzerland) and co-author of a new scientific paper published today, about the users and activity of the social network Bluesky. Created in February 2023, Bluesky now has more than 32 million users and is one of the strongest alternatives, along with Threads, to X, formerly Twitter, after its purchase by Elon Musk. “Bluesky has already incorporated most of the features that made Twitter successful before Musk, positioning itself as a viable alternative. It continues to grow, although few new networks manage to consolidate. It has potential, but it’s too early to know if it will really be able to maintain itself as Twitter’s successor,” explains Quelle.

Even if it maintains its growth, Bluesky is unlikely to soon become a “digital public square,” the name one of Twitter’s founders gave his network when it had about 200 million members in 2013. Today the media landscape has changed and text-based networks have become more important, with their influence on current affairs more evident. “In Bluesky’s case, the left-wing political leaning of users limits debate between different ideologies, which, for me, is key in a real public square,” says Quelle. “In contrast, Twitter remains the home of world leaders, journalists, executives and activists, representing virtually all politically active groups. It’s a diverse ecosystem that Bluesky cannot replicate overnight. If it truly wants to become the new public square, it needs to continue growing at the current rate and wait for new waves of migration to help it add users,” he adds.

Bluesky’s growth peaks have coincided with user exoduses from X. The largest migration in its history was after the US presidential election in November, when Elon Musk’s support for Donald Trump became more evident. These more recent waves are outside the data in the scientific paper, which covers February 2023 to May 2024, so it’s possible that Bluesky’s homogeneity has increased further. Nevertheless, not all Bluesky users have the same origin, according to Ignacio Castro, professor at Queen Mary University of London who has researched Bluesky in the past: “There were already many Japanese users, many Brazilians migrated when X was blocked in Brazil, and we also saw a jump in the number of users due to the Twitter block in Indonesia. It’s quite possible that these users diverge from those who come to Bluesky because Musk acquired Twitter, changed X’s privacy policy, or because of the US elections,” explains Castro.

Despite ideological closeness, polarisation remains present on Bluesky regarding highly controversial issues. The paper studies the diversity of opinions about Israel and Palestine on the network, which continues to be notable. The article covers messages sent during and after the October 2023 attack. “After the attacks on Israel, the percentage of neutral publications decreases,” the text says, “whilst both pro-Palestinian and pro-Israeli positions increase. In the following ten months, pro-Palestinian messages continue to grow steadily, until becoming the absolute majority of publications in January 2024.”

These signs of polarisation don’t prevent Bluesky from potentially ending up as a bubble: “Homogeneity doesn’t completely eliminate disagreement, but suggests that Bluesky could be less polarised than Twitter/X. However, it may also end up functioning more like a bubble, where people barely interact with opinions that challenge their political vision,” explains Quelle.

One of Bluesky’s great advantages for researchers is that it has become an open source of data and information now that X, by Musk’s order, has closed access to academics. Thus, in the coming years, they will be able to continue observing how a new network evolves, with its own characteristics. For example, whether the option for each user to create their own information menu, thanks to the variety of algorithms offered by Bluesky, is something that is increasingly used or not. For now, it seems a scarce function: “Only 0.09% of all timelines are customised. Recently, new options with feeds that include advertisements have the potential to change the landscape,” says Castro, who adds that other Bluesky features such as “starter packs” [groups of users aggregated by topic to follow when arriving on the network] have their audience: “They have a clear effect on the popularity of users who are part of one of those packs and reinforce the effect that popular accounts become even more popular.”

Another issue analysed in the study is the amount of misinformation, one of the major problems in networks over the last decade. On Bluesky, there is hardly any. The authors have looked at whether users share many links to dubious sources, and they don’t. Again, this is something that can evolve and change. But if in Facebook misinformation was mainly shared by conservatives, and if Bluesky is mostly populated by progressives without opposition, it’s unlikely that much unverified information will circulate: “I would say that misinformation circulates much less frequently on Bluesky than on X, and when it appears, it tends to be less blatant or extreme,” says Quelle.

Jordi Pérez Colomé