why scientists are joining the rush to Bluesky

Researchers are flocking to social media platform Bluesky, hoping to recreate the good old days of Twitter.

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

In the two weeks since the US presidential election, the platform has grown from close to 14 million users to almost 21 million. Bluesky has broad appeal, in large part because it looks and feels a lot like X (formerly known as Twitter), which became hugely popular with researchers who used it to share research results, collaborate and network. One estimate suggests that at least half a million researchers had Twitter profiles by 2022.

That was the year billionaire Elon Musk bought the platform. He renamed it X and reduced content moderation, among other changes, causing some researchers to leave. Since then, pornography, spam, bots and offensive content have increased on X, and community protections have declined, researchers say.

Musk has responded to some of these issues on X. In March, he wrote: “Stopping crypto/porn spambots isn’t easy, but we’re working on it.”

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 mute features, researchers say. It is also built on an open network, which allows researchers and developers access to its data; X now charges a large fee for this type of access.

Several similar social media platforms have also emerged, including Mastodon and Threads, but they have not gained the same traction among academics as Bluesky.

Mass migration

Daryll Carlson, a bioacoustics researcher at the University of New Hampshire in Durham, says she noticed the biggest influx of users on Bluesky after the US election. Musk has become closely associated with President-elect Donald Trump. For Carlson, Bluesky offers a space to engage with other scientists, as well as artists, photographers and the general public. “I really want it to continue to be a place of joy 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 website or request to share content on them.

One of the most popular is the Science feed, where scientists and science communicators share content. It has been liked by more than 14,000 users and gets 400,000 views a day, according to the feed’s manager, a user named Bossett. So far, it has 3,600 contributors, ranging from ecologists and zoologists to quantum physicists, but these numbers are growing rapidly.

To become a contributor, users must share proof of their research credentials with a moderator. Mae Saslaw, a geoscientist at Stony Brook University in New York, processes requests to post on the feed from people in the geosciences and has seen an increase from one a week to half a dozen a day. As an early-career researcher, Saslaw has found Bluesky useful for learning about new software, finding interesting articles, and searching for jobs.

Safe space

For many researchers, the move to Bluesky has been about regaining control over what appears in their timelines. Feeds are one example, but the platform also offers options to filter content, such as nudity and spam, or specific phrases, from appearing on their timelines.

Bluesky also offers a feature users have dubbed ‘nuclear blocking’, which prevents all interaction with blocked accounts – an option no longer available on X. And users can create and subscribe to regularly updated collaborative block lists, such as lists of offending accounts. If a user subscribes to one of these, no content from those accounts will appear on their timelines.

Clíona Murray, a neuroscientist at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, says the protection provided by BlueSky is appealing. Murray was very rooted in X. She co-founded an organization to diversify neuroscience, called Black in Neuro, which partially started there. But she began to feel that X was not a safe place.

Bluesky offers ‘starter packs’ — user-created custom lists of accounts for new entrants to follow. Murray created one called Blackademics UK; she also notes 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 content that is racist, anti-black, or misogynistic—expressing hatred especially toward black women—and filter it out.

But as Bluesky grows, the problems that plague X may come back to haunt it, researchers say. “There is definitely a risk of malicious actors moving in; bots will move in,” says Davies.

“With any big wave of growth, there will also be a wave of spam and scams,” says Emily Liu, who manages growth, communications and partnerships at Bluesky in San Francisco, California. “We have scaled up our trust and security team; hired more moderators to help combat all this.”

Leave or stay

Some researchers, such as Axel Bruns, a digital-media researcher at the Queensland University of Technology in Brisbane, Australia, keep their Twitter accounts to avoid losing them to impersonators. Others have closed their accounts.

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