Researchers present first comprehensive study on the social media platform Bluesky

The booming short messaging service Bluesky, with its logo of a blue butterfly, is not only a suitable alternative to X, but offers tangible advantages to users, concludes a study by a team of researchers with leading involvement from TU Darmstadt in a study on the novel platform.

The findings are published in the Proceedings of the 2024 ACM on Internet Measurement Conference.

In protest against owner and tech billionaire Elon Musk, millions of users worldwide have been leaving the social media platform X, formerly Twitter, in recent months. Many of them are moving to its competitor Bluesky, which was launched in 2022.

In collaboration with international research partners, scientists at TU Darmstadt recently presented the first extensive analysis of Bluesky. The researchers, led by TU first author Leonhard Balduf of the Communication Networks Lab (Department of Electrical Engineering and Information Technology), presented their results at the renowned conference ACM IMC.

Although Bluesky is “a clone of X, at first glance,” it actually offers significantly more functionality, explains Balduf. The participative platform is based on fundamentally different principles and architectures. The biggest advantages over centralized networks such as Facebook or X include openness, transparency, participation, and a more even distribution of power.

Bluesky users have significantly more control over their own data and identity, as well as over the content displayed to them, according to the study. Instead of being dependent on a single feed provided by an opaque algorithm, users can choose from tens of thousands of generated feeds, most of which are created by other users.

Similarly, Bluesky also offers more freedom of choice and control when it comes to moderation, with substantial contributions by the community. In addition, all the necessary components are available as open source software and can therefore, in principle, be operated by any user themselves.

“Bluesky’s open architecture effectively enables at least tech-savvy users to meaningfully contribute to core aspects of the social network, namely the recommendation and moderation of content,” explains Professor Björn Scheuermann, head of the Communication Networks Lab. “And we found that the community actually makes a lot of use of this option.”

With its transparency and openness, according to Scheuermann, Bluesky is “a paradise” for researchers, especially as Twitter/X has effectively closed access to its data for independent research purposes by introducing exorbitant fees.

In addition to the major advantages, the decentralized platform presents issues, as indicated in the study. For example, there is an increasing debate about who has the rights to the content and how open data access can be protected from misuse, explains Balduf.

The study also notes that the system may struggle with its explosive growth, and that financial security of the currently ad-free service remains an open question. Since the relatively new platform was opened to the general public in February 2024, the number of users has increased tenfold from around 2.5 million to around 28 million today.

In addition to TU Darmstadt, five other universities from the UK, France, and China were involved in the study. The TU scientists contributed the majority of the data collection and analysis. Among other things, they analyzed the content moderation system.