Thread: Dump Twitter

Like ‘old Twitter’: The scientific community finds a new home on Bluesky

In July 2023, Adam Kucharski asked his Twitter followers: What platform do you think you will be spending the most time on a year from now? Like many scientists on Twitter, Kucharski, a mathematical modeler of infectious diseases, was increasingly frustrated with changes to the platform since Elon Musk bought it in October 2022. But of the more than 1300 people who responded to his poll, the vast majority expected to keep posting on Twitter, which was renamed X just 2 weeks later. About one-quarter were banking on Threads, Meta’s Twitter rival. Only about 7% chose Bluesky.

Now, that has changed, in a big way. Although academics mostly stuck with X in the year after the poll, Bluesky has rapidly emerged as the new online gathering place for researchers, Kucharski among them. They are drawn by its Twitter-like feel, welcoming features, and, increasingly, the critical mass of scientists in many fields who have already made the move. “The majority has spoken, and researchers are moving en masse” to Bluesky, says De-Shaine Murray, a neuroscientist at Yale University who has also migrated to Bluesky.

“It’s just gone completely crazy,” says Mike Young, a science communicator in Denmark who gives social media workshops to scientists. He and his colleague Lasse Hjorth Madsen did an analysis in August mapping science communities on Bluesky. They found more than 20,000 influential scientists—people on the platform who were followed by at least 30 other scientists in the same network. When they repeated the analysis last week with an increased threshold of 40 scientist followers, the new number of influential scientists was almost 40,000. It is likely to be many times that now, Young says.

For scientists the network is starting to look like home. Academic institutions, scientific journals and conferences, and international organizations such as the World Health Organization have established a presence there in recent days. The platform has become so popular that on Monday, Altmetric, a company that tracks where published research is mentioned online, urged publishers to implement a “share to Bluesky” button like those to share content to Facebook, X, or LinkedIn that many websites feature. Many researchers say the atmosphere on Bluesky so far is less polarized than on X, partly because there is more content moderation and the user base is, for now, much smaller and more homogenous. “There is this pent-up demand among scientists for what is essentially the old Twitter,” Young says.

“Old Twitter” refers to the platform’s earlier role as a hub where scientists could talk to one another, distribute and discuss preprints and published papers, post job openings and conference invitations, and communicate their research to the public. “I could go on there for 15 minutes and I would know what the trending papers in infectious diseases and virology were just by looking at the timeline,” says Emory University virologist Boghuma Titanji.

But that all changed with Musk’s takeover of Twitter. “It was obvious within 2 months of his purchase that the algorithm was already skewing against people who post factual, accurate information on climate,” says Katharine Hayhoe, a climate researcher at Texas Tech University. Many researchers say interesting interactions were increasingly obscured by misinformation and hate. “Over the last few years, the experience on Twitter has just become worse and worse,” says Ilan Schwartz, a researcher studying fungal diseases at Duke University.

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Most researchers leaving X are keeping their accounts there for now, in part to keep their usernames from being taken up by others and used to spread more misinformation. Hayhoe says she occasionally logs into X, mostly to invite some remaining colleagues to move to Bluesky. The last time she checked, half her messages were from people saying they had abandoned ship, she says. “It’s a ghost town.”