Researchers are flocking to the 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 the University of Newcastle, United Kingdom. The platform has “absolutely exploded.”

In the two weeks since the US presidential election, the platform has grown from almost 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 extremely popular with scientists, 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, among other things, reduced content moderation, prompting some researchers to leave. Since then, pornography, spam, bots and abusive content on X have increased 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, gives users control over the content they see and the people they interact with through moderation and protections like blocking and muting features, researchers say. It is also built on an open network, which gives researchers and developers access to the data; X now charges a hefty fee for this type of access.

Several similar social media platforms have also emerged, including Mastodon and Threads, but these have not gained the same popularity 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 elections. Musk has become closely associated with newly elected President Donald Trump. For Carlson, Bluesky provides a space to connect with other scientists, as well as artists, photographers and the general public. “I would really like 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 homepage, or request content to be shared on them.

One of the most popular is the Science feed, where scientists and science communicators share content. The feed is liked by more than 14,000 users and is viewed 400,000 times a day, according to the feed’s manager, a user named Bossett. So far it has contributed 3,600 people, from ecologists and zoologists to quantum physicists, but those numbers are growing rapidly.

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

Safe space

For many researchers, the switch to Bluesky was about regaining control over what appears in their timelines. Feeds are one example of this, but the platform also offers options to filter content like nudity and spam, or specific phrases, from their timelines.

Bluesky also offers a feature that users have nicknamed “nuclear block,” which prevents all interaction with blocked accounts – an option no longer available on offensive accounts. . If a user subscribes to one of these accounts, content from those accounts will not appear on their timelines.

Clíona Murray, a neuroscientist at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, says the protection BlueSky offers is attractive. Murray was very entrenched in X. She co-founded an organization to diversify neuroscience called Black in Neuro, which partly started there. But she started to feel like X wasn’t a safe place.

Bluesky offers “starter packs”: user-created custom lists of accounts for new participants 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 and filter out content that is racist, anti-Black or misogynistic – expressing hatred, especially against Black women.

But as Bluesky grows, the problems plaguing X may also come back to haunt him, researchers say. “There is definitely a risk that bad faith actors will enter; bots will move in,” says Davies.

“With every massive wave of growth, there will also come a wave of spam and scams,” says Emily Liu, who manages growth, communications and partnerships at Bluesky in San Francisco, California. “We have expanded our trust and safety team; have hired more moderators to help combat all this.

Leave or stay

Some researchers, like Axel Bruns, a digital media researcher at 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 lost about a thousand followers during the exodus (he still has 98,000). But he hesitates to leave. “If good experts stop doing X, who will provide evidence-based input on X?”