Abstract

Bluesky is a Twitter-like decentralized social media platform that has recently grown in popularity. After an invite-only period, it opened to the public worldwide on February 6th, 2024. In this paper, we provide a longitudinal analysis of user activity in the two months around the opening, studying changes in the general characteristics of the platform due to the rapid growth of the user base. We observe a broad distribution of activity similar to more established platforms, but a higher volume of original than reshared content, and very low toxicity. After opening to the public, Bluesky experienced a large surge in new users and activity, especially posting English and Japanese content. In particular, several accounts entered the discussion with suspicious behavior, like following many accounts and sharing content from low-credibility news outlets. Some of these have already been classified as spam or suspended …

Date

January 1, 1970

Authors

Erfan Samieyan Sahneh, Gianluca Nogara, Matthew R DeVerna, Nick Liu, Luca Luceri, Filippo Menczer, Francesco Pierri, Silvia Giordano

Journal

Proceedings of the 16th International Conference on Advances in Social Networks Analysis and Mining (ASONAM)