Related papers: Bluesky and the AT Protocol: Usable Decentralized …
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…
The pitfalls of centralized social networks, such as Facebook and Twitter/X, have led to concerns about control, transparency, and accountability. Decentralized social networks have emerged as a result with the goal of empowering users.…
Bluesky is a nascent Twitter-like and decentralized social media network with novel features and unprecedented data access. This paper provides a characterization of its interaction network, studying the political leaning, polarization,…
Bluesky is a decentralized, Twitter-like social media platform that has rapidly gained popularity. Following an invite-only phase, it officially opened to the public on February 6th, 2024, leading to a significant expansion of its user…
Moderation and blocking behavior, both closely related to the mitigation of abuse and misinformation on social platforms, are fundamental mechanisms for maintaining healthy online communities. However, while centralized platforms typically…
This study investigates the rapid growth and evolving network structure of Bluesky from August 2023 to February 2025. Through multiple waves of user migrations, the platform has reached a stable, persistently active user base. The growth…
We build, deploy, and evaluate Paper Skygest, a custom personalized social feed for scientific content posted by a user's network on Bluesky and the AT Protocol. We leverage a new capability on emerging decentralized social media platforms:…
Mainstream social media platforms function as "walled garden" ecosystems that restrict user agency, control, and data portability. They have demonstrated a lack of transparency that contributes to a multitude of online harms. Our research…
Large-scale networks have been instrumental in shaping how we think about social systems, and have undergirded many foundational results in mathematical epidemiology, computational social science, and biology. However, many of the social…
Pollution of online social spaces caused by rampaging d/misinformation is a growing societal concern. However, recent decisions to reduce access to social media APIs are causing a shortage of publicly available, recent, social media data,…
Decentralized social media platforms like Bluesky Social (Bluesky) have made it possible to publicly disclose some user behaviors with millisecond-level precision. Embracing Bluesky's principles of open-source and open-data, we present the…
Online political discourse is increasingly shaped not by a few dominant platforms but by a fragmented ecosystem of social media spaces, each with its own user base, target audience, and algorithmic mediation of discussion. Such…
The emergence of decentralized social media platforms presents new opportunities and challenges for real-time analysis of public discourse. This study introduces CognitiveSky, an open-source and scalable framework designed for sentiment,…
Calls to decentralize feed-based social media have been driven by concerns about the concentrated power of centralized platforms and their societal impact. In response, numerous decentralized social media protocols have emerged, each…
Microblogging is a crucial mode of online communication. However, launching a new microblogging platform remains challenging, largely due to network effects. This has resulted in entrenched (and undesirable) dominance by established…
Decentralized social networks like Mastodon and BlueSky are trending topics that have drawn much attention and discussion in recent years. By devolving powers from the central node to the end users, decentralized social networks aim to cure…
Bluesky has recently emerged as a lively competitor to Twitter/X for a platform for public discourse and news sharing. Most of the research on Bluesky so far has focused on characterizing its adoption due to migration. There has been less…
This study examines the shift in the scientific community from X (formerly Twitter) to Bluesky, its impact on scientific communication, and consequently on social metrics (altmetrics). We analysed 14,497 publications from multidisciplinary…
Personalized recommendation algorithms deliver content to the user on most major social media platforms. While these algorithms are crucial for helping users find relevant content, users lack meaningful control over them. This reduces…
Digital public health monitoring has long relied on data from major social media platforms. Twitter was once an indispensable resource for tracking disease outbreaks and public sentiment in real time. Researchers used Twitter to monitor…