These news are awfully similar to click-bait stating "the science is settled" by grouping a small set of the group and then pretending it represents the whole.
The paper failed both to identify the overall number of scientists using X or the cases where multiple platforms are used (most common scenario). Therefore the paper only seems biased on its best scenario or downright propaganda at its worst.
NOSTR and Mastodon should never be left out of any serious research.
> NOSTR and Mastodon should never be left out of any serious research
I'm a nerd and I've never heard of NOSTR. What I've heard about Mastodon suggests strong "Desktop Linux circa 2000" vibes: Too much fiddling around for too little gain. If I can't be bothered to deal with either of these, the normies certainly cannot.
Most nerds I know wouldn't see obstacles to try out either Mastodon nor NOSTR because they'd be naturally curious about them.
Mastodon works as intended and grows reasonably well. NOSTR is quite frankly one of the most relevant innovations on open source forum/communities from the past two decades.
Both serve similar purposes (build online communities) but the while Mastodon uses a traditional server with a federation on top, NOSTR uses the concept of relay.
In essence, your texts never belong to the owner of a server, you send them to any of a thousand volunteer maintained relays and your audience reads them from there. Your identity remains the same, anyone can verify the authenticity of your texts and this is quite a feature on a time that digital censorship increases.
No idea where you get your gossip, the only real problem I'm aware of with Mastodon is search functionality being useless garbage. Not even sure what you would "fiddle" with on a social platform? Or are you talking about self hosting?
As with the history of Linux, there is a certain kind of person who cannot imagine any middle ground between "I buy only Microsoft-approved products" and "For each named server we start with LFS and it typically takes 6-8 weeks to customize the build for that server".
In this space it's "I use Twitter" and "After sitting down with the protocol documentation I reckon in January 2026 I will launch my own custom Mastodon server". No middle ground at all. No "Maybe I could join this instance of like-minded individuals?" or even "I found a turnkey solution for $10 per month", it's either 100% blood oath loyalty to Elon's service or they have to write all the software by hand themselves.
Pretty wild how important social media is for some people.. We seem now to be at the level of public school DARE officer lecture. Everything else aside, its just amazing how much things have changed, how alien this sentiment would seem if transported back even like 15 years..
"I have been groomed into joining the social media platform of the ruling aristocracy!" This is odd right? Or am I out of touch? There just seems prima facie to be more important things to care about, but maybe I am just an old man now.
It all just feels like some ominous prelude to 15 years from now where twitter accounts are compulsory and we all get food stamps based on retweets or something..
It is. If anything, it reads like sour grapes over their tribe picking a different place to socialize.
Maybe this is controversial, but I think socializing should be a pleasant experience. If a social space doesn't pass a vibe check, find someplace else where you feel more comfortable. If these scientists feel more comfortable on BlueSky, more power to them.
You feel you have the right and ability to freely associate, "select self"?
I agree with your naive libertarian perspective to the degree that it is meant to miss the mark, but when the government has not only violated the law, i.e., the Constitution, and has done some consistently and been derelict in enforcing the law, like free speech in the public domain, then you arrive at both the objective fact that the government has not been legitimate for many many decades, and that it is inherently illegitimate through its treason, the root word of which meaning betrayal.
I registered a Bluesky account not too long ago and noticed shortly after a regular appearance of gay and furry nsfw content. The NSFW setting was turned off, so these accounts are for whatever reason neglecting to tag their content properly.
Telling Bluesky that I'm not interested in "this type of content" didn't help remove the problem. Blocking/Reporting the accounts is futile, as they are so numerous. Moderation lists for LGBT/furry content seem to be nonexistent or unlisted from public modlist sites (maybe they are considered to be "homophobic"?)
Anyway, Bluesky does't seem to be safe-for-work, so it's hardly a proper replacement for Twitter. If this is fixed, then that would be good.
Agreed that better filtering would help greatly in making Bluesky more work-safe. (By contrast, ActivityPub’s communities do a decent job self-filtering, but that community is also more self-selecting at present.)
That said: furries are the internet’s coal mine canary. They’re one of the more visually prominent marginalized internet communities, and one of the first to get deplatformed when capital steps in. If you’re on a platform where furries are thriving, you’re probably in a safe space. Cf. the history of Tumblr, Twitter, Blogger, etc.
Generally, yes. If NSFW content is removed, it's incredibly common to see furry and LGBTQ content rolled into that. Furry themed account will be treated as a "repeat offender" even though they weren't really offenders to begin with.
Since I started reporting them ad "Unwanted sexual content" I am seeing significantly less half naked persons desperately begging for sttention. But there's still the issue of all the comic and manga crap labeled as art. Bluesky needs to correctly identify and relabel those as comics and manga.
Would be nice if others would report them too, because there are kids on BlueSky and they don't need to see their uncles/aunts or neighbors sticking their butt into a camera.
> there's still the issue of all the comic and manga crap labeled as art
I'm not into comics or manga, but surely they're art?
And I mean this quite aside from the annoyance of seeing them when you don't want to. I'm not saying you should have to see them. It just doesn't seem right to imply that you shouldn't have to see them because they're not art.
The problem with Art is Art is whatever the Artist says it is. There is no concrete definition of Art, it is wholy subjective to the perspectives of the creator and the appreciator. Comics & Manga certainly fall under the umbrella of art in a strict sense, they are first and foremost Comics & Manga.
Colloquially when people say Art they mean what they see in a museum, not what they can buy in the corner store. When I subscribe to a generic Art category I want to see artists showing techniques, cool paintings, breakdowns of how marble was carved, and most certainly not catgirl uwu. I might be interested in a post about how comics are made (high effort, interesting content), but I am not interested in a picture from issue #346 (low effort fandom attraction).
At a place like bluesky where it's user generated content, if you follow art you're going to see a lot of the content artists want to make. For whatever reason, that's often apparently a lot of comic and manga artwork.
If there's a "fine art" category, that would probably be more in line with what you're looking for.
But not many artists these days work in marble or do museum-style paintings because there's not much of a market for it and they have to eat. So working artists are not likely to generate that sort of content in large numbers.
Labeling content as SFW/NSFW is the first step towards censorship. Seeing a butt never hurt anyone, and we shouldn't try to sanitize the Internet just to make it safe for children.
This is how things would (and ought to) work without a social media algorithm pushing engagement. It's a better way.
It's a shame you have to push through people making some sexual fetish the centerpiece of their online identity. That speaks volumes for the lack of maturity for the people behaving this way.
Granted the scientists heading over to BlueSky are predominantly doing so for ideological reasons, not for "effectiveness." Sean Carroll, for example, both an excellent scientist and perhaps the best science communicator out there, has declared for BlueSky, but it's largely because of his political views. Sean is a committed Democrat and his ideological in-group has declared for BlueSky.
Not content to waste an opportunity, that in-group is spinning this sort of thing as "Science (TM)" is moving to BlueSky. But it's really just moving to a comfortable echo chamber.
> Bluesky does't seem to be safe-for-work, so it's hardly a proper replacement for Twitter.
Is twitter SFW? I constantly hear about "mechahitler" and all sorts of terrible bigotry, language, and dog whistles. I may be ignorant because I refuse to even go on there.
it comes down to who you follow, posts you comment on, and the type of posts you like. those who say it's filled with (insert some category) indicates that their past activities likely involved those entities or topics in some form.
my feed is made up of rust stuff, databases, system designs, tech meetups, a few founders, OSS stuff, and some companies. even the other day, i came across a post from a dev at planetscale, ben dickens, who said he's going to livestream at a scheduled time to talk about some of the database concepts he recently read in the book DDIA. i watched it, and it was fantastic.
bottom line, i would say what everyone has to say about X, based on their personal experience, are all completely correct, because it becomes (or can become) the environment you want it to be.
Huh? You talk about your fetishes/turn-ons and sexual experiences with your co-workers, or are you mocking something I'm not online enough to understand?
>Huh? You talk about your fetishes/turn-ons and sexual experiences with your co-workers, or are you mocking something I'm not online enough to understand?
"Lotta straight guys like watching their buddies fuck. I know I do."[0][1]
More seriously, on at least one occasion, a co-worker was showing a group of co-workers photos of their vacation at a swingers retreat. Let's just say nothing was left to the imagination. I'd add that this was an employee at the corporate headquarters of a Fortune 50 company.
You choose who to follow on twitter. It's also your choice to use the AI feed vs just who you follow.
Mechahitler thing was a brief controversy that was turned off a while ago and the people I follow aren't getting spammed dumb questions to grok (although I find grok to be very good these days).
The attention seeking right wing accounts are annoyingly prevalent but it's entirely possibly to not see their content. Just like on old twitter which was full of radical politics. Curate your follow list.
Even so being a nazi or having a feed of a bunch of hitlers or whatever is 1st amendment protected political activity that won't expose your employer to a successful hostile workplace lawsuit.
Having a sexually provocative furry show up is not protected by the first amendment, since it appeals to prurient interest, someone passing by could argue they feel sexually harassed or find it hostile and have a much better chance at causing problems for your employer.
Maybe I've worked for some weird employers but if I was caught on twitter posting Nazi salutes I would expect raised eye-brows, but for the stated reasons, if I was caught with a furry picture on display where someone else could see it I'd expect to be immediately terminated.
> I was caught on twitter posting Nazi salutes I would expect raised eye-brows, but for the stated reasons, if I was caught with a furry picture on display where someone else could see it I'd expect to be immediately terminated.
Let me get this straight: you would get fired immediately for a picture that depicts a sub-culture of people that is often sexually deviant (but would include no nudity or anything in said picture), but it would be perfectly acceptable to promote a hate/terrorism group whose main purpose is to exterminate large parts of the Earth's population?
There's pretty much zero chance of a hostile workplace lawsuit succeeding for Nazi activity, political activity is the absolute strongest 1st amendment protected activity.
It is much easier to win a lawsuit on something appealing to prurient interest since the supreme court says it is not protected.
Most people don't actually care if the people involved in making their products are murderous psychopaths, as long as you aren't putting Nazi symbols in their product or something. That's why what are essentially CCP owned chinese manufacturers run by a party that tank-rolls over people wanting basic civil rights is seen as no-fucking-problem, no one gives a shit and their sales are not meaningfully impacted.
The only reason American employers care is if they're going to get sued, unless they are selling to rich people in San Francisco or something who can afford to pay more to buy something for moral reasons.
The US government is concerned about terrorism, as they have very much been in the past. The current political climate, however, specifies forms of terrorism which are seemingly acceptable, so I suppose in this case you are sadly correct. It still doesn't fail to boggle the shit out of my mind.
"Hostile" can only be enforced by the government within the bounds afforded by the constitution. The constitution as interpreted protects the right to publicly and loudly wish or celebrate death of minorities. The constitution as interpreted does not protect the right to display sexually explicit pictures to your coworkers of someone in a furry get-up.
I don't know what you mean by "not discussed on twitter." That's where it happened. There were follow up posts, including explanations of who and what goaded that particular output stream for Grok. There was also an incessant stream of memes by people making fun of Grok, Elon, and X (all of it allowed).
The fact that LLMs become what is projected on them, in this case from outrage over a leftist saying how glad she was that white children died in a flood, was twisted to fit a narrative by the media. It was not suppressed. That woman did get her account nuked, but that was because of her own violations of the ToS.
> Anyway, Bluesky does't seem to be safe-for-work, so it's hardly a proper replacement for Twitter. If this is fixed, then that would be good.
I'm not a Bluesky user. Twitter has exactly the same problem. I've got the NSFW setting turned off. And I've reported a lot of accounts posting unflagged NSFW content, mostly videos. And every time I get this slop reply email from them after a few minutes:
Thanks for reporting <account_name> and for using your voice to make X better for everyone. After review, we want to let you know <account_name> hasn't broken our sensitive media rule.
We allow sensitive content — like consensually produced adult content, graphic imagery and violence — in posts as long as it doesn't break our sensitive media policy.
I suspect they let these accounts slide because they value the user (or bot) engagement these accounts generate over safety/moderation.
On other platforms I tend to not use algorithmic feeds that much, and so I don't encounter that problem. That's because I already know some good accounts.
But on Bluesky, I'm new, and I want to get a feel for what's out there, so the Discover feature has been interesting for that purpose. But using it will quickly lead to the types of content that I mentioned, and I don't think users should have to tolerate this until they find interesting accounts to follow and move on to more controlled feeds.
With that said, from the limited experience I've had with Twitter/X's algorithmic feeds, they haven't been that explicit. But that's my anecdote.
That’s what I’ve heard from basically everyone I know personally. They get the app sign up and just a flood of furry content. Bluesky really needs to figure out a better default curated feed if they’re gonna just recommend content like that.
I have no idea what the originator of this thread was doing to end up in their situation. I've seen nothing like it on bluesky.
Maybe it's obvious to you and others why it happened, but it's not to all of us, and down voting people for asking this question doesn't make is any clearer.
The way BlueSky is structured, you have to follow people to see their content in your feed. Hence my confusion.
Other people have pointed out that the "Discover" feed with a fresh account may show material that the OP finds unappealing and that people have failed to report as untagged NSFW content.
> I registered a Bluesky account not too long ago and noticed shortly after a regular appearance of gay and furry nsfw content. The NSFW setting was turned off, so these accounts are for whatever reason neglecting to tag their content properly.
What... are you doing with the app exactly??? Do you not curate a list of accounts you follow?
To counter your anecdote: I've literally never seen anything like what you describe. I follow the people I'm interested in who post things I find of interest. I've occasionally (only occasionally) clicked on the "discover" tab, but it also does not show the sorts of things you described.
I joined to try to re-follow the tech community that was lost when Elon lost it. All I get now is 24/7 non stop Trump complaints. I get it, but it adds no value to my life. I certainly don't look forward to opening the app and hearing them. I've tried blocking the terms and even unfollowing people, but to no avail. Now I just never use the app.
I tried registering a new account using my real name a few weeks ago (I have never used blue sky before this) and within 5 minutes got an email saying my account is suspended for spam behaviour that violates community guidelines. I hadn’t even posted anything with the account yet.
I appealed but my appeal has seemingly gone into a black hole somewhere.
Wikipedia had that problem for a while too, to the point where some of the pedophiles were Wikipedia admins, and were softening the language in pages discussing pedophiles and pedophilia.
Several comments already angrily agreeing with the claim in the headline, which is weird.
"Yeah, those academics are all in a bubble together on bsky". Yes, that sounds "professionally useful", to be in a bubble with the people who work in the same field.
the bubble already exists, or.....tower, it's called academia.What is quite clear from many personal experiences in online semi professional forums, is that what many top notch acedemics crave is to "profess" to an interested random group in the hopes of finding successors and students, or colaborators that are missing from there actual real world life. This is proving to be clumsy and time consuming, with no good way to moderate, and distinguish between those who's enthusiasims are positive and the always almost's.
This whole phenominon is ancient, and we have accounts of identical situations from the agora of
athens and many other citys open .....forums
the open forumis messy, but it inevitably yields new thoughts and actions bieng adopted, vs a closed school, that yield orthodox reactionary beurocratic stagnancy.
The mainline bluesky "mushroom" PDS have been struggling with an influx of spam and bot accounts so they've gotten a bit picky on email addresses (which I partially get but also find quite frustrating).
Luckily there are alternative PDS that you can use without issue. Tangled[1] (the atproto github host) is one. They are a smaller PDS host so the usual caveats apply (if you act up they are more likely to notice you, downtime may occur, etc) but otherwise you can use them like you would any other PDS to interact with bluesky and the greater atproto network.
I regularly block throwaway email providers from PortableApps.com as that's where most of the genuinely awful community members come from. Racists screeds, death threats, and porn, oh my. The spammers, on the other hand, almost all use Gmail, Hotmail, Outlook, Yahoo.
I'm trying to like Bluesky. X has a large tech community and some deep thoughts/discussions on tech and philosophy matters, but I can't find similar people or groups on Bluesky yet.
On both Twitter and Bluesky, my best results at feed building have come from finding one person I find valuable, then looking at and following people they interact with and follow. A brief look at bios and recent posts helps. Then repeating this for additional interesting people.
I am fast to follow but also fast to unfollow if a person turns out to be a dud. An example of a dud is a person who is a cybersecurity expert but almost all their posts were about their travel: which hotels treated them well, complaints about flights, etc.
Bluesky also has a notion of lists, which folks seem to use. For example someone curates a list of people active in local politics and it’s a quick way for me to plug into what local activists and politicians are talking about. Again, I found it via one person I found interesting.
It really depends what you are looking for. Try searching for some starter packs to seed your follow graph. The below site works well but the search is a bit dumb/literal and the packs are all user created so you'll want to check some of the accounts in the packs that come up before you blindly follow them.
The are fewer posters and likes on bluesky today than there were in early September of last year, and both graphs have been trending down consistently since February of this year.
Bs went from 2.8m likers/day its peak to 1.1m today.
Yes certain so-called scientific fields that have a 100% viewpoint capture in academia only feel comfortable sharing views in the bluesky bubble, and they’re the exclusively-BA schools like “Integrative Biology” that this paper is published in.
There was a huge bump of new users right after the election, and things have gone down since then, but they are still much higher than they were in September 2024. And if you look at the tail of the graph, it seems to be holding pretty steady, which is about what you would expect for a social network after a huge spike of growth: not all of those users will stick around.
I find it really difficult to care about whether other people use a website or not. I stopped using it at one point, and I started using another website instead. I really don't care if other people continue to use it because I can just continue on with my life ignoring it.
I spent numerous times a day crafting paragraphs desperately trying to convince others that I didn't care. The faster I can realize the feeling's probably mutual, the faster I hit that back button and find the next thing to not care about.
Try posting anything about AI or LLMs. You will be inundated with people deriding you for even looking at it. The only accepted opinion on bsky is "ai bad, mkay". The doomerism is suffocating.
That's a 12 week window though. Foolish to use that as a long-term viability measure. I'd be willing to wager usage could come up again as the U.S. midterms ramp up in 2026.
2024-08-21 they had 156,328 unique posters, 2025-08-2021 they had 669,909. So "nearly" a year is cherry-picking.
Whatever "bleeding" is happening* is after some enormous growth. I'm not a booster at all, they ought to be concerned about this recent depletion, but this slow decline is hardly the death knell.
I have 140k followers and a strong incentive to go back to X. I do check in occasionally for the reasons you state, and it’s unusable and high-noise every time I do it. There was a golden age for science on Twitter and it’s over. On BlueSky I don’t get the huge engagement (and there’s too much politics) but I can blather on about cryptography and people are enthusiastic and I don’t get weird bluecheck crypto scammers in my replies.
I find it much easier to filter out the politics on BlueSky and focus on my professional connections. I gave up on Twitter years ago precisely because I got sucked into politics all the bloody time.
Having control over your timeline/algorithm, and the absence of engagement bait, makes it worthwhile for me to be on such a platform for the first time.
The algorithm on X is intentionally less calibrated for everyone. For example replies are now ordered by subscriber status rather than time stamp or relevance. Subscribers also have preference in “For You” feeds and suggested accounts. There is also an overt thumb on the scale for certain accounts like Elon Musk or the Cat Turd guy.
It’s still an entertaining place to find memes etc, but any use as real signal for public sentiment is long gone.
I’m glad to see folks moving off Xitter. But this feels like just repeating the same mistake by moving to a VC-funded centralized platform. What prevents ActivityPub from being technically sufficient—or is this just the network effect in action?
It's the network effect in action - most people just wanted "Twitter without Elon's bullshit" and Bluesky provided that.
Mastodon is great but most of the arguments for using Mastodon over Bluesky are honestly arguments most people don't care about, and the Mastodon community can be aggressive and hostile to newcomers, which is great for sustaining a community and preserving your culture against Eternal September but not great for onboarding new people.
Seems to be similar to my experience. I used to go to track and follow interesting individuals - scientists, engineers, artists... then it all got washed away with flamebait. Bluesky doesn't feel like its there yet, but I'm hopeful
Personally Twitter was very useful as a mid-career engineer to keep up to date on Bay Area developments and connect with my former coworkers. Several of my previous jobs were the result of Twitter DMs.
At this point someone being a big Twitter user would be a deal breaker for joining their company.
Blue Sky has far more moderation. Unfortunately some of that includes limiting political view points. I always looked at BlueSky as reddit lite from that perspective. Their "respect others" rule appears to primarily apply to protecting left of center posters. Academia as a whole is left of center so I understand the overlap there.
X has almost no moderation. Its the wild wild west.
You can read a thoughtful post about nutrition followed by outright antisemitism. X is the free speech platform, almost anything goes. I am a free speech maximalist though, my only limit being personal threats of violence, targeted attacks (revenge porn, pornographic image manipulation, doxxing, etc. ) other than that whatever people want to say or ideas they want to push should be debated in the public space. No censorship. Freedom of speech of course does not mean freedom from consequence. If I am spouting racist diatribe under my real name and lose my job, that's on me.
I prefer X as I like being exposed to all sorts of view points and find the more extreme posts amusing as its not something you see on the daily. I'm a jew and at one point the algorithm seemed to think I was an open neo-nazi. Was pretty funny, did not bother me at all.
Each to their own, the nice thing is that there are options.
BlueSky isn’t mere “moderation”, it is a narrative security ops platform that has the feature of social networking. It distills the worst of Reddit practices and makes them available at greater speed and scale.
X on the other hand, has a far lighter touch, opting to cutting back the ability to silence at scale and speed.
I wish that was the case but at least in my domain, after many people initially switched to bluesky, most eventually went back since many high-profile people did not make the switch.
I find the reverse, that everyone has a bsky but few have an X. The people still posting there tend to be the type looking for clicks (like promoting their brand or whatever) instead of just wanting to share their thoughts and science
Do you have any hypotheses why these high-profile people didn't make the switch?
I guess that many high-profile people are too busy with their regular work to be mindful of politics/ethics and thus they can't be bothered to switch. But maybe there are other reasons as well?
For what it's worth bluesky is fairly low on politics if you unpin the discover feed.
The following feed is purely content by people you follow.
There are also other feeds like "for you" which only shows you posts liked by the people who liked the posts you liked. If you mainly interact with niche/technical/creative content and avoid politics, those feeds will trend towards avoiding politics as well.
I’ve observed that most of those who switched back are egotists addicted to their status as influencers, not people wishing to actually participate in public conversations.
Good riddance, I say. My Bluesky and Mastodon feeds are much nicer these days without pseudo-celebrities Pontificating About Important Things.
So they surveyed a few hundred people and that’s supposed to justify an academic paper? In a formerly prestigious journal (emphasis on the former - if you need evidence that it’s been co-opted by activists take a look at its home page).
i have only read the title and synopsis, but weighing the professional value of personal microblogging platforms seems misguided , i wonder what the breakdown would be if linkedin (the "professional" microblogging platform, even as awful as it may be) were included , i would wager that it would be the winner. nevermind that "following academics" is something that sounds better than it actually is and reduces the individual to their profession. a more interesting question is where the dilettantes frequent
Circa 2018-2020, Twitter felt genuinely unique as a social media platform to find intelligent scientific and policy discussion. The quality of discussion in my feed felt much higher than reddit or HN. I could barely imagine leaving it. By 2024, that completely reversed, and it felt much so, so stupider than anywhere else. So many scientists have left. Eventually I left despite having 1000s of followers.
Bluesky has recapitulated or even surpassed peak sci twitter. The signal:noise is excellent. However, it requires some work because there is no algorithm. Aggressively unfollow people with low signal:noise, use the custom feeds that disable reposts and enable replies, use the Quiet Posters feed, and use sill.social. This has created a science feed that for me surpasses even the peak of Twitter, let alone X today which is unusable for scientific discussion.
Finally, the thing that drives me crazy is that Bluesky is literally a popular open-source, nonprofit, Ad-less, algorithm-less, truly free and partially decentralized social media network. It's what we all dreamed about in the 2010s! It's Mastodon but actually popular! But half the tech community have convinced themselves it's a "liberal bubble" (that anyone can join....) and that the website that apparently isn't a bubble is the, err, website run by a billionaire with an algorithm designed to promote certain political content that agrees with that billionaire. Absolutely bizarre situation.
My Twitter account was hijacked earlier this year. I created it in 2007 using an e-mail address on a domain I've owned since 1999. Multiple attempts to recover the account have been rejected.
I created a new account. Since I'm not following anybody, I see a random-ish feed of things.
It's kinda jarring going from a feed of tech science music to misinformation getrichquick scams and reposted viral content. Like woah.
In recent years, new leadership at Twitter has made substantive changes that have resulted in increases in the prevalence of pseudoscience, conspiracy theory, and harassment on the platform
changes to Twitter have made the social media platform no longer professionally useful or pleasant
I think we need to be honest that - while there is some truth there - this is the view from elements of the left who were instrumental in suppressing conservative voices and generally making it an unpleasant environment for people who did not subscribe to modish cultural takes under the previous management.
The alternative view is of course that for good or ill, freedom of speech is a much higher priority now - which you would think is more in tune with scientific and rational enquiry.
None of that is mentioned in the abstract which immediately suggests caution should be taken when evaluating this study.
Well, Bluesky is an open-source, algorithmless, decentralizable community platform with crowd sourced opt-in moderation, so it's the place to go for free speech, as opposed to the website run by the guy who bans people who disagree with him, has an AI he wants to rewrite history with, right, and has an algorithm preferentially promote his political views? This is common sense stuff to be honest
Bluesky is not the place to go for free speech. The admins ban users from the entire site for a variety of reasons, including disagreement over political viewpoints.
Full stack, and ability to opt out of purely ideological filters that are essentially trying to mandate Dorsey Twitter?
At least with Mastodon, you weren’t tied as tightly or centrally, such that the worst one can do is balkanize instance groups as opposed to efficient narrative security ops.
> None of that is mentioned in the abstract which immediately suggests caution should be taken when evaluating this study.
You're entitled to your opinion of course but it's little more than an anecdote and doesn't offer any meaningful counterpoint except, ironically, an admonition for us to 'be honest'.
You are claiming that elements of the left harassed conservative voices on the platform, which agrees completely with the point to are attempting to discredit. The sort of harassment that can only occur by placing a high priority on freedom of speech. It is hard to have a professional discussion with angry people shouting at you, no matter your ideology.
You are claiming that elements of the left harassed conservative voices on the platform
You misquote me. I said "suppressing" not "harassed". I disagree strongly with both, but it is the former that is incompatible with free speech; the latter exploits it.
Suppressing is a form of harassment. The easiest and most common way of suppressing speech is to just keep shouting at an opponent so nobody can hear what they are saying. As discussed in the article, a situation where the platform was unusable for professional discussions due to the noise. Suppressed speech.
Years ago Quillette claimed to have objective factual proof that Conservatives were being oppressed on Twitter with a data-driven approach. Alright, sounds good, so let's take a look. And ... their data includes shining examples of conservatism such as the American Nazi Party. It continues with more upstanding citizens such as David Duke, Richard Spencer, and similar. Such poor oppressed conservatives.
I did a quick fact-check on your post here by googling quillette twitter cancel
These are among the first articles that come up and note that none of them are Nazis, just people bucking the weird dictats of what was allowed to be said at the time.
I read your link and it describes the suppression of conservative voices while far left voices posting genuine messages of hate were supported.
Surely you read your own link before posting it?
I've additionally given you several examples which counter your original claim that it's basically just Nazis whining about being cancelled, which you've dismissed flippantly.
This is a serious subject; if you can't address it in good faith I will leave it at that.
You really think this is a full comprehensive list of everyone that was banned, or that it's a highly cherry-picked list of examples? At the time people pointed out it missed many prominent left-wing bans that were excluded, but I can't be bothered to search for that now.
And maybe some more left-wing accounts should have been banned too; I don't know. I never claimed anything about this. I said that Quillette published an article that considered the American Nazi Party and similar far-right explicit Nazis and KKK members as "conservatives" that were being banned.
It's really not that hard to say "yeah, the American Nazi party probably should have been banned, it was a mistake to include that on that data-driven approach, as was the inclusion of David Duke and Richard Spencer".
Scientists have used Twitter for more than a decade before Elon took over. It was extremely popular and there were large communities of scientists there sharing all kinds of stuff. After it became X, they have largely disappered. Many just stopped doing that kind of social media.
I've stayed with X, just because it still seems like that's where stuff is talked about. If and when that changes, I won't need an academic study to tell me so.
If either "reality has a liberal bias" or "scientific institutions have become ideologically captured" then something akin to this would make sense. Of course, how you would distinguish between the two I'm not sure.
This seems factually incorrect? There are massively more scientists on X than bluesky, and they seem to engage in their profession on X all the time.
The scientists I know personally are actually using LinkedIn the most for discussions around their work, and extremely rarely using any platform other than LinkedIn for this
Bluesky is dead, Mastodon is hardly any more popular. Neither X nor any of these should have ever been of scientific value. If you want to publish science, use a standard blog platform like a normal person and curate a RSS feed of stuff you like.
FWIW- it seems tech is still firmly on X. I’ve made an account there recently (@ma_bettinson !) and the discussions are quite great, though there are quite a few grifters
You’re posting this here on HN which is a curated social space that absolutely does not let you post annoying things that serve only to offend people and is good because it produces high signal/noise. Presumably you’re here because you appreciate that high quality discussion. Thats what Twitter used to be like for scientists, except that you also had access to smart people from industry and smart non-scientists as well and so “scientists in the academic bubble” had access to a huge number of perspectives. Now X is 4chan. 4chan is useful for its specific brand of content, it’s just not useful the way HN is or Twitter was.
It would be one thing if Bluesky were a no-politics, effortpost-only zone. It's not that though. In actuality, Bluesky is an echo chamber just like 2010s-era Twitter, but somehow even more strident.
Academics who insisting on their colleagues moving to Bluesky aren't deleting noise. That's a pretext. What these academics are really doing is trying to use their social power to enforce singular answers to questions that divide the public. They're tacitly asserting that nobody can be a legitimate intellectual and disagree with them on social issues having nothing to do with their field.
I'm not going to waste my time on people who can't tolerate divergent perspectives. X has plenty of tools to help people prune distractions from their timelines. This isn't a signal to noise ratio thing so much as a contamination taboo. Frazer would be proud. The problem these academics have with X isn't that it's noisy channel, but actually that it lets the wrong people participate.
These academics think they have a monopoly on knowledge production, but they don't. Close-mindedness bleeds from the social to the professional domain with terrifying speed. Censorship is anathema to discovery. When academics try to use ostracism to build echo chambers like Bluesky, they're only accelerating the ongoing divorce of academia and scholarship.
Bluesky isn't perfect, and I actually find it kind of annoying, but it's a "follow who you want" place. If your timeline is strident, that's because you followed people who are strident. The same isn't really true of Twitter, where even the "Following" timeline shows you algorithmically-recommended content and then boosts the replies of paying customers (AKA scammers.) To get the same feature from X, you need to do something complicated with "Lists", and it doesn't fix the reply ordering problem.
The rest of your comment tells me that you don't really spend a lot of time with scientists, but you do spend a lot of time developing your opinions from social media. I wish you could do the opposite! Academics are great and funny and sometimes wrong about social issues just like other people, but they also work on some of the coolest problems we have.
JD Vance's account was temporarily banned because it was suspected of being an impostor account, and it was reinstated within 20 minutes, and continues to be active.
He was not banned because his "pretty innocuous post" offended anyone's political sensibilities. He has 15k followers. He isn't being oppressed or censored.
If you’re providing products of scientific research that have societal impact, it is a certain type of actionable cowardice to hide in a BlueSky hugbox.
Ummm... you know that Bluesky is the social network that permits anyone to say anything, right? Like, that's just how it works? That the open source decentralizable community moderation opt in website is the free speech website and the website run by a billionaire with an algorithm and AI designed to promote his political views isn't? Right?
i wonder why various governments and journalists keep using anti-social media as well, due to the innate conflict of interest: anti-social media is all about sinking governments and trad journalism.
don't go on the rival platform and legitimize it further, IMO
It is often not a rational decision. People spend time on social media because they find it interesting or entertaining. That doesn’t mean it is actually useful or good for them. That includes journalists.
High-profile brands are somewhat stuck because departing would cause a negative news cycle. Quite a few have shrunk their organic social media teams and put more resources into paid social media, which has a more directly measurable ROI.
These news are awfully similar to click-bait stating "the science is settled" by grouping a small set of the group and then pretending it represents the whole.
The paper failed both to identify the overall number of scientists using X or the cases where multiple platforms are used (most common scenario). Therefore the paper only seems biased on its best scenario or downright propaganda at its worst.
NOSTR and Mastodon should never be left out of any serious research.
> NOSTR and Mastodon should never be left out of any serious research
I'm a nerd and I've never heard of NOSTR. What I've heard about Mastodon suggests strong "Desktop Linux circa 2000" vibes: Too much fiddling around for too little gain. If I can't be bothered to deal with either of these, the normies certainly cannot.
Most nerds I know wouldn't see obstacles to try out either Mastodon nor NOSTR because they'd be naturally curious about them.
Mastodon works as intended and grows reasonably well. NOSTR is quite frankly one of the most relevant innovations on open source forum/communities from the past two decades.
Both serve similar purposes (build online communities) but the while Mastodon uses a traditional server with a federation on top, NOSTR uses the concept of relay.
In essence, your texts never belong to the owner of a server, you send them to any of a thousand volunteer maintained relays and your audience reads them from there. Your identity remains the same, anyone can verify the authenticity of your texts and this is quite a feature on a time that digital censorship increases.
Interesting. NOSTR sounds a bit like Usenet.
Yes, very similar. Main difference is using public/private keys instead of email addresses.
No idea where you get your gossip, the only real problem I'm aware of with Mastodon is search functionality being useless garbage. Not even sure what you would "fiddle" with on a social platform? Or are you talking about self hosting?
As with the history of Linux, there is a certain kind of person who cannot imagine any middle ground between "I buy only Microsoft-approved products" and "For each named server we start with LFS and it typically takes 6-8 weeks to customize the build for that server".
In this space it's "I use Twitter" and "After sitting down with the protocol documentation I reckon in January 2026 I will launch my own custom Mastodon server". No middle ground at all. No "Maybe I could join this instance of like-minded individuals?" or even "I found a turnkey solution for $10 per month", it's either 100% blood oath loyalty to Elon's service or they have to write all the software by hand themselves.
Specifically, https://mathstodon.xyz/ seems to be pretty popular among the math scientists I know, https://biologists.social/ for biologists, computer security folk seem to be using https://infosec.exchange/
Don't look at mastodon as a whole, look at specific popular servers and their niche.
> The paper failed both to identify ....
But its published by Oxford, so it must be perfect.
/s
It's also behind a paywall preventing public knowledge of the critical is bluesky or twitter cooler issue.
Certainly more so than anything you'd spot from Trump University or Liberty University.
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Pretty wild how important social media is for some people.. We seem now to be at the level of public school DARE officer lecture. Everything else aside, its just amazing how much things have changed, how alien this sentiment would seem if transported back even like 15 years..
"I have been groomed into joining the social media platform of the ruling aristocracy!" This is odd right? Or am I out of touch? There just seems prima facie to be more important things to care about, but maybe I am just an old man now.
It all just feels like some ominous prelude to 15 years from now where twitter accounts are compulsory and we all get food stamps based on retweets or something..
> This is odd right?
It is. If anything, it reads like sour grapes over their tribe picking a different place to socialize.
Maybe this is controversial, but I think socializing should be a pleasant experience. If a social space doesn't pass a vibe check, find someplace else where you feel more comfortable. If these scientists feel more comfortable on BlueSky, more power to them.
The ruling aristocracy prefer Twitter, though? I genuinely don't know what you mean by this.
Same for HN
Fox News
University
Etc
Because it's a human trait to select self.
No need to create a sense of false consensus hammering on just Bluesky or make a philosophical mythology about it
I mean I would 100% build a business that could ruin yours. This isn't honorific-obligationism. It's capitalism.
You want honorable? Do better by example; sew your own clothes rather than externalize such on sweatshop labor for a low low price
You feel you have the right and ability to freely associate, "select self"?
I agree with your naive libertarian perspective to the degree that it is meant to miss the mark, but when the government has not only violated the law, i.e., the Constitution, and has done some consistently and been derelict in enforcing the law, like free speech in the public domain, then you arrive at both the objective fact that the government has not been legitimate for many many decades, and that it is inherently illegitimate through its treason, the root word of which meaning betrayal.
I registered a Bluesky account not too long ago and noticed shortly after a regular appearance of gay and furry nsfw content. The NSFW setting was turned off, so these accounts are for whatever reason neglecting to tag their content properly.
Telling Bluesky that I'm not interested in "this type of content" didn't help remove the problem. Blocking/Reporting the accounts is futile, as they are so numerous. Moderation lists for LGBT/furry content seem to be nonexistent or unlisted from public modlist sites (maybe they are considered to be "homophobic"?)
Anyway, Bluesky does't seem to be safe-for-work, so it's hardly a proper replacement for Twitter. If this is fixed, then that would be good.
Agreed that better filtering would help greatly in making Bluesky more work-safe. (By contrast, ActivityPub’s communities do a decent job self-filtering, but that community is also more self-selecting at present.)
That said: furries are the internet’s coal mine canary. They’re one of the more visually prominent marginalized internet communities, and one of the first to get deplatformed when capital steps in. If you’re on a platform where furries are thriving, you’re probably in a safe space. Cf. the history of Tumblr, Twitter, Blogger, etc.
How does that work? Would they lose access to the platform? Has that happened actually?
Generally, yes. If NSFW content is removed, it's incredibly common to see furry and LGBTQ content rolled into that. Furry themed account will be treated as a "repeat offender" even though they weren't really offenders to begin with.
Since I started reporting them ad "Unwanted sexual content" I am seeing significantly less half naked persons desperately begging for sttention. But there's still the issue of all the comic and manga crap labeled as art. Bluesky needs to correctly identify and relabel those as comics and manga.
Would be nice if others would report them too, because there are kids on BlueSky and they don't need to see their uncles/aunts or neighbors sticking their butt into a camera.
> there's still the issue of all the comic and manga crap labeled as art
I'm not into comics or manga, but surely they're art?
And I mean this quite aside from the annoyance of seeing them when you don't want to. I'm not saying you should have to see them. It just doesn't seem right to imply that you shouldn't have to see them because they're not art.
The problem with Art is Art is whatever the Artist says it is. There is no concrete definition of Art, it is wholy subjective to the perspectives of the creator and the appreciator. Comics & Manga certainly fall under the umbrella of art in a strict sense, they are first and foremost Comics & Manga.
Colloquially when people say Art they mean what they see in a museum, not what they can buy in the corner store. When I subscribe to a generic Art category I want to see artists showing techniques, cool paintings, breakdowns of how marble was carved, and most certainly not catgirl uwu. I might be interested in a post about how comics are made (high effort, interesting content), but I am not interested in a picture from issue #346 (low effort fandom attraction).
> When I subscribe to a generic Art category I want to see artists showing techniques, cool paintings, breakdowns of how marble was carved
I think the root issue is that a generic category is inherently not opinionated.
At a place like bluesky where it's user generated content, if you follow art you're going to see a lot of the content artists want to make. For whatever reason, that's often apparently a lot of comic and manga artwork.
If there's a "fine art" category, that would probably be more in line with what you're looking for.
But not many artists these days work in marble or do museum-style paintings because there's not much of a market for it and they have to eat. So working artists are not likely to generate that sort of content in large numbers.
Labeling content as SFW/NSFW is the first step towards censorship. Seeing a butt never hurt anyone, and we shouldn't try to sanitize the Internet just to make it safe for children.
Yes, same experience. I only read posts from people I follow, which solves this problem.
But of course this is a slow way to grow my network. But I like the slow linearity of the timeline this way.
This is how things would (and ought to) work without a social media algorithm pushing engagement. It's a better way.
It's a shame you have to push through people making some sexual fetish the centerpiece of their online identity. That speaks volumes for the lack of maturity for the people behaving this way.
Granted the scientists heading over to BlueSky are predominantly doing so for ideological reasons, not for "effectiveness." Sean Carroll, for example, both an excellent scientist and perhaps the best science communicator out there, has declared for BlueSky, but it's largely because of his political views. Sean is a committed Democrat and his ideological in-group has declared for BlueSky.
Not content to waste an opportunity, that in-group is spinning this sort of thing as "Science (TM)" is moving to BlueSky. But it's really just moving to a comfortable echo chamber.
> Bluesky does't seem to be safe-for-work, so it's hardly a proper replacement for Twitter.
Is twitter SFW? I constantly hear about "mechahitler" and all sorts of terrible bigotry, language, and dog whistles. I may be ignorant because I refuse to even go on there.
it comes down to who you follow, posts you comment on, and the type of posts you like. those who say it's filled with (insert some category) indicates that their past activities likely involved those entities or topics in some form.
my feed is made up of rust stuff, databases, system designs, tech meetups, a few founders, OSS stuff, and some companies. even the other day, i came across a post from a dev at planetscale, ben dickens, who said he's going to livestream at a scheduled time to talk about some of the database concepts he recently read in the book DDIA. i watched it, and it was fantastic.
bottom line, i would say what everyone has to say about X, based on their personal experience, are all completely correct, because it becomes (or can become) the environment you want it to be.
> Is twitter SFW?
I'd rate twitter about as safe-for-work as 4chan.
Talking about the mechahitler bug is water cooler appropriate. Even funny. Talking about the sexcapades and fetishes you have at home is not.
Ah, the puritan incel mindset that's taking over the USA.
Huh? You talk about your fetishes/turn-ons and sexual experiences with your co-workers, or are you mocking something I'm not online enough to understand?
>Huh? You talk about your fetishes/turn-ons and sexual experiences with your co-workers, or are you mocking something I'm not online enough to understand?
"Lotta straight guys like watching their buddies fuck. I know I do."[0][1]
More seriously, on at least one occasion, a co-worker was showing a group of co-workers photos of their vacation at a swingers retreat. Let's just say nothing was left to the imagination. I'd add that this was an employee at the corporate headquarters of a Fortune 50 company.
[0] https://www.moviequotedb.com/movies/repo-man/quote_37738.htm...
[1] https://getyarn.io/yarn-clip/50d10668-35f3-40bd-8fd1-c8c1aa6...
Edit: Added detail about NSFW content at work.
You choose who to follow on twitter. It's also your choice to use the AI feed vs just who you follow.
Mechahitler thing was a brief controversy that was turned off a while ago and the people I follow aren't getting spammed dumb questions to grok (although I find grok to be very good these days).
The attention seeking right wing accounts are annoyingly prevalent but it's entirely possibly to not see their content. Just like on old twitter which was full of radical politics. Curate your follow list.
Even so being a nazi or having a feed of a bunch of hitlers or whatever is 1st amendment protected political activity that won't expose your employer to a successful hostile workplace lawsuit.
Having a sexually provocative furry show up is not protected by the first amendment, since it appeals to prurient interest, someone passing by could argue they feel sexually harassed or find it hostile and have a much better chance at causing problems for your employer.
Maybe I've worked for some weird employers but if I was caught on twitter posting Nazi salutes I would expect raised eye-brows, but for the stated reasons, if I was caught with a furry picture on display where someone else could see it I'd expect to be immediately terminated.
> I was caught on twitter posting Nazi salutes I would expect raised eye-brows, but for the stated reasons, if I was caught with a furry picture on display where someone else could see it I'd expect to be immediately terminated.
Let me get this straight: you would get fired immediately for a picture that depicts a sub-culture of people that is often sexually deviant (but would include no nudity or anything in said picture), but it would be perfectly acceptable to promote a hate/terrorism group whose main purpose is to exterminate large parts of the Earth's population?
There's pretty much zero chance of a hostile workplace lawsuit succeeding for Nazi activity, political activity is the absolute strongest 1st amendment protected activity.
It is much easier to win a lawsuit on something appealing to prurient interest since the supreme court says it is not protected.
Most people don't actually care if the people involved in making their products are murderous psychopaths, as long as you aren't putting Nazi symbols in their product or something. That's why what are essentially CCP owned chinese manufacturers run by a party that tank-rolls over people wanting basic civil rights is seen as no-fucking-problem, no one gives a shit and their sales are not meaningfully impacted.
The only reason American employers care is if they're going to get sued, unless they are selling to rich people in San Francisco or something who can afford to pay more to buy something for moral reasons.
The US government is concerned about terrorism, as they have very much been in the past. The current political climate, however, specifies forms of terrorism which are seemingly acceptable, so I suppose in this case you are sadly correct. It still doesn't fail to boggle the shit out of my mind.
So the celebration of the murder of me and all people like me is not "hostile". Right.
"Hostile" can only be enforced by the government within the bounds afforded by the constitution. The constitution as interpreted protects the right to publicly and loudly wish or celebrate death of minorities. The constitution as interpreted does not protect the right to display sexually explicit pictures to your coworkers of someone in a furry get-up.
I do not have an account on twitter but I’m sure you hear more about “mechahitler” on here than on twitter
It was on the front page of most of the worlds news.
If it's not discussed on twitter, there's a good chance that topic is suppressed.
I don't know what you mean by "not discussed on twitter." That's where it happened. There were follow up posts, including explanations of who and what goaded that particular output stream for Grok. There was also an incessant stream of memes by people making fun of Grok, Elon, and X (all of it allowed).
The fact that LLMs become what is projected on them, in this case from outrage over a leftist saying how glad she was that white children died in a flood, was twisted to fit a narrative by the media. It was not suppressed. That woman did get her account nuked, but that was because of her own violations of the ToS.
Maybe you should re-read again what I was responding to
They said:
> I do not have an account on twitter but I’m sure
> Anyway, Bluesky does't seem to be safe-for-work, so it's hardly a proper replacement for Twitter. If this is fixed, then that would be good.
I'm not a Bluesky user. Twitter has exactly the same problem. I've got the NSFW setting turned off. And I've reported a lot of accounts posting unflagged NSFW content, mostly videos. And every time I get this slop reply email from them after a few minutes:
Thanks for reporting <account_name> and for using your voice to make X better for everyone. After review, we want to let you know <account_name> hasn't broken our sensitive media rule.
We allow sensitive content — like consensually produced adult content, graphic imagery and violence — in posts as long as it doesn't break our sensitive media policy.
I suspect they let these accounts slide because they value the user (or bot) engagement these accounts generate over safety/moderation.
On other platforms I tend to not use algorithmic feeds that much, and so I don't encounter that problem. That's because I already know some good accounts.
But on Bluesky, I'm new, and I want to get a feel for what's out there, so the Discover feature has been interesting for that purpose. But using it will quickly lead to the types of content that I mentioned, and I don't think users should have to tolerate this until they find interesting accounts to follow and move on to more controlled feeds.
With that said, from the limited experience I've had with Twitter/X's algorithmic feeds, they haven't been that explicit. But that's my anecdote.
That’s what I’ve heard from basically everyone I know personally. They get the app sign up and just a flood of furry content. Bluesky really needs to figure out a better default curated feed if they’re gonna just recommend content like that.
I noticed the same, which was off-putting, but not as much as how dull it is, and how badly the "nuclear block" feature ruins conversations.
Can't really see a future for Bluesky outside of the niche communities that are already established there.
It’s fixed. There were a few weeks in which I noticed this as well. No longer.
I still get NSFW catgirls in my "Cats" feed. It's better, but not perfect.
Cats are inherently NSFW, you will need to switch to a dogs feed. (Though husky feeds are strangely NSFW too.)
Thanks, I will try it out again. I will be ready with the app delete button in case any inflate furry porn appears though.
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Regular appearance as in posted by the people you follow?
Nope, I didn't follow anything of the sort.
So how did the content appear in your feed?
Likely using the "discover" or "popular with friends" feeds, not sure why one would do that to themselves on either bluesky or twitter.
Do you use social media? You seem unaware of how it’s worked for over a decade.
Normally, I need to follow someone on BlueSky to see their content or content shared by them. It doesn't inject recommendations into my feed.
The discover feed of bsky on a blank account with no follows or followers or likes had lots of this stuff when I tried it.
That makes sense.
My discover feed is pretty much all Scottish politics and tech.
I have since the early days. And I avoid algorithmic feeds. So I don’t get furry porn she. I read bsky. Or X. Or Insta.
These are non-problems for people who don’t allow them to be
Why on earth is this downvoted? I have an identical question.
The default method of operation on Bluesky is that you follow people you are interested in, and only the people you follow show up in your feed.
> Why on earth is this downvoted? I have an identical question.
Feigning misunderstanding is a weird look.
Spell out what you are implying.
I have no idea what the originator of this thread was doing to end up in their situation. I've seen nothing like it on bluesky.
Maybe it's obvious to you and others why it happened, but it's not to all of us, and down voting people for asking this question doesn't make is any clearer.
The way BlueSky is structured, you have to follow people to see their content in your feed. Hence my confusion.
Other people have pointed out that the "Discover" feed with a fresh account may show material that the OP finds unappealing and that people have failed to report as untagged NSFW content.
> I registered a Bluesky account not too long ago and noticed shortly after a regular appearance of gay and furry nsfw content. The NSFW setting was turned off, so these accounts are for whatever reason neglecting to tag their content properly.
What... are you doing with the app exactly??? Do you not curate a list of accounts you follow?
To counter your anecdote: I've literally never seen anything like what you describe. I follow the people I'm interested in who post things I find of interest. I've occasionally (only occasionally) clicked on the "discover" tab, but it also does not show the sorts of things you described.
I joined to try to re-follow the tech community that was lost when Elon lost it. All I get now is 24/7 non stop Trump complaints. I get it, but it adds no value to my life. I certainly don't look forward to opening the app and hearing them. I've tried blocking the terms and even unfollowing people, but to no avail. Now I just never use the app.
Gay furry nsfw content you say - well shit, maybe I’ve been sleeping on bluesky.
I tried registering a new account using my real name a few weeks ago (I have never used blue sky before this) and within 5 minutes got an email saying my account is suspended for spam behaviour that violates community guidelines. I hadn’t even posted anything with the account yet.
I appealed but my appeal has seemingly gone into a black hole somewhere.
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Wikipedia had that problem for a while too, to the point where some of the pedophiles were Wikipedia admins, and were softening the language in pages discussing pedophiles and pedophilia.
https://web.archive.org/web/20080915002726/http://www.wikisp...
Do I want to know what that means?
Pedophiles. They call themselves Minor Attracted Persons to try to square their pedophilia in their own heads.
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I'm left wing and I've certainly seen the term 'MAP' being used by the left more than the right.
That said, last time I logged into Bluesky was ~6 months ago.
You'll never find any moderation lists for the people who are the main users of the site. It'd take far, far too long to create it anyways.
Have you considered that it might not be worth it using social media at all?
Several comments already angrily agreeing with the claim in the headline, which is weird.
"Yeah, those academics are all in a bubble together on bsky". Yes, that sounds "professionally useful", to be in a bubble with the people who work in the same field.
the bubble already exists, or.....tower, it's called academia.What is quite clear from many personal experiences in online semi professional forums, is that what many top notch acedemics crave is to "profess" to an interested random group in the hopes of finding successors and students, or colaborators that are missing from there actual real world life. This is proving to be clumsy and time consuming, with no good way to moderate, and distinguish between those who's enthusiasims are positive and the always almost's. This whole phenominon is ancient, and we have accounts of identical situations from the agora of athens and many other citys open .....forums the open forumis messy, but it inevitably yields new thoughts and actions bieng adopted, vs a closed school, that yield orthodox reactionary beurocratic stagnancy.
The term “filter bubble” has stopped being quite so universal and become more of a right wing talking point.
Between a bubble and the culture war screeching that is inextricably Twitter now, I'll take the bubble.
Bluesky seems unfriendly to email-alias providers like SimpleLogin. I signed up with an alias and was suspended within minutes.
bsky.app email support [1] requested me to contact them via blueskyweb.xyz email instead [2], but mail from aliases appears dropped by blueskyweb.xyz.
Gave up creating an account after being given the runaround. In contrast, Mastodon have worked fine for me.
[1]: https://bsky.social/about/support
[2]: https://bsky.social/about/blog/09-18-2024-trust-safety-updat...
The mainline bluesky "mushroom" PDS have been struggling with an influx of spam and bot accounts so they've gotten a bit picky on email addresses (which I partially get but also find quite frustrating).
Luckily there are alternative PDS that you can use without issue. Tangled[1] (the atproto github host) is one. They are a smaller PDS host so the usual caveats apply (if you act up they are more likely to notice you, downtime may occur, etc) but otherwise you can use them like you would any other PDS to interact with bluesky and the greater atproto network.
1. https://tangled.sh/signup
I regularly block throwaway email providers from PortableApps.com as that's where most of the genuinely awful community members come from. Racists screeds, death threats, and porn, oh my. The spammers, on the other hand, almost all use Gmail, Hotmail, Outlook, Yahoo.
I'm trying to like Bluesky. X has a large tech community and some deep thoughts/discussions on tech and philosophy matters, but I can't find similar people or groups on Bluesky yet.
On both Twitter and Bluesky, my best results at feed building have come from finding one person I find valuable, then looking at and following people they interact with and follow. A brief look at bios and recent posts helps. Then repeating this for additional interesting people.
I am fast to follow but also fast to unfollow if a person turns out to be a dud. An example of a dud is a person who is a cybersecurity expert but almost all their posts were about their travel: which hotels treated them well, complaints about flights, etc.
Bluesky also has a notion of lists, which folks seem to use. For example someone curates a list of people active in local politics and it’s a quick way for me to plug into what local activists and politicians are talking about. Again, I found it via one person I found interesting.
Search for "<topic of interest> starter pack"
It really depends what you are looking for. Try searching for some starter packs to seed your follow graph. The below site works well but the search is a bit dumb/literal and the packs are all user created so you'll want to check some of the accounts in the packs that come up before you blindly follow them.
https://blueskydirectory.com/starter-packs
Same with Mastodon for me. It's good, and the app is well done, but there's just no reason for me to use it.
The are fewer posters and likes on bluesky today than there were in early September of last year, and both graphs have been trending down consistently since February of this year.
Bs went from 2.8m likers/day its peak to 1.1m today.
Yes certain so-called scientific fields that have a 100% viewpoint capture in academia only feel comfortable sharing views in the bluesky bubble, and they’re the exclusively-BA schools like “Integrative Biology” that this paper is published in.
This is not true?
https://bsky.jazco.dev/stats
There was a huge bump of new users right after the election, and things have gone down since then, but they are still much higher than they were in September 2024. And if you look at the tail of the graph, it seems to be holding pretty steady, which is about what you would expect for a social network after a huge spike of growth: not all of those users will stick around.
All the trends look downward to me?
I find it really difficult to care about whether other people use a website or not. I stopped using it at one point, and I started using another website instead. I really don't care if other people continue to use it because I can just continue on with my life ignoring it.
I spent numerous times a day crafting paragraphs desperately trying to convince others that I didn't care. The faster I can realize the feeling's probably mutual, the faster I hit that back button and find the next thing to not care about.
That's nice. Glad you stopped by.
Bluesky is constantly bleeding users so even if this is true it won't be relevant for long.
https://blueskyfeeds.com/bluesky-user-growth?t=3m
That's too bad, does anyone know why?
yes. because "no fun allowed" is not very attractive.
It is to a certain kind of personality. Hacker News is very much "no fun allowed" and people here seem like it.
In a recent post about todo apps almost all the comments use plain text. Hacker News is niche and tiny.
yes exactly. thats why hackernews is niche.
I see plenty of "fun" on Blue Sky.
What "fun" is not allowed? Be explicit.
Try posting anything about AI or LLMs. You will be inundated with people deriding you for even looking at it. The only accepted opinion on bsky is "ai bad, mkay". The doomerism is suffocating.
People disagreeing with you is not the same as something not being allowed.
What is it you'd like to be posting that you think you aren't allowed to?
That's a 12 week window though. Foolish to use that as a long-term viability measure. I'd be willing to wager usage could come up again as the U.S. midterms ramp up in 2026.
They’ve been bleeding users for nearly a year.
https://bsky.jazco.dev/stats
2024-08-21 they had 156,328 unique posters, 2025-08-2021 they had 669,909. So "nearly" a year is cherry-picking.
Whatever "bleeding" is happening* is after some enormous growth. I'm not a booster at all, they ought to be concerned about this recent depletion, but this slow decline is hardly the death knell.
*: edited from "has happened"
I'll buy that narrative if you can demonstrate that an another big service lost 11.5% users in the last three months.
Demonstrate to me that your opinion is valuable and maybe I'll consider it
BlueSky and Mastodon are as relevant and useful as Blogger.com; Threads meanwhile has leeched itself to Instagram and somehow existing.
There is no point in creating an account there, even the Elon Haters have gone back, they keep the BSky account as a backup.
Sad, but if you want to feel the global pulse (however weak) X/Twitter is still the place.
Also X/Twitter is an insane name.
I have 140k followers and a strong incentive to go back to X. I do check in occasionally for the reasons you state, and it’s unusable and high-noise every time I do it. There was a golden age for science on Twitter and it’s over. On BlueSky I don’t get the huge engagement (and there’s too much politics) but I can blather on about cryptography and people are enthusiastic and I don’t get weird bluecheck crypto scammers in my replies.
I find it much easier to filter out the politics on BlueSky and focus on my professional connections. I gave up on Twitter years ago precisely because I got sucked into politics all the bloody time.
Having control over your timeline/algorithm, and the absence of engagement bait, makes it worthwhile for me to be on such a platform for the first time.
I have been enjoying your Twitter feed over Bluesky, much prefer the lower volume but more curated posts
Could it be your algorithm on X is now uncalibrated due to your prolonged absence ?
The algorithm on X is intentionally less calibrated for everyone. For example replies are now ordered by subscriber status rather than time stamp or relevance. Subscribers also have preference in “For You” feeds and suggested accounts. There is also an overt thumb on the scale for certain accounts like Elon Musk or the Cat Turd guy.
It’s still an entertaining place to find memes etc, but any use as real signal for public sentiment is long gone.
> even the Elon Haters have gone back, they keep the BSky account as a backup.
My Mastodon timeline full of interesting people says otherwise. I think you're overgeneralising some experience.
mastodon is a fediverse client. not a destination. its worth getting right
Totally not my experience. All interesting people are on Bluesky now and quite active.
I’m glad to see folks moving off Xitter. But this feels like just repeating the same mistake by moving to a VC-funded centralized platform. What prevents ActivityPub from being technically sufficient—or is this just the network effect in action?
It's the network effect in action - most people just wanted "Twitter without Elon's bullshit" and Bluesky provided that.
Mastodon is great but most of the arguments for using Mastodon over Bluesky are honestly arguments most people don't care about, and the Mastodon community can be aggressive and hostile to newcomers, which is great for sustaining a community and preserving your culture against Eternal September but not great for onboarding new people.
Seems to be similar to my experience. I used to go to track and follow interesting individuals - scientists, engineers, artists... then it all got washed away with flamebait. Bluesky doesn't feel like its there yet, but I'm hopeful
Personally Twitter was very useful as a mid-career engineer to keep up to date on Bay Area developments and connect with my former coworkers. Several of my previous jobs were the result of Twitter DMs.
At this point someone being a big Twitter user would be a deal breaker for joining their company.
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Blue Sky has far more moderation. Unfortunately some of that includes limiting political view points. I always looked at BlueSky as reddit lite from that perspective. Their "respect others" rule appears to primarily apply to protecting left of center posters. Academia as a whole is left of center so I understand the overlap there.
X has almost no moderation. Its the wild wild west. You can read a thoughtful post about nutrition followed by outright antisemitism. X is the free speech platform, almost anything goes. I am a free speech maximalist though, my only limit being personal threats of violence, targeted attacks (revenge porn, pornographic image manipulation, doxxing, etc. ) other than that whatever people want to say or ideas they want to push should be debated in the public space. No censorship. Freedom of speech of course does not mean freedom from consequence. If I am spouting racist diatribe under my real name and lose my job, that's on me.
I prefer X as I like being exposed to all sorts of view points and find the more extreme posts amusing as its not something you see on the daily. I'm a jew and at one point the algorithm seemed to think I was an open neo-nazi. Was pretty funny, did not bother me at all.
Each to their own, the nice thing is that there are options.
BlueSky isn’t mere “moderation”, it is a narrative security ops platform that has the feature of social networking. It distills the worst of Reddit practices and makes them available at greater speed and scale.
X on the other hand, has a far lighter touch, opting to cutting back the ability to silence at scale and speed.
I wish that was the case but at least in my domain, after many people initially switched to bluesky, most eventually went back since many high-profile people did not make the switch.
I find the reverse, that everyone has a bsky but few have an X. The people still posting there tend to be the type looking for clicks (like promoting their brand or whatever) instead of just wanting to share their thoughts and science
Do you have any hypotheses why these high-profile people didn't make the switch?
I guess that many high-profile people are too busy with their regular work to be mindful of politics/ethics and thus they can't be bothered to switch. But maybe there are other reasons as well?
It's no escape from the angry political stuff, it's just a jump from one end of the political spectrum to the other.
Best to just cut down the social media usage. Twitter-style social media isn't a good place to have deep and meaningful discussions of anything.
Shame though, way back before Trump/Brexit and the era of extreme tribalism, Twitter was full of interesting creative and technical stuff :(
For what it's worth bluesky is fairly low on politics if you unpin the discover feed.
The following feed is purely content by people you follow.
There are also other feeds like "for you" which only shows you posts liked by the people who liked the posts you liked. If you mainly interact with niche/technical/creative content and avoid politics, those feeds will trend towards avoiding politics as well.
I’ve observed that most of those who switched back are egotists addicted to their status as influencers, not people wishing to actually participate in public conversations.
Good riddance, I say. My Bluesky and Mastodon feeds are much nicer these days without pseudo-celebrities Pontificating About Important Things.
So they surveyed a few hundred people and that’s supposed to justify an academic paper? In a formerly prestigious journal (emphasis on the former - if you need evidence that it’s been co-opted by activists take a look at its home page).
i have only read the title and synopsis, but weighing the professional value of personal microblogging platforms seems misguided , i wonder what the breakdown would be if linkedin (the "professional" microblogging platform, even as awful as it may be) were included , i would wager that it would be the winner. nevermind that "following academics" is something that sounds better than it actually is and reduces the individual to their profession. a more interesting question is where the dilettantes frequent
Circa 2018-2020, Twitter felt genuinely unique as a social media platform to find intelligent scientific and policy discussion. The quality of discussion in my feed felt much higher than reddit or HN. I could barely imagine leaving it. By 2024, that completely reversed, and it felt much so, so stupider than anywhere else. So many scientists have left. Eventually I left despite having 1000s of followers.
Bluesky has recapitulated or even surpassed peak sci twitter. The signal:noise is excellent. However, it requires some work because there is no algorithm. Aggressively unfollow people with low signal:noise, use the custom feeds that disable reposts and enable replies, use the Quiet Posters feed, and use sill.social. This has created a science feed that for me surpasses even the peak of Twitter, let alone X today which is unusable for scientific discussion.
Finally, the thing that drives me crazy is that Bluesky is literally a popular open-source, nonprofit, Ad-less, algorithm-less, truly free and partially decentralized social media network. It's what we all dreamed about in the 2010s! It's Mastodon but actually popular! But half the tech community have convinced themselves it's a "liberal bubble" (that anyone can join....) and that the website that apparently isn't a bubble is the, err, website run by a billionaire with an algorithm designed to promote certain political content that agrees with that billionaire. Absolutely bizarre situation.
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Like what?
My Twitter account was hijacked earlier this year. I created it in 2007 using an e-mail address on a domain I've owned since 1999. Multiple attempts to recover the account have been rejected.
I created a new account. Since I'm not following anybody, I see a random-ish feed of things.
It's kinda jarring going from a feed of tech science music to misinformation getrichquick scams and reposted viral content. Like woah.
That’s fine. If they want a hugbox, then they can have one.
But if they want scientific or public facing discourse, they will have to leave it.
In recent years, new leadership at Twitter has made substantive changes that have resulted in increases in the prevalence of pseudoscience, conspiracy theory, and harassment on the platform
changes to Twitter have made the social media platform no longer professionally useful or pleasant
I think we need to be honest that - while there is some truth there - this is the view from elements of the left who were instrumental in suppressing conservative voices and generally making it an unpleasant environment for people who did not subscribe to modish cultural takes under the previous management.
The alternative view is of course that for good or ill, freedom of speech is a much higher priority now - which you would think is more in tune with scientific and rational enquiry.
None of that is mentioned in the abstract which immediately suggests caution should be taken when evaluating this study.
Well, Bluesky is an open-source, algorithmless, decentralizable community platform with crowd sourced opt-in moderation, so it's the place to go for free speech, as opposed to the website run by the guy who bans people who disagree with him, has an AI he wants to rewrite history with, right, and has an algorithm preferentially promote his political views? This is common sense stuff to be honest
Bluesky is not the place to go for free speech. The admins ban users from the entire site for a variety of reasons, including disagreement over political viewpoints.
No, you can host your own server, subscribe to your own moderation services. It's a protocol like email.
Full stack, and ability to opt out of purely ideological filters that are essentially trying to mandate Dorsey Twitter?
At least with Mastodon, you weren’t tied as tightly or centrally, such that the worst one can do is balkanize instance groups as opposed to efficient narrative security ops.
Like what?
> None of that is mentioned in the abstract which immediately suggests caution should be taken when evaluating this study.
You're entitled to your opinion of course but it's little more than an anecdote and doesn't offer any meaningful counterpoint except, ironically, an admonition for us to 'be honest'.
This "anecdotal" response gets quite old, where have you been to have missed the years of suppression of non-far-left voices in the 2000s?
Anyway, to get you started you can read some of the articles linked in my other response to a Quillette reader:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44985171
You are claiming that elements of the left harassed conservative voices on the platform, which agrees completely with the point to are attempting to discredit. The sort of harassment that can only occur by placing a high priority on freedom of speech. It is hard to have a professional discussion with angry people shouting at you, no matter your ideology.
You are claiming that elements of the left harassed conservative voices on the platform
You misquote me. I said "suppressing" not "harassed". I disagree strongly with both, but it is the former that is incompatible with free speech; the latter exploits it.
Suppressing is a form of harassment. The easiest and most common way of suppressing speech is to just keep shouting at an opponent so nobody can hear what they are saying. As discussed in the article, a situation where the platform was unusable for professional discussions due to the noise. Suppressed speech.
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Years ago Quillette claimed to have objective factual proof that Conservatives were being oppressed on Twitter with a data-driven approach. Alright, sounds good, so let's take a look. And ... their data includes shining examples of conservatism such as the American Nazi Party. It continues with more upstanding citizens such as David Duke, Richard Spencer, and similar. Such poor oppressed conservatives.
I did a quick fact-check on your post here by googling quillette twitter cancel
These are among the first articles that come up and note that none of them are Nazis, just people bucking the weird dictats of what was allowed to be said at the time.
Twitter's Trans-Activist Decree
https://quillette.com/2018/11/28/twitters-trans-activist-dec...
Ending Discrimination by Twitter
https://quillette.com/2022/11/28/ending-discrimination-on-tw...
Why I'm Suing Twitter
https://quillette.com/2019/02/26/why-im-suing-twitter/
Think Cancel Culture Doesn’t Exist? My Own ‘Lived Experience’ Says Otherwise
https://quillette.com/2020/07/30/think-cancel-culture-doesnt...
https://quillette.com/2019/02/12/it-isnt-your-imagination-tw...
https://web.archive.org/web/20230118212512/https://www.richa...
https://web.archive.org/web/20220628153148/https://f621cf77-...
Didn't have it bookmarked; really didn't take that long to find it because it's literally the first search result: https://imgur.com/a/FZQ1D7b
That you simply repeat talking points in your "fact check" says a lot.
I read your link and it describes the suppression of conservative voices while far left voices posting genuine messages of hate were supported.
Surely you read your own link before posting it?
I've additionally given you several examples which counter your original claim that it's basically just Nazis whining about being cancelled, which you've dismissed flippantly.
This is a serious subject; if you can't address it in good faith I will leave it at that.
You really think this is a full comprehensive list of everyone that was banned, or that it's a highly cherry-picked list of examples? At the time people pointed out it missed many prominent left-wing bans that were excluded, but I can't be bothered to search for that now.
And maybe some more left-wing accounts should have been banned too; I don't know. I never claimed anything about this. I said that Quillette published an article that considered the American Nazi Party and similar far-right explicit Nazis and KKK members as "conservatives" that were being banned.
It's really not that hard to say "yeah, the American Nazi party probably should have been banned, it was a mistake to include that on that data-driven approach, as was the inclusion of David Duke and Richard Spencer".
why would a scientist need anti-social media?
Scientists have used Twitter for more than a decade before Elon took over. It was extremely popular and there were large communities of scientists there sharing all kinds of stuff. After it became X, they have largely disappered. Many just stopped doing that kind of social media.
Why would someone else communicate in a way that you disapprove of?
Well, because they are someone else.
I've stayed with X, just because it still seems like that's where stuff is talked about. If and when that changes, I won't need an academic study to tell me so.
If either "reality has a liberal bias" or "scientific institutions have become ideologically captured" then something akin to this would make sense. Of course, how you would distinguish between the two I'm not sure.
a lot of tech and design conversations are happening on X. is there a way to mirror those on Bluesky?
This seems factually incorrect? There are massively more scientists on X than bluesky, and they seem to engage in their profession on X all the time.
The scientists I know personally are actually using LinkedIn the most for discussions around their work, and extremely rarely using any platform other than LinkedIn for this
Bluesky is dead, Mastodon is hardly any more popular. Neither X nor any of these should have ever been of scientific value. If you want to publish science, use a standard blog platform like a normal person and curate a RSS feed of stuff you like.
Twitter was never professionally useful.
FWIW- it seems tech is still firmly on X. I’ve made an account there recently (@ma_bettinson !) and the discussions are quite great, though there are quite a few grifters
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What about studying...Nazi bots?
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You’re posting this here on HN which is a curated social space that absolutely does not let you post annoying things that serve only to offend people and is good because it produces high signal/noise. Presumably you’re here because you appreciate that high quality discussion. Thats what Twitter used to be like for scientists, except that you also had access to smart people from industry and smart non-scientists as well and so “scientists in the academic bubble” had access to a huge number of perspectives. Now X is 4chan. 4chan is useful for its specific brand of content, it’s just not useful the way HN is or Twitter was.
It would be one thing if Bluesky were a no-politics, effortpost-only zone. It's not that though. In actuality, Bluesky is an echo chamber just like 2010s-era Twitter, but somehow even more strident.
Academics who insisting on their colleagues moving to Bluesky aren't deleting noise. That's a pretext. What these academics are really doing is trying to use their social power to enforce singular answers to questions that divide the public. They're tacitly asserting that nobody can be a legitimate intellectual and disagree with them on social issues having nothing to do with their field.
I'm not going to waste my time on people who can't tolerate divergent perspectives. X has plenty of tools to help people prune distractions from their timelines. This isn't a signal to noise ratio thing so much as a contamination taboo. Frazer would be proud. The problem these academics have with X isn't that it's noisy channel, but actually that it lets the wrong people participate.
These academics think they have a monopoly on knowledge production, but they don't. Close-mindedness bleeds from the social to the professional domain with terrifying speed. Censorship is anathema to discovery. When academics try to use ostracism to build echo chambers like Bluesky, they're only accelerating the ongoing divorce of academia and scholarship.
Bluesky isn't perfect, and I actually find it kind of annoying, but it's a "follow who you want" place. If your timeline is strident, that's because you followed people who are strident. The same isn't really true of Twitter, where even the "Following" timeline shows you algorithmically-recommended content and then boosts the replies of paying customers (AKA scammers.) To get the same feature from X, you need to do something complicated with "Lists", and it doesn't fix the reply ordering problem.
The rest of your comment tells me that you don't really spend a lot of time with scientists, but you do spend a lot of time developing your opinions from social media. I wish you could do the opposite! Academics are great and funny and sometimes wrong about social issues just like other people, but they also work on some of the coolest problems we have.
You can absolutely say things that other people may find offensive on Bluesky.
The difference is there's no algorithmic feed pushing stuff at you and it's easy to filter or block things you personally find offensive.
So you can totally have an audience of people who like what you say, but you have no right to annoy an audience who dislikes it.
If you like being outraged all the time, then fine. Many people don't want that experience.
The Vice President of America was banned from Bsky in one pretty innocuous post.
JD Vance's account was temporarily banned because it was suspected of being an impostor account, and it was reinstated within 20 minutes, and continues to be active.
He was not banned because his "pretty innocuous post" offended anyone's political sensibilities. He has 15k followers. He isn't being oppressed or censored.
Is it unreasonable not to want to share a social network with the people who want to exclude you from practical participation in society?
If you’re providing products of scientific research that have societal impact, it is a certain type of actionable cowardice to hide in a BlueSky hugbox.
Ummm... you know that Bluesky is the social network that permits anyone to say anything, right? Like, that's just how it works? That the open source decentralizable community moderation opt in website is the free speech website and the website run by a billionaire with an algorithm and AI designed to promote his political views isn't? Right?
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THIS
Are scientists stupid, this study says yesss....
i wonder why various governments and journalists keep using anti-social media as well, due to the innate conflict of interest: anti-social media is all about sinking governments and trad journalism.
don't go on the rival platform and legitimize it further, IMO
Because to get votes from voters and views on their articles, they have to go to where people are, not where they wish people were.
It is often not a rational decision. People spend time on social media because they find it interesting or entertaining. That doesn’t mean it is actually useful or good for them. That includes journalists.
High-profile brands are somewhat stuck because departing would cause a negative news cycle. Quite a few have shrunk their organic social media teams and put more resources into paid social media, which has a more directly measurable ROI.