Like old Twitter': The scientific community finds a new home on Bluesky
www.science.org

... After recent changes to Elon Musk's X, a gradual migration turns into a stampede.

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

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

"It's just gone completely crazy," says Mike Young, a science communicator in Denmark who gives social media workshops to scientists. He and his colleague Lasse Hjorth Madsen did an analysis in August mapping science communities on Bluesky.

They found more than 20,000 influential scientists -- people on the platform who were followed by at least 30 other scientists in the same network.

When they repeated the analysis last week with an increased threshold of 40 scientist followers, the new number of influential scientists was almost 40,000.

It is likely to be many times that now, Young says. ...