Looking AT the Blue Skies of Bluesky

TL;DR

This paper conducts the first large-scale analysis of Bluesky, a prominent decentralized microblogging platform, and decomposes and opens the key functions of the platform into subcomponents that can be provided by third party stakeholders.

Abstract

The pitfalls of centralized social networks, such as Facebook and Twitter/X, have led to concerns about control, transparency, and accountability. Decentralized social networks have emerged as a result with the goal of empowering users. These decentralized approaches come with their own tradeoffs, and therefore multiple architectures exist. In this paper, we conduct the first large-scale analysis of Bluesky, a prominent decentralized microblogging platform. In contrast to alternative approaches (e.g. Mastodon), Bluesky decomposes and opens the key functions of the platform into subcomponents that can be provided by third party stakeholders. We collect a comprehensive dataset covering all the key elements of Bluesky, study user activity and assess the diversity of providers for each sub-components.

Figures (12)

• Figure 1: Daily operation and active user counts.
• Figure 2: Active user counts of individual language-specific communities.
• Figure 3: Number of subdomain handles per registered domain name (effective second-level domain); for clarity, we exclude subdomains of bsky.social, which account for 98.9% of all observed FQDN handles.
• Figure 4: Number of labels produced by source per month (left-hand axis), and number of community-run labeler services over time (right-hand axis).
• Figure 5: Number of labels produced by source vs. reaction time --- median and quartiles shown.