Scientists Are Flocking to Bluesky

Per Shiffman and Wester, an “overwhelming majority” of respondents said that Bluesky had a “dynamic and healthy online scientific community”, while Twitter does not do so. And many Bluesky users said they had more blow for their money, so to speak, on Bluesky. They could have a lower number of followers, but these subscribers are much more committed: someone with 50,000 Twitter / X subscribers, for example, could obtain five likes on a given post; But on Bluesky, they can only have 5,000 subscribers, but their messages will receive 100 likes.

According to Shiffman, Twitter was still in the first three in terms of reference traffic for publications on Southern Fried Science. Then came the “muskification”, and suddenly, the Twitter references did not even carry out the Top 10. On the other hand, in 2025 so far, Bluesky has led “a hundred times more pages” to Southern Fried Science than Twitter. Ironically, “the blog post that has obtained the most pages from Twitter is that of this document,” said Shiffman.

ARS ‘social media director Connor Mcinerney confirmed that Ars Technica has also experienced a constant drop in reference traffic on Twitter until now in 2025. “In addition,” I can say anecdotally that during the summer, we saw our Bluesky traffic start to go beyond our traffic Twitter for the first time “, factors. “We publish more often on the platform and our audience has increased considerably. By my estimate, our audience has increased by 63% since January. The platform in general also increased a lot-they received 10 million users in September of last year, and this month, the latest figures indicate 38 million users. Conversely, our Twitter audience remained just during the same period. ”

Bubble, schmubble

As for scientists who seek to share learned online articles, Shiffman has drawn altmetrical statistics for his new document and new Wester document. “This is already one of the 10 most shared articles in the history of this newspaper on social networks,” he said, with 14 shares on Twitter / X vs more than a thousand sharing on Bluesky (at 4 p.m. on August 20). “If the objective shows that there is a more active university conversation on Bluesky-I mean, damn,” he said.

And although there was a constant drum beat recently in certain inherited media accusing Bluesky of being trapped in his own liberal bubble, Shiffman, for his part, has little concerns about this. “I don’t care, because I do not use social media to chat with foreigners on politics,” he wrote in his blog article that accompanies him. “I use social media to talk about fish. When I talk about fish on Bluesky, people ask me questions about fish. When I talk about fish on Twitter, people threaten to kill my family because we are Jewish. ” He compared the current incarnation of Twitter as no better than 4chan or true in terms of percentage of “extremists subjects to the plot” in the public. “Even if you want to stay, the algorithm works against you,” he wrote.

“There have been many opinion articles on the reasons why Bluesky is not useful because people there tend to be relatively on the left,” Shiffman told Ars. “I have not seen any of these same people say that Twitter is bad because it is relatively straight. Twitter is also not a representative sample of the public. ” And given the emphasis on the conservation of the oceans and the environmental advocacy based on the data, it is likely to find a more committed and convinceable audience in Bluesky.