Looking AT the Blue Skies of Bluesky

Leonhard Balduf (1) , Saidu Sokoto (2) , Onur Ascigil (3) , Gareth Tyson (4) , Björn Scheuermann (1) , Maciej Korczyński (5, 6, 7) , Ignacio Castro (8) , Michaŀ Król (2)

1 TU Darmstadt - Technische Universität Darmstadt - Technical University of Darmstadt
2 University of London [London]
3 Lancaster University
4 HKUST - Hong Kong University of Science and Technology
5 Grenoble INP - Institut polytechnique de Grenoble - Grenoble Institute of Technology
6 LIG - Laboratoire d'Informatique de Grenoble
7 Drakkar
8 QMUL - Queen Mary University of London

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 trade-offs, 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.

Mots clés: CCS Concepts Networks → Network measurement Social media networks • Information systems → Social networks Bluesky; Decentralized Social Networks; Social Network Analysis; CCS Concepts; Networks → Network measurement; Social media networks; • Information systems → Social networks Bluesky

Domaines: Informatique [cs]

Leonhard Balduf, Saidu Sokoto, Onur Ascigil, Gareth Tyson, Björn Scheuermann, et al.. Looking AT the Blue Skies of Bluesky. Internet Measurement Conference, ACM, Nov 2024, Madrid, Spain. pp.76 - 91, ⟨10.1145/3646547.3688407⟩. ⟨hal-04788468⟩