Many in my (X-)Twitter bubble are in the process of moving or have already moved to Bluesky. And it’s not just this select group: Musk’s intervention in the US election and the election’s outcome were the proverbial last straw for many, many people.
Anger, frustration and herd-instincts aside, Bluesky is attractive to us old-timers, because it has (at least for now) some of old Twitter’s best qualities.
One thing that I find particularly gratifying is that significant parts of a particular constellation that was once known as ScienceTwitter are re-emerging on Bluesky. And that is not just a hunch: here is some research which suggests that ScienceSky is officially happening.
If you already are on Bluesky or would like to set up shop over there, you may find the Bluesky Network Analyzer a surprisingly useful tool. Basically, it helps to make your local network a bit more complete by finding accounts that you would probably want to follow. While the first setting is geared towards generally popular accounts that many in your bubble like (AOC was one of my top suggestions), the second setting helped me find some people and institutions without many followers (yet), whom I know from Twitter or – shock! – the so-called real life. That’s very handy.
Bonus track: I have a short post here on the blog which shows that accessing the Bluesky API from R is ridiculously easy: you can e.g. find interesting follows with just eight lines of code.
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