Bluesky へ移住する科学者コミュニティ？

There is a growing University of York community on Bluesky (more on how to find this community below), and if you’d like to be part of it read on: this guide is for you. It’s worth noting that the official word from the University is that staff are welcome to set up and maintain personal social media accounts related to their work, provided that their use conforms with the University’s social media policy – best to ensure you have read the policy before setting up a new Bluesky account.

Several users who maintain presences on both X and Bluesky report that engagement is much higher on the latter: in fact a comparison by Andrew Dressler found engagement was 10 times greater on Bluesky:

as an experiment, I posted the same post to twitter and bluesky.

here is the time series of engagements (sum of comments, reposts, likes) from the two platforms.

Note that I have 39K followers on twitter and 7K here, so engagement per follower here is more than 10 times higher here on bluesky.

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— Andrew Dessler (@andrewdessler.com) November 12, 2024 at 8:24 AM

Furthermore Katharine Hayhoe reported that not only was the level of engagement considerably higher on Bluesky, the nature of the responses was much more positive too.

There was an even bigger difference in the comments received. All on Threads and all but one here were positive, constructive, or neutral (one person was just being a jerk, not a troll). Only 18% on X were positive or neutral. The rest were negative, many highly so.

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— Katharine Hayhoe (@katharinehayhoe.com) July 3, 2024 at 8:01 AM

For scientists the network is starting to look like home. Academic institutions, scientific journals and conferences, and international organizations such as the World Health Organization have established a presence there in recent days. The platform has become so popular that on Monday, Altmetric, a company that tracks where published research is mentioned online, urged publishers to implement a “share to Bluesky” button like those to share content to Facebook, X, or LinkedIn that many websites feature. Many researchers say the atmosphere on Bluesky so far is less polarized than on X, partly because there is more content moderation and the user base is, for now, much smaller and more homogenous. “There is this pent-up demand among scientists for what is essentially the old Twitter,” Young says.

Most researchers leaving X are keeping their accounts there for now, in part to keep their usernames from being taken up by others and used to spread more misinformation. Hayhoe says she occasionally logs into X, mostly to invite some remaining colleagues to move to Bluesky. The last time she checked, half her messages were from people saying they had abandoned ship, she says. “It’s a ghost town.”