Looking AT the Blue Skies of Bluesky

TL;DR

This paper provides the first large-scale analysis of Bluesky, a decentralized microblogging platform, examining its architecture, user activity, and provider diversity to understand its unique decentralized approach.

Contribution

It offers a comprehensive dataset and analysis of Bluesky's architecture, user engagement, and third-party provider diversity, highlighting its novel modular design.

Findings

Bluesky decomposes platform functions into subcomponents.

User activity patterns on Bluesky are characterized.

Diversity of third-party providers varies across components.

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.