“I’m in the Bluesky Tonight”: Insights from a year worth of social data

2024/04/29 by Andrea Failla, Giulio Rossetti · 2 voices · 18 citations
Physics and Astronomy · Social Sciences · #Complex Network Analysis Techniques #Computational sociology #Computer science #Computer security #Data science #Internet privacy #Misinformation #Misinformation and Its Impacts #Opinion Dynamics and Social Influence #Social media #World Wide Web

paper · pdf · open access · doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0310330

published in PLoS ONE 19(11), e0310330 (Public Library of Science)

openalex publication_date 2024/11/05 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/04

Abstract

Pollution of online social spaces caused by rampaging d/misinformation is a growing societal concern. However, recent decisions to reduce access to social media APIs are causing a shortage of publicly available, recent, social media data, thus hindering the advancement of computational social science as a whole. We present a large, high-coverage dataset of social interactions and user-generated content from Bluesky Social to address this pressing issue. The dataset contains the complete post history of over 4M users (81% of all registered accounts), totalling 235M posts. We also make available social data covering follow, comment, repost, and quote interactions. Since Bluesky allows users to create and like feed generators (i.e., content recommendation algorithms), we also release the full output of several popular algorithms available on the platform, along with their timestamped "like" interactions. This dataset allows novel analysis of online behavior and human-machine engagement patterns. Notably, it provides ground-truth data for studying the effects of content exposure and self-selection and performing content virality and diffusion analysis.

Cited by

• Quantifying Political Partisanship for Cross-Platform Analyses
• Paper Skygest: Personalized Academic Recommendations on Bluesky
• A Blue Start: A large-scale pairwise and higher-order social network dataset
• Self-moderation in the decentralized era: decoding blocking behavior on Bluesky
• Multi-Platform Aggregated Dataset of Online Communities (MADOC)
• A Simulation Framework for Studying Recommendation-Network Co-evolution in Social Platforms
• Simulating Online Social Media Conversations on Controversial Topics Using AI Agents Calibrated on Real-World Data
• PolitiSky24: U.S. Political Bluesky Dataset with User Stance Labels
• A longitudinal analysis of misinformation, polarization and toxicity on Bluesky after its public launch
• The effect of digital platform adoption on the resilience of innovation ecosystems: An empirical analysis using social media data

Discussions

• 🚨 ALERT 🚨 Are you looking for (recent) longitudinal social media data? We recently released a huge #bluesky anonymized #dataset of social interactions and contents covering 80% of the service use [bsky, 36 points, 3 comments]
• Anyway here's the arxiv paper from the curators of the dataset arxiv.org/abs/2404.18984 [bsky, 0 points, 1 comments]

Related

• BlueTempNet: A Temporal Multi-network Dataset of Social Interactions in Bluesky Social
• A Blue Start: A large-scale pairwise and higher-order social network dataset
• A longitudinal analysis of misinformation, polarization and toxicity on Bluesky after its public launch
• Bluesky: Network topology, polarization, and algorithmic curation
• The Dawn of Decentralized Social Media: An Exploration of Bluesky's Public Opening