Scientists Are Flocking to Bluesky | EUROtoday

Per Shiffman and Wester, an “overwhelming majority” of respondents mentioned that Bluesky has a “vibrant and healthy online science community,” whereas Twitter now not does. And many Bluesky customers reported getting extra bang for his or her buck, so to talk, on Bluesky. They might need a decrease follower rely, however these followers are way more engaged: Someone with 50,000 Twitter/X followers, for instance, would possibly get 5 likes on a given put up; however on Bluesky, they might solely have 5,000 followers, however their posts will get 100 likes.

According to Shiffman, Twitter at all times was once within the high three when it comes to referral visitors for posts on Southern Fried Science. Then got here the “Muskification,” and all of a sudden Twitter referrals weren’t even cracking the highest 10. By distinction, in 2025 up to now, Bluesky has pushed “a hundred times as many page views” to Southern Fried Science as Twitter. Ironically, “the blog post that’s gotten the most page views from Twitter is the one about this paper,” mentioned Shiffman.

Ars social media supervisor Connor McInerney confirmed that Ars Technica has additionally seen a gentle dip in Twitter referral visitors up to now in 2025. Furthermore, “I can say anecdotally that over the summer we’ve seen our Bluesky traffic start to surpass our Twitter traffic for the first time,” McInerney mentioned, attributing the expansion to a mix of things. “We’ve been posting to the platform more often and our audience there has grown significantly. By my estimate our audience has grown by 63 percent since January. The platform in general has grown a lot too—they had 10 million users in September of last year, and this month the latest numbers indicate they’re at 38 million users. Conversely, our Twitter audience has remained fairly static across the same period of time.”

Bubble, Schmubble

As for scientists seeking to share scholarly papers on-line, Shiffman pulled the Altmetrics stats for his and Wester’s new paper. “It’s already one of the 10 most shared papers in the history of that journal on social media,” he mentioned, with 14 shares on Twitter/X vs over a thousand shares on Bluesky (as of 4 pm ET on August 20). “If the goal is showing there’s a more active academic scholarly conversation on Bluesky—I mean, damn,” he mentioned.

And whereas there was a gentle drumbeat of op-eds of late in sure legacy media shops accusing Bluesky of being trapped in its personal liberal bubble, Shiffman, for one, has few issues about that. “I don’t care about this, because I don’t use social media to argue with strangers about politics,” he wrote in his accompanying weblog put up. “I use social media to talk about fish. When I talk about fish on Bluesky, people ask me questions about fish. When I talk about fish on Twitter, people threaten to murder my family because we’re Jewish.” He in contrast the present incarnation of Twitter as no higher than 4Chan or TruthSocial when it comes to the share of “conspiracy-prone extremists” within the viewers. “Even if you want to stay, the algorithm is working against you,” he wrote.

“There have been a lot of opinion pieces about why Bluesky is not useful because the people there tend to be relatively left-leaning,” Shiffman informed Ars. “I haven’t seen any of those same people say that Twitter is bad because it’s relatively right-leaning. Twitter is not a representative sample of the public either.” And given his deal with ocean conservation and science-based, data-driven environmental advocacy, he’s prone to discover a extra engaged and persuadable viewers at Bluesky.