CoChat
Sign Up
Cited by 16Blockchain Technology Applications and SecurityPrivacy, Security, and Data ProtectionMedia and Digital Communication

Looking AT the Blue Skies of Bluesky

Open access
Balduf, Leonhard, Sokoto, Saidu, Ascigil, Onur, Tyson, Gareth, Scheuermann, Björn, Korczyński, Maciej, Castro, Ignacio, Król, Michaŀ·2024·Proceedings of the 2024 ACM on Internet Measurement Conference
DOI 10.1145/3646547.3688407
Open this paper in CoChat — free account

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 trade-offs, 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.

The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.

Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.

A few free checks a day · papers already verified open instantly · results are public

Integrity signals

Registry

Crossref · 10.1145/3646547.3688407

Cites

Statistics

Claims the paper makes

The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.

Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.

A few free checks a day · papers already verified open instantly · results are public

Claims other papers make about this one

Each is checked against this paper’s own text: does it say what the citing paper says it does?

Self-check

Percentages, sums and reported differences re-computed from the paper’s own numbers.

The self-check needs the paper’s full text.

Cites

No references could be resolved yet.

Research works printed but not linked: 24

  1. [7][7] Leonhard Balduf, Maciej Korczyński, Onur Ascigil, Navin V Keizer, George Pavlou, Björn Scheuermann, and Michał Król. 2023. The Cloud Strikes Back: Investigating the Decentralization of IPFS. In Proceedings of the 2023 ACM on Internet Measurement Conference . 391-405. -
  2. [8][8] J Bayer, Y Nosyk, O Hureau, S Fernandez, S Paulovics, A Duda, and M Korczynski. 2022. Study on Domain Name System (DNS) abuse - Technical report. Appendix 1 . Publications Office of the European Union. https://doi.org/doi/10.2759/473317 - · DOI
  3. [9][9] Haris Bin Zia, Jiahui He, Ignacio Castro, and Gareth Tyson. 2024. Fediverse Migrations: A Study of User Account Portability on the Mastodon Social Network. In Proc. of ACM Internet Measurement Conference (IMC) . -
  4. [10][10] Haris Bin Zia, Aravindh Raman, Ignacio Castro, Ishaku Hassan Anaobi, Emiliano De Cristofaro, Nishanth Sastry, and Gareth Tyson. 2022. Toxicity in the decentralized web and the potential for model sharing. Proceedings of the ACM on Measurement and Analysis of Computing Systems 6, 2 (2022), 1-25. -
  5. [11][11] Lucio La Cava, Sergio Greco, and Andrea Tagarelli. 2021. Understanding the growth of the Fediverse through the lens of Mastodon. Applied Network Science 6 (2021), 1-35. -
  6. [12][12] Lucio La Cava, Sergio Greco, and Andrea Tagarelli. 2022. Information consumption and boundary spanning in decentralized online social networks: the case of mastodon users. Online Social Networks and Media 30 (2022), 100220. -
  7. [13][13] Lucio La Cava, Sergio Greco, and Andrea Tagarelli. 2022. Network analysis of the information consumption-production dichotomy in mastodon user behaviors. In Proceedings of the International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media , Vol. 16. 1378-1382. -
  8. [18][18] Barbara Guidi, Andrea Michienzi, and Laura Ricci. 2020. A graph-based socioeconomic analysis of steemit. IEEE Transactions on Computational Social Systems 8, 2 (2020), 365-376. -
  9. [19][19] Anaobi Ishaku Hassan, Aravindh Raman, Ignacio Castro, Haris Bin Zia, Emiliano De Cristofaro, Nishanth Sastry, and Gareth Tyson. 2021. Exploring content moderation in the decentralised web: The pleroma case. In Proceedings of the 17th International Conference on emerging Networking EXperiments and Technologies . 328-335. -
  10. [20][20] Jiahui He, Haris Bin Zia, Ignacio Castro, Aravindh Raman, Nishanth Sastry, and Gareth Tyson. 2023. Flocking to mastodon: Tracking the great twitter migration. In Proceedings of the 2023 ACM on Internet Measurement Conference . 111-123. -
  11. [22][22] Lars Andreassen Jaatun, Anders Ringen, and Martin Gilje Jaatun. 2022. Yet Another Blockchain-based Privacy-friendly Social Network. In 2022 IEEE International Conference on Cloud Computing Technology and Science (CloudCom) . IEEE, 222-229. -
  12. [23][23] Ujun Jeong, Bohan Jiang, Zhen Tan, H. Russell Bernard, and Huan Liu. 2024. BlueTempNet: A Temporal Multi-network Dataset of Social Interactions in Bluesky Social. arXiv:2407.17451 [cs.SI] https://arxiv.org/abs/2407.17451 - · arXiv
  13. [24][24] Ujun Jeong, Ayushi Nirmal, Kritshekhar Jha, Susan Xu Tang, H. Russell Bernard, and Huan Liu. 2024. User Migration across Multiple Social Media Platforms. arXiv:2309.12613 [cs.SI] https://arxiv.org/abs/2309.12613 - · arXiv
  14. [25][25] Martin Kleppmann, Paul Frazee, Jake Gold, Jay Graber, Daniel Holmgren, Devin Ivy, Jeromy Johnson, Bryan Newbold, and Jaz Volpert. 2024. Bluesky and the AT Protocol: Usable Decentralized Social Media. arXiv preprint arXiv:2402.03239 (2024). - · arXiv
  15. [26][26] Victor Le Pochat, Tom Van Goethem, Samaneh Tajalizadehkhoob, Maciej Korczyński, and Wouter Joosen. 2019. Tranco: A Research-Oriented Top Sites Ranking Hardened Against Manipulation. In NDSS . -
  16. [27][27] Stephen McQuistin, Peter Snyder, Colin Perkins, Hamed Haddadi, and Gareth Tyson. 2023. A first look at the privacy harms of the public suffix list. In Proceedings of the 2023 ACM on Internet Measurement Conference . 383-390. -
  17. [28][28] Dorian Quelle and Alexandre Bovet. 2024. Bluesky: Network Topology, Polarization, and Algorithmic Curation. arXiv:2405.17571 [cs.SI] https://arxiv.org/abs/ 2405.17571 - · arXiv
  18. [29][29] Aravindh Raman, Sagar Joglekar, Emiliano De Cristofaro, Nishanth Sastry, and Gareth Tyson. 2019. Challenges in the decentralised web: The mastodon case. In Proceedings of the internet measurement conference . 217-229. -
  19. [30][30] Alan Z Rozenshtein. 2023. Moderating the fediverse: Content moderation on distributed social media. J. Free Speech L. 3 (2023), 217. -
  20. [33][33] Dominic Tarr, Erick Lavoie, Aljoscha Meyer, and Christian Tschudin. 2019. Secure Scuttlebutt: An Identity-Centric Protocol for Subjective and Decentralized Applications (ICN '19) . Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 1-11. https://doi.org/10.1145/3357150.3357396 - · DOI
  21. [34][34] Leanne Townsend and Claire Wallace. 2017. The ethics of using social media data in research: A new framework. In The ethics of online research . Emerald Publishing Limited, 189-207. -
  22. [35][35] Yiluo Wei, Dennis Trautwein, Yiannis Psaras, Ignacio Castro, Will Scott, Aravindh Raman, and Gareth Tyson. 2024. The Eternal Tussle: Exploring the Role of Centralization in { IPFS } . In 21st USENIX Symposium on Networked Systems Design and Implementation (NSDI 24) . 441-454. -
  23. [36][36] Alma Whitten and J Doug Tygar. 1999. Why Johnny Can't Encrypt: A Usability Evaluation of PGP 5.0.. In USENIX security symposium , Vol. 348. 169-184. -
  24. [37][37] Wenrui Zuo, Aravindh Raman, Raul J Mondragón, and Gareth Tyson. 2023. Set in Stone: Analysis of an Immutable Web3 Social Media Platform (WWW '23) . Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 1865-1874. https://doi.org/10.1145/3543507.3583510 · DOI

Cited by

Sorted by citations

Authors
Balduf, L., Sokoto, S., Ascigil, O., Tyson, G., Scheuermann, B., Korczyński, M., Castro, I., & Król, M.
Affiliations
  • Technische Universität Darmstadt (DE)
  • City, University of London (GB)
  • Lancaster University (GB)
  • Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (GZ), Guangzhou, China
  • Laboratoire d'Informatique de Grenoble (FR)
  • Queen Mary University of London (GB)
  • City, University of London, London, United Kingdom
ORCID
Venue
Proceedings of the 2024 ACM on Internet Measurement Conference
Publisher
ACM
Published
2024-11-04
Pages
76-91
DOI
10.1145/3646547.3688407
OpenAlex
W4403981564
Cited by
16
References
0
Citations by year
2026: 6 · 2025: 9 · 2024: 1
FWCI
6.09
Type
conference paper
Language
en
Open access
Licence
Locations
  • ACM Internet Measurement Conference (IMC) (publishedVersion, cc-by)
  • Lancaster EPrints (Lancaster University) (acceptedVersion)
  • arXiv (Cornell University) (submittedVersion)
  • HAL (submittedVersion, cc-by)
  • City Research Online (City University London) (submittedVersion)
  • Rare & Special e-Zone (The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology) (submittedVersion)
  • arXiv (Cornell University)
Funders
German Research Foundation (SFB 1053: MAKI)
Topics
  • Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Information Systems › Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
  • Social Sciences › Sociology and Political Science › Privacy, Security, and Data Protection
  • Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Computer Networks and Communications › Media and Digital Communication
Keywords
Bluesky, decentralized social networks, microblogging, platform architecture, user activity, Mastodon

About these checks

Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.

Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.

Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.

What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›

Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review