Even though political leanings on Bluesky are relatively homogeneous, we find issues-based divergence by studying opinions related to the Israel-Palestine conflict where opposing viewpoints seldomly interact.

Users predominantly share left-center news sources (63.4%), with very few right-leaning outlets (7.9%). Interestingly, the spread of questionable sources is minimal - only 0.14% of shared links.

We found that despite its novel features, Bluesky's network structure resembles other social networks: heavy-tailed distributions, high clustering, and short connection paths. Sign-ups were strongly correlated with controversial events at Twitter/X!

Feed algorithms have been blamed for polarisation, misinfo, and radicalisation. However, research has been hindered by the fact that feeds are backboxes – we don’t know how they rank content and cant study exposure. Bsky users create their own feeds and we can see which feeds user like!

Israel & Palestine (Cont): Fascinating patterns in the relative proportion of stances on the conflict over time. While interest in the conflict has decreased over time this decrease is mainly driven by supporters of Israel while voices of Palestine have remained vocal and now dominate the discourse.

But does that mean that there is no controversy? We train a Transformer model to infer the stance of Users on the Israel – Palestine Conflict and repeat the analysis. Two large modular clusters of users emerge! This patterns show clear signs of polarisation.

Who uses Bluesky? We look at the political leanings of Users, and investigate polarisations and political leanings on Bluesky. Bluesky users are almost exclusively center-left leaning with a unimodal distribution of political opinions.

Millions of users have created hundreds of millions of posts, likes and follows – all accessible via the AT Protocol. We find that initial signups to Bluesky were driven by Technical Troubles on Twitter. Remember receiving rate limit errors last year? That lead to a surge in singups on Bluesky!

It was a pleasure to present our work on Blocking on
@bsky.app
@netsciconf.bsky.social
! In this thread I will make a case for Bluesky as a fantastic opportunity for scientists to answer old questions with new data! (1/7)

Meanwhile on Twitter ... I don't understand how you could mess up so badly.