And what do users think about SPs? They are positively perceived with ~5x more positive than negative comments back in July. The ratio increases over time with ~10x more positive comments at the end of 2024. The SP perception improves as the users start to use them more.
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Popular accounts are more likely to be included in SPs, increasing their existing popularity even further. We observe a “rich get richer” effect, with the gap between more and less popular accounts widening over time.
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But is it beneficial to be an SP member or creator? We assessed the impact on users' visibility. In the first week after its inclusion, the members received ~39% more follows than similar users not in SPs. This trend reaches 85% after four weeks.
🧵6/11

However, the created SPs ended up being highly impactful! Over the last 6 months, they accounted for up to 40% of all daily follow operations and represent an impressive ~20% of all the follow relations in the network!
🧵 5/11

Starter packs (SPs) were introduced in June 2024. Since then, 335k SPs have been created. Is it a lot? By the end of 2024, 1% of users created at least one SP, 6% were members of at least one SP, and 4% had employed the follow-all operation on an SP.
🧵4/11

@bsky.app grew from ~2.5M users in Jan'24 to ~25M in Dec'24. An impressive 10x increase in just a year! This was driven by (1) opening to the public, (2) Twitter/X banning in Brazil; (3) X’s change making content visible to blocked users, and (4) the 2024 US elections.
🧵3/11

Phishing websites are delivered to victims via gateways that serve @ipfs.tech content via HTTP. We found that some of the most popular gateways are used almost uniquely to serve phishing websites.
🧵 5/7

The number of requests for problematic content is steadily increasing. The majority of the traffic is related to shadow libraries (Anna’s Archive) migrating to @ipfs.tech. However, we also observed a sharp increase in the number of phishing websites hosted on the platform.
🧵4/7

We used ML to create textual descriptions of every CID and represent them as word clouds.
For terrorist content, we observe collections of literature acting as motivation ("love"). We also spot guides on how to blend into society without raising suspicions ("home").
🧵3/7

We recovered 417,912 Content Identifiers (CIDs) that were moderated by different @ipfs.tech entities. We then downloaded, analyzed and classified 368,762 (≈ 86.60%) of them. Most of the CIDs represent DMCA. However, we also discovered phishing, terrorist content or CSAM.
🧵 2/7