Researchers at the TU Darmstadt present the first comprehensive study on the Bluesky platform
The booming short news service Bluesky not only represents a suitable alternative to X, but also offers real advantages: This is the result of a research team with a leading participation of the TU Darmstadt in an investigation into the platform with the blue butterfly as a logo.
In protest against owners and tech billionaire Elon Musk, millions of people worldwide have been leaving the social media platform X, formerly Twitter. Many of them are drawn to the competitor Bluesky launched in 2022. Together with international research partners: Inside, scientists from the TU Darmstadt have now presented the first far -reaching data analysis of Bluesky. The researchers led by TU-First author Leonhard Balduf from the Department of Communication Networks (Department of Electrical Engineering and Information Technology) presented their results at the renowned ACM IMC specialist conference.
Bluesky is "a clone of X" at first glance, but actually offers much more functions, explains Balduf. The participative platform is based on fundamental other principles and architectures. The greatest advantages over centralized networks such as Facebook or X included openness, transparency, participation and a more even distribution of power.
Bluesky users have significantly more control both about their own data and their own identity as well as the content shown to them, as the study states. Because instead of being dependent on a single feed, specified by an unknown algorithm, users can choose from tens of thousands of generated feeds, which are mostly created by other users. Similarly, Bluesky also offers more freedom of choice and control in moderation, which also largely comes from the community. In addition, all necessary components are available as open source software and can therefore in principle be operated by all users themselves.
"The open architecture of bluesky actually enables tech-affine users to contribute to the core aspects of a social network, namely to recommend and moderate content," explains Professor Björn Scheuermann, head of the area of communication networks. "And we have found that this possibility is used by the community." For science, bluesky is "a paradise" for the transparency and openness, especially since Twitter/X is practically preventing access to usage data for independent research purposes by introducing exorbitant fees for independent research purposes have.
In addition to the large plus points, the decentralized platform is also associated with disadvantages according to the study. Among other things, there is an increasing discussion about who has the rights to the content and how the open data access can be protected against abuse, explains Balduf. It has also been shown that the system could be overwhelmed with great growth and that the future financing of the currently advertising -free service is an open question. Since opening the relatively young platform for the general public in February 2024, the number of users has increased from around 2.5 million to around 28 million today.
In addition to the TU Darmstadt, five other universities from Great Britain, France and China were involved in the study. The TU scientists contributed most of the data collection and analysis. Among other things, they examined the moderations of content. The study was partially financed by means of the recently expired special research area "Multi-Mechanism adaptation for the future Internet"
(Darmstadt - TU / Maki).
