“I’m in the Bluesky Tonight”: Insights from a year worth of social data

Pollution of online social spaces caused by rampaging d/misinformation is a growing societal concern. However, recent decisions to reduce access to social media APIs are causing a shortage of publicly available, recent, social media data, thus hindering the advancement of computational social science as a whole. We present a large, high-coverage dataset of social interactions and user-generated content from Bluesky Social to address this pressing issue. The dataset contains the complete post history of over 4M users (81% of all registered accounts), totalling 235M posts. We also make available social data covering follow, comment, repost, and quote interactions. Since Bluesky allows users to create and like feed generators (i.e., content recommendation algorithms), we also release the full output of several popular algorithms available on the platform, along with their timestamped "like" interactions. This dataset allows novel analysis of online behavior and human-machine engagement patterns. Notably, it provides ground-truth data for studying the effects of content exposure and self-selection and performing content virality and diffusion analysis.

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Publication Details

Journal
PLoS ONE
Published
2024-11-05
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0310330
Citations
12
Primary Topic
Complex Network Analysis Techniques
Type
article
Field-Weighted Citation Impact
3.37

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article

“I’m in the Bluesky Tonight”: Insights from a year worth of social data

Giulio Rossetti, Andrea Failla
12 citations
PLoS ONE
Complex Network Analysis Techniques
3.37
article

“I’m in the Bluesky Tonight”: Insights from a year worth of social data

Giulio Rossetti, Andrea Failla
article en
12 citations

Abstract

Pollution of online social spaces caused by rampaging d/misinformation is a growing societal concern. However, recent decisions to reduce access to social media APIs are causing a shortage of publicly available, recent, social media data, thus hindering the advancement of computational social science as a whole. We present a large, high-coverage dataset of social interactions and user-generated content from Bluesky Social to address this pressing issue. The dataset contains the complete post history of over 4M users (81% of all registered accounts), totalling 235M posts. We also make available social data covering follow, comment, repost, and quote interactions. Since Bluesky allows users to create and like feed generators (i.e., content recommendation algorithms), we also release the full output of several popular algorithms available on the platform, along with their timestamped "like" interactions. This dataset allows novel analysis of online behavior and human-machine engagement patterns. Notably, it provides ground-truth data for studying the effects of content exposure and self-selection and performing content virality and diffusion analysis.

PLoS ONEVol. 19(11)
University of Pisa (IT), Istituto di Scienza e Tecnologie dell'Informazione "Alessandro Faedo" (IT), National Research Council (IT)
European Commission, Horizon 2020 Framework Programme
Reduced inequalities
Openalex Percentile: Top 7%
Complex Network Analysis Techniques
3.37
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“I’m in the Bluesky Tonight”: Insights from a year worth of social data — Giulio Rossetti, Andrea Failla · PLoS ONE (2024) | TGRS Research Map | TGRS