Instagram Threads is developing new features that would bring its user experience more in line with that of X (formerly Twitter) and the social network Bluesky. The Meta-owned company is internally prototyping the ability to set a display name and add a cover image to profiles. A spokesperson for the company confirmed to TechCrunch on […]
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Social network and X competitor Bluesky’s massive growth slowed in December in the U.S., after having surged from 9+ million in September to north of 20 million users in November. The slowdown is based on an analysis of web traffic and mobile app daily active users by analytics firm Similarweb, which found that Bluesky grew […]
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Ah, 2024: the year we debated how to pronounce “hawk tuah,” pondered the health benefits of eating rocks, and held space for a Broadway showstopper. It was a year when the discourse could feel shockingly pure and joyful — at least for a few minutes, before we all came tumbling back down to reality. Online […]
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A new survey revealed stark political and behavioral differences between users of rival social media platforms Bluesky and Meta-owned Threads.
Bluesky's user base skews heavily Democratic, with nearly half of its users identifying with the party, according to findings published earlier this month by CivicScience, a research and survey company. In contrast, only 34% of Threads users identified as either Democrat or Independent.
The study also found that Bluesky users are more politically engaged overall. And nearly three-quarters of them said that they experienced higher levels of stress postelection. In contrast, 33% of people who used Threads daily said that their stress levels decreased after Donald Trump's victory on November 5.
"With the surge of Bluesky coming so directly in the wake of the presidential election, it's not surprising that the user base is disproportionately more left-leaning than the user base of Threads," John Dick, CivicScience CEO and founder, told Business Insider.
The survey included 12,188 Threads users and 5,431 Bluesky users. This roughly mirrors the ratio of both platforms' user bases in the adult US population, as 18% of respondents reported using Threads daily, compared to 8% for Bluesky, CivicScience data found.
Both social networks experienced significant user growth following the US election, particularly as billionaire Elon Musk, the owner of X, threw his weight behind Trump and actively promoted misinformation that reportedly garnered over 2 billion views.
Still, Threads seems to be eating Bluesky's lunch. Earlier this month, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced that the platform had more than 300 million monthly active users, compared to Bluesky's 24 million users at the beginning of this month.
Bluesky began life inside Twitter in 2019 as a project started under the company's former CEO, Jack Dorsey. Its goal was to give users more control over moderation. Bluesky has been an independent company since 2021 and is a decentralized social network.
Bluesky is powered by the "AT Protocol" (Authenticated Transfer Protocol), which means that while Bluesky operates the main server, anyone can create and run their own server that can work with Bluesky. This allows users to choose different providers while maintaining a unified social network experience. Crucially, this also means that users can add their own moderation policies on top of Bluesky's built-in moderation systems.
"The decentralized moderation policies of Bluesky, which allow for more proliferation of political content on the platform, could be exacerbating this phenomenon," said Dick of Bluesky's left-leaning user base, "as Democrats and liberals create a sort of tribal safe space for their views and conversations."
Beyond politics, the survey revealed an optimism gap between the two platforms regarding AI. Bluesky users appear to be significantly more bullish on the technology, with 62% believing that AI will have at least a somewhat positive impact on the quality of their lives over the next decade, compared to 51% of Threads users.
Overall, More Bluesky users are likely to use platforms like YouTube, TikTok, and X every day compared to Threads users who gravitate toward Facebook and Instagram, which are both owned by Meta.
Social network Bluesky said on Christmas that it is testing a trending topics view. The trending topics are visible both on the desktop and mobile apps of the social network for users across the world. On the desktop, you can see trending topics on the right sidebar, and on the mobile app, you can tap […]
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On November 15, Peter Wang posted a message requesting ideas for a new incubator and fund to support experimental projects built on the burgeoning Bluesky/AT Protocol ecosystem. Four weeks later, Skyseed emerged with an initial commitment of $1 million. This turnaround, a speed underscored by the fact that the fund doesn’t even have a website […]
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Social network Bluesky has released a new update to its app that includes a separate mentions tab in notifications, protections against username squatting, and new controls for replies sorting. The company announced that it is adding a new mentions tab with the v1.96 rollout to let you see those posts separately. Until now, all notifications […]
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The fund will offer grants to those building on BlueSky’s open source AT Protocol.
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Social magazine app maker Flipboard is reinventing itself for the new era of the open social web. While the company’s original app allowed users to collect content from blogs, news websites, and traditional social media services like Facebook and Twitter in order to create curated magazines, its new app called Surf, launching into invite-only beta […]
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Bridgy Fed, which is working to connect the social network Bluesky with the wider fediverse (i.e., the open social web), which includes sites like Mastodon and others, will be the first app incubated within a new nonprofit called A New Social. The organization, announced Tuesday, aims to bring together developers, researchers, startups, and industry leaders […]
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Meta’s microblogging platform, Threads, is growing at a quick clip since it was launched last year, and it seems to have benefited from the exodus of users from its rival, X, a couple months ago. The company’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg said on Monday that more than 100 million people use Threads daily, and that it […]
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Now with 25 million users, Bluesky is facing a test that will determine whether or not its platform will still be seen as a safe space and place of refuge from the toxicity of X. In recent days, a large number of users on Bluesky have been urging the company to ban one newcomer for […]
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Meta’s Threads is rolling out its own take on Bluesky’s “Starter Packs,” which are curated lists of suggested accounts that help new users find people to follow. Instagram head Adam Mosseri announced on Thursday that the social network is testing a way for users to find and easily follow collections of profiles that post about […]
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Since the dawn of the generative AI era a few years ago, the march of technology—toward what tech companies hope will replace human intellectual labor—has continuously sparked angst about the future role humans will play in the job market. Will we all be replaced by machines?
A Y-Combinator-backed company called Artisan, which sells customer service and sales workflow software, recently launched a provocative billboard campaign in San Francisco playing on that angst, reports Gizmodo. It features the slogan "Stop Hiring Humans." The company markets its software products as "AI Employees" or "Artisans."
The company's billboards feature messages that might inspire nightmares among workers, like "Artisans won't complain about work-life balance" and "The era of AI employees is here." And they're on display to the same human workforce the ads suggest replacing.
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Social networking startup and X competitor Bluesky is working on subscriptions. The company first announced plans to develop a new revenue stream based on the subscription model when detailing its $15 million Series A back in October. Now, mockups teasing the upcoming Bluesky subscription, along with a list of possible features, have been published to […]
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Now that the seal is broken on scraping Bluesky posts into datasets for machine learning, people are trolling users and one-upping each other by making increasingly massive datasets of non-anonymized, full-text Bluesky posts taken directly from the social media platform’s public firehose—including one that contains almost 300 million posts.
Last week, Daniel van Strien, a machine learning librarian at open-source machine learning library platform Hugging Face, released a dataset composed of one million Bluesky posts, including when they were posted and who posted them. Within hours of his first post—shortly after our story about this being the first known, public, non-anonymous dataset of Bluesky posts, and following hundreds of replies from people outraged that their posts were scraped without their permission—van Strein took it down and apologized.
"I've removed the Bluesky data from the repo," he wrote on Bluesky. "While I wanted to support tool development for the platform, I recognize this approach violated principles of transparency and consent in data collection. I apologize for this mistake." Bluesky’s official account also posted about how crawling and scraping works on the platform, and said it’s “exploring methods for consent.”
404 MediaSamantha Cole
As I wrote at the time, Bluesky’s infrastructure is a double-edged sword: While its decentralized nature gives users more control over their content than sites like X or Threads, it also means every event on the site is catalogued in a public feed. There are legitimate research uses for social media posts, but researchers typically follow ethical and legal guidelines that dictate how that data is used; for example, a research paper published earlier this year that used Bluesky posts to look at how disinformation and misinformation spread online uses a dataset of 235 million posts, but that data was anonymized. The researchers also provide clear instructions for requesting one’s data be excluded.
If there’s one constant across social media, regardless of the platform, it’s the Streisand effect. Van Strien’s original post and apology both went massively viral, and since a lot of people are straddling both Bluesky and Twitter as their primary platforms, the dataset drama crossed over to X, too—where people love to troll. The dataset of one million posts is gone from Hugging Face, but several much larger datasets have taken its place.
There’s a two million posts dataset by Alpine Dale, who claims to be associated with PygmalionAI, a yet to be released “open-source AI project for chat, role-play, adventure, and more,” according to its site. That dataset description says it “could be used for: Training and testing language models on social media content; Analyzing social media posting patterns; Studying conversation structures and reply networks; Research on social media content moderation; Natural language processing tasks using social media datas.” The goal, Dale writes in the dataset description, “is for you to have fun :)”
The community page for that dataset is full of people saying this either breaks Bluesky’s developer guidelines (specifically “All services must have a method for deleting content a user has requested to be deleted”) or is against the law in European countries, where the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) would apply to this data collection.
I asked Neil Brown, a lawyer who specializes in internet law and GDPR, if that’s the case. The answer isn’t a straightforward one. “Merely processing the personal data of people in the EU does not make the person doing that processing subject to the EU GDPR,” he said in an email. To be subject to GDPR, the processing would need to fall within its material and territorial scopes. Material scope involves how the data is processed: “processing of personal data done through automated means or within a structured filing system, including collection, storage, access, analysis, and disclosure of personal information,” according to the law. Territorial scope involves where the person who is doing the data collecting is located, and also where the subjects of that data are located.
“But I imagine that there are some who would argue that this activity is consistent with the EU GDPR,” Brown said. “These arguments are normally based in the thinking that, if someone has made personal data public, then they are ‘fair game’ but, IMHO, the EU GDPR simply does not work that way.”
None of these legal questions have stopped others from creating more and bigger datasets. There’s also an eight million posts dataset compiled by Alim Maasoglu, who is “currently dedicated to developing immersive products within the artificial intelligence space,” according to their website. “This growing dataset aims to provide researchers and developers with a comprehensive sample of real world social media data for analysis and experimentation,” Maasoglu’s description of the dataset on Hugging Face says. “This collection represents one of the largest publicly available Bluesky datasets, offering unique insights into social media interactions and content patterns.”
It was quickly surpassed by a lot. There’s now a 298 million posts dataset released by someone with the username GAYSEX. They wrote an imaginary dialogue in their Hugging Face project description between themselves and someone whose posts are in the dataset: “‘NOOO you can't do this!’ Then don't post. If you don't want to be recorded, then don't post it. ‘But I was doing XYZ!!’ Then don't. Look. Just about anything on the internet stays on the internet nowadays. Especially big social network sites. You might want to consider starting a blog. Those have lower chances of being pulled for AI training + there are additional ways to protect blogs being scraped aggressively.” As a co-owner of a blog myself, I can say that being scraped has been a major pain in the ass for us, actually, and generative AI companies training on news outlets is a serious problem this industry is facing—so much so that many major outlets have struck deals with the very big tech companies that want to eat their lunch.
There are at least six more similar datasets of user posts currently on Hugging Face, in varying amounts. Margaret Mitchell, Chief Ethics Scientist at Hugging Face, posted on Bluesky following van Strien’s removal of his dataset: “The best path forward in AI requires technologists to be reflective/self-critical about how their work impacts society. Transparency helps this. Appreciate Bsky for flagging AI ethics &my colleague’s response. Let’s make informed consent a real thing.” When someone replied to her post linking to the two million dataset asking her to “address” it, she said, “Yes, I'm trying to address as much as I can.”
Like just about every other industry that relies on human creative output, including journalism, music, books, academia, and the arts, social media platforms seem to be taking one of two routes when it comes to AI: strike a deal, or wait and see how fair use arguments shake out in court, where what constitutes “transformative” under copyright law is still being determined. In the meantime, everyone from massive generative AI corporations to individuals on troll campaigns are snapping up data while the area’s still gray.
Bluesky has blown up this year thanks to a vibrant community of posters, user customization choices, and a decentralized protocol that doesn’t lock users into the choices of a billionaire CEO. But one question mark hanging over Bluesky is how the platform will eventually make money, and whether it will use the most common business […]
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Meta’s X competitor Instagram Threads is gaining an improved search interface, the company announced on Monday. The app, which offers a Meta-run alternative to Elon Musk’s X, but built on top of Instagram’s social graph, is rolling out a new way to search for specific posts, allowing users to filter searches by user profiles and […]
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A new app called GoBlue has launched to help those looking to track their following on Bluesky, the Twitter-like social network that’s rapidly grown in recent weeks to reach nearly 24 million users. Filling in a gap in the Bluesky ecosystem of third-party apps and utilities, GoBlue offers a simple interface for tracking your own […]
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As more celebrities and popular influencers join Bluesky, the fast-growing social media service has been facing more concerns around impersonation and verified identity. The Bluesky Safety team posted Friday that the company has updated its impersonation policy to be “more aggressive,” adding that “impersonation and handle-squatting accounts will be removed.” The company said it should […]
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