Researchers and academics have flocked to Bluesky. Credit: Matteo Della Torre/NurPhoto via Getty
Posts about research on Bluesky receive substantially more attention than similar posts on X, formerly called Twitter, according to the first large-scale analysis of science content on Bluesky1. The results suggest that Bluesky users engage with posts more than do users of X.
Bluesky has more than 38 million users and shares many features with X, which fell out of favour with some scientists when it was bought by entrepreneur Elon Musk in October 2022. A survey of Nature readers earlier this year suggested that many prefer Bluesky over X to discuss and disseminate their work.
A team of researchers from the United Kingdom and China analysed 2.6 million Bluesky posts published from January 2023 to July 2025. Together, these referenced 532,000 academic articles. The results were posted in preprint on arXiv last month and have not been peer reviewed.
‘A place of joy’: why scientists are joining the rush to Bluesky
They found that almost half of the posts about science on Bluesky garnered at least ten likes and that one-third were reposted ten or more times. Previous research on X has shown that the proportion of science posts receiving at least ten likes varied between 4% and 7.5%, and that the proportion receiving ten or more reposts ranged from 1.4% to 4.4%2. Interactions on Bluesky were an order of magnitude higher than on X, the researchers said. Quotes — whereby users share posts and add their own text — and replies were nearly two orders of magnitude greater on Bluesky than on X, they said.
The team also reported that nearly half of Bluesky posts summarized academic articles and that only 6.3% simply mentioned the article name and journal. By contrast, 92% of original X posts about life and earth sciences and 17% of those in engineering and physical sciences referred to little more than the study title, according to a 2018 study in the Journal of Infometrics3. This suggests that research content on Bluesky is more original, says Er-Te Zheng, the study’s first author and a PhD student at the University of Sheffield, UK. “While X has primarily served as a dissemination tool, Bluesky may support a more interpretive, reflective mode of science communication.”
