Bluesky’s ahead, but is X a dead parrot?

Since Elon Musk’s acquisition of X in October of 2022 concluded, rumours of X’s demise have often surfaced. Now that we’re three months into 2025, and have been capturing and integrating Bluesky posts  in Almetric since October 2024, we thought it was timely to provide the community with some data on what’s going on with social networks and publication-linked discourse.

First thing: you may be wondering what this ‘Bluesky’ thing is! Subsequent to the Musk acquisition of the platform-formerly-known-as Twitter, several social media platforms have received the accolade of being “the new Twitter”. Amongst these have been Mastodon, Meta’s Threads, LinkedIn and now Bluesky. You can find Bluesky here – as with Threads, you’ll find it a familiar experience. You can post original content, repost, quote-post, “at” people, hashtag, include media – and on some platforms, you can control who interacts with your content.

Altmetric is a company whose reputation is  based on data, and the quality of insights that become possible. But it’s also a company that works with a lot of data: the volume of posts on social media linked to research is huge, with a typical week seeing something close to half-a-million posts. Our total database of social media activity linked to research is approaching 0.22B posts! (See the interview with Miguel Garcia, Product Director, Altmetric, for more information on this)

We can, of course, only track those platforms that provide suitable means to track attention: at time of writing, LinkedIn and Threads don’t offer this (although Meta are actively developing Threads’ capabilities). While we don’t have access to these other sources yet, it looks like Bluesky is becoming the leading platform for posts linked to new research (Figure 1). 

Figure 1: Altmetric timeline with X and Bluesky posts From 2011 to present (20th March 2025)

When we looked at the volume of Bluesky data in October, it was still a relatively small fraction of X (Figure 1), but three months into the new year, the picture is changing rapidly – and this picture is much clearer if we look at original engagement with new publications (i.e. original posts tagging things published in 2025, Figure 2): in March 2025, on most days, Bluesky hosts more posts linked to new research than X. 

Figure 2: Original Bluesky and X posts from 1st January 2025 to 20th March 2025 tagging new research.

There’s a strong reason for taking this into account, although X engagement with new publications is still strong and of quality, there’s a large body of “reposting” activity that seems largely focussed on a certain body of work: vaccine scepticism, MMR, autism, ivermectin, etc. In fact, this ongoing debate is still sufficiently large to merit being treated as a separate phenomenon. One day, we might publish a paper just on that. So the picture looking at all research shows X still ahead, on a daily basis (Figure 3 below).

Figure 3: All Bluesky and X posts from 1st January 2025 to 20th March 2025 tagging all research.

Curiously, there are some behavioural differences that are emerging – initial investigation suggests that different demographics are migrating at different speeds, and that different subject areas are represented slightly differently. We’re waiting on the data to stabilise before reporting on that here – please bear with us! However, we are confident in showing you the breakdown of original / reposts / quoted posts, and these do appear to be different: the proportion of original posts on Bluesky, linked to new research, is considerably higher than on X (Figure 4). Given that the overall volume is similar, this suggests that Bluesky early adopters are ‘story starters’ rather than ‘propagators’ (the flip side of this analysis is that there is more virality on X than on Bluesky… we’re following this with considerable interest!).

Both Bluesky and X are home to rich and valuable research conversations, but it looks like the days of X’s dominance are over. Competing platforms, such as Bluesky and Threads continue to invest in their platforms – for example, Bluesky now offers more sophisticated posting options (Figure 5), that leaves users fully in control of who can interact with their posts.

Figure 4: Breakdown of post types on X versus Bluesky from 1st January 2025 to 20th March 2025

In the spirit of “tl:dr”, we’re going to give you the bullet points here:

• The quality of posts linked to new research on Bluesky and X are of equivalent quality (i.e. this is the content you’re looking for).
• There seems to be a higher proportion of original posts on Bluesky than X.
• On weekdays, Bluesky tends to be more active than X; this has been the case for most of March, and the tendency is growing.
• Mondays and Fridays are particularly busy for Bluesky. At weekends, X is more active, and this leads to a levelling off of the weekly averages.
• X remains a strong and important platform for original and reposted mentions of scientific research.
• If you take into account old research, and reposts, X is substantially larger (but caveats apply, see above).
• The changes are a mix of “punctuated” and “gradual”: in other words, we see jumps in the migration away from X and towards Bluesky, aside from these jumps (usually associated with – shall we say – external events, that coincide with the US presidential inauguration and the German Bundestag elections) we also see a gradual change.
• Going back, we used to see the volume on X drop, and then pick up again. This isn’t happening anymore.
• Bluesky hasn’t taken all X’s usage, but it’s a large proportion, and – we think – this proportion is increasing.
• Threads seems to have a very lively science community (with a particular focus on environmental and medical discussions), and with its links to Instagram, we hope that (one day) we’ll be able to give you a much fuller picture of who-is-saying-what-where. Anecdotally, we think Mastodon is home to more conversations in computer science.
• Talking of subject areas, although all fields are showing growth in Bluesky and dropping in X, the ‘early adopters’ are (as ever) in technology / computer sciences. This analysis needs more work.

Figure 5: Bluesky have invested in their user experience, introducing a host of new features in the last year – this includes finely grained reply settings

As ever, the Altmetric team are keen to hear your feedback, and are working hard to support everyone involved in scientific communication and research, from the lab to the library. So we welcome you to contact the Altmetric team.

Want to dive deeper into how Bluesky is reshaping the research conversation? Tune into our podcast Is Bluesky ahead? The past and future of Social Media for Med Affairs where we explore the data, trends, and what it all means for the future of scholarly communication. Listen now here.