Scientists Are Flocking to Bluesky
Per Shiffman and Wester, an “overwhelming majority” of respondents said that Bluesky has a “vibrant and healthy online science community,” while Twitter no longer does. And many Bluesky users reported getting more bang for their buck, so to speak, on Bluesky. They might have a lower follower count, but those followers are far more engaged: Someone with 50,000 Twitter/X followers, for example, might get five likes on a given post; but on Bluesky, they may only have 5,000 followers, but their posts will get 100 likes.
According to Shiffman, Twitter always used to be in the top three in terms of referral traffic for posts on Southern Fried Science. Then came the “Muskification,” and suddenly Twitter referrals weren’t even cracking the top 10. By contrast, in 2025 thus far, Bluesky has driven “a hundred times as many page views” to Southern Fried Science as Twitter. Ironically, “the blog post that’s gotten the most page views from Twitter is the one about this paper,” said Shiffman.
Ars social media manager Connor McInerney confirmed that Ars Technica has also seen a steady dip in Twitter referral traffic thus far in 2025. Furthermore, “I can say anecdotally that over the summer we’ve seen our Bluesky traffic start to surpass our Twitter traffic for the first time,” McInerney said, attributing the growth to a combination of factors. “We’ve been posting to the platform more often and our audience there has grown significantly. By my estimate our audience has grown by 63 percent since January. The platform in general has grown a lot too—they had 10 million users in September of last year, and this month the latest numbers indicate they’re at 38 million users. Conversely, our Twitter audience has remained fairly static across the same period of time.”
Bubble, Schmubble
As for scientists looking to share scholarly papers online, Shiffman pulled the Altmetrics stats for his and Wester’s new paper. “It’s already one of the 10 most shared papers in the history of that journal on social media,” he said, with 14 shares on Twitter/X vs over a thousand shares on Bluesky (as of 4 pm ET on August 20). “If the goal is showing there’s a more active academic scholarly conversation on Bluesky—I mean, damn,” he said.
And while there has been a steady drumbeat of op-eds of late in certain legacy media outlets accusing Bluesky of being trapped in its own liberal bubble, Shiffman, for one, has few concerns about that. “I don’t care about this, because I don’t use social media to argue with strangers about politics,” he wrote in his accompanying blog post. “I use social media to talk about fish. When I talk about fish on Bluesky, people ask me questions about fish. When I talk about fish on Twitter, people threaten to murder my family because we’re Jewish.” He compared the current incarnation of Twitter as no better than 4Chan or TruthSocial in terms of the percentage of “conspiracy-prone extremists” in the audience. “Even if you want to stay, the algorithm is working against you,” he wrote.
“There have been a lot of opinion pieces about why Bluesky is not useful because the people there tend to be relatively left-leaning,” Shiffman told Ars. “I haven’t seen any of those same people say that Twitter is bad because it’s relatively right-leaning. Twitter is not a representative sample of the public either.” And given his focus on ocean conservation and science-based, data-driven environmental advocacy, he is likely to find a more engaged and persuadable audience at Bluesky.