# Academic Paper: Why Academics Are Leaving Twitter for Bluesky

Source: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.24801
Kiwi News: https://news.kiwistand.com/stories/Academic-Paper-Why-Academics-Are-Leaving-Twitter-for-Bluesky?index=0x68407c2482c8084b02e5cbf01bde56f75ecffaf948b0238cc60fcf47d8cc202640971d76
Submitted by ferran.eth on 2025-06-04 UTC, 6 upvotes, 2 comments

## Summary

Researchers Dorian Quelle, Frederic Denker, Prashant Garg and Alexandre Bovet report that scholar migration from Twitter/X to Bluesky is driven by peer influence, with simple rather than complex contagion. They linked 276,431 scholars on Twitter/X to their new profiles among 16.7 million Bluesky accounts, tracked from January 2023 to December 2024. Using Brazil's court-ordered suspension of Twitter/X as exogenous variation, they find treatment effects are short-lived and dose-dependent. Adoption concentrates among users deeply embedded in Twitter's social graph, public political expression predicts migration, and early reconnection with prior contacts predicts longer tenure on Bluesky.

## Article

Simple contagion drives population-scale platform migration

Authors: Dorian Quelle, Frederic Denker, Prashant Garg, Alexandre Bovet

Social media platforms mediate professional communication, political expression, and community formation, making the rare instances when users collectively abandon an incumbent platform particularly consequential. Strong network effects raise switching costs and strengthen incumbents' positions, making coordinated exit difficult. Here we link 276,431 scholars on Twitter/X to their respective new profiles among the universe of all 16.7 million Bluesky accounts, tracked from January 2023 to December 2024, using a scalable, high-precision cross-platform matching pipeline. Exploiting exogenous variation from Brazil's court-ordered suspension of Twitter/X and a dynamic matching design, we show that adoption is peer-driven, treatment effects are short-lived and dose-dependent, and contagion is simple, not complex. Three patterns characterize adoption and retention. Adoption concentrates among users deeply embedded in Twitter's social graph. Public political expression predicts migration, consistent with homophilous inflows into a largely left-of-center Bluesky information space. Early reconnection with prior contacts predicts longer tenure and engagement. Our findings provide the first population-scale causal evidence of peer influence in a social media platform migration by exploiting exogenous exposure variation in a natural experiment and using daily dynamic matching. Rather than the complex contagion mechanism often emphasized in the literature, contagion is predominantly simple. Our findings recast migration as a multi-homing strategy that insures against governance uncertainty and show that users who quickly reconnect with prior contacts remain active longer on Bluesky.

## Comments

**tim**: I asked o3 to summarize the paper: 

* Tracked about 276 000 academics from 2023-2025.
* Roughly 1 in 5 opened a Bluesky account and stopped tweeting; split by field: ~31 % in arts & humanities vs ~13 % in medicine.
* Biggest predictor is whether the accounts you read migrate. If 10 % of your followees leave, your own chance of quitting jumps about ten-fold compared with losing the same share of followers.
* Five flashpoints caused most exits:

  1. July 2023 global X outage
  2. July 2023 “rate-limit” fee talk
  3. Feb 2024 Bluesky public launch
  4. Aug 2024 one-day X block in Brazil
  5. Post-election rush after the Nov 2024 US vote
* Re-creating your old Twitter reading list on Bluesky makes you stay active; failing to do so means you often drift away.
* Political tweeters leave in a steady trickle; non-political scholars mainly bolt during the big shocks.
* Citation counts, h-index, and “top-100 author” status have no effect on who quits.

TL;DR: Academics move when the voices they rely on disappear—especially during Twitter/X hiccups—and they stick with Bluesky only if they can rebuild that feed.


**ccarella.eth**: Is there an academic vibe there, where people are talking about their research etc? That sounds like something I would check out. If its just academics spouting of politics, it sounds like the worst network in the world.