Visualizing 13M Bluesky users

I must be one of those tiny dots just floating in nothingness because my BSKY feed is a dead zone. I&#x27;ve posted, I&#x27;ve replied, I&#x27;ve liked and tried to be an active participant but nothing seems to stick. There&#x27;s only so many posts I can publish &quot;for myself&quot; before I lose interest.<p>Contrast this with early Twitter where everyone was just super excited, and eager to follow new people. I don&#x27;t get it, shouldn&#x27;t a new social network be full of people looking to create new... social networks?

Bluesky and atproto seem to be built to be hackable.<p>Someone in the community recently built a searchable directory of Bluesky &quot;Starter Packs&quot; (which are a way for a user to publish a set of interesting people &amp; feeds to follow, primarily to help newcomers bootstrap their experience):<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;blueskydirectory.com&#x2F;starter-packs&#x2F;all" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;blueskydirectory.com&#x2F;starter-packs&#x2F;all</a><p>Dan Abramov posted about it earlier today, saying he liked it and:<p>&quot;the fact that it can be done in the ecosystem is awesome. let the ecosystem cook&quot; [1]<p>And maybe more poignantly:<p>&quot;seeing random projects pop up in the atproto ecosystem reminds me just how much public web common were stifled by social companies closing down their APIs. an entire landscape of tools given up on and abandoned&quot; [2]<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;bsky.app&#x2F;profile&#x2F;danabra.mov&#x2F;post&#x2F;3lar3sdna222d" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;bsky.app&#x2F;profile&#x2F;danabra.mov&#x2F;post&#x2F;3lar3sdna222d</a><p>[2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;bsky.app&#x2F;profile&#x2F;danabra.mov&#x2F;post&#x2F;3lar3xpuu4c2d" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;bsky.app&#x2F;profile&#x2F;danabra.mov&#x2F;post&#x2F;3lar3xpuu4c2d</a>

Bluesky has really exploded in certain niches over the past week, I think my followers have gone up 5-6x since Saturday.<p>I&#x27;d been a somewhat active user over the past year as conversation on the field I work in (energy) become so degraded on Twitter as to make it kind of worthless (mean in multiple senses of the word as well as ludicrous levels of spam), but Bluesky was pretty relaxed without a lot of traction, now there&#x27;s some real heat to it as things pick up.<p>Hopefully this surge is real, has certianly gotten me to be much more active.

I&#x27;m part of the wave of users who migrated to bluesky last week. I have to say I really like it so far, which surprised me a bit given that I had been underwhelmed by mastodon before. I already spend more time in bluesky than in twitter.<p>For those (like me) who don&#x27;t know what bluesky is, it&#x27;s basically a carbon copy of twitter circa 2015, down to an almost identical UI. Except that there&#x27;s no monetization, no ads, no growth hacking, which means that in the main features are there to serve the user. My favorite example is the simple expo&#x2F;react native based mobile app, which lets you open links in safari rather than a useless in-app browser.

Pretty cool! The BlueSky API is on point. A colleague of mine put together this visualization based on the firehose: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;bigmood.blue&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;bigmood.blue&#x2F;</a><p>Source: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;bsky.app&#x2F;profile&#x2F;even.westvang.com&#x2F;post&#x2F;3laob7tefxk23" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;bsky.app&#x2F;profile&#x2F;even.westvang.com&#x2F;post&#x2F;3laob7tefxk2...</a>

Hard to overstate just how much I like this. Not only does the end result convey information in many dimensions, it&#x27;s also extremely appealing visually. The graininess that stems from rendering such a large number of nodes really adds a nice touch here, something that you don&#x27;t often see in other graph visualizations.

The best thing about Bluesky is you can use your domain as your username. I&#x27;m @bradgessler.com on there, so if people want to &quot;verify&quot; me, they see something more meaningful than a blue checkbox, which is my website.<p>If I ever get blocked, banned, deplatformed, whatever—people would see my domain and be able to go there to determine what&#x27;s going on. In a sense it&#x27;s &quot;censorship-evident&quot;.<p>I think this will be great for businesses—it&#x27;s so much more less ambiguous if I can @example.com a business and get a response. I put a starter pack together of SaaS built on Rails that&#x27;s already doing this at <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;go.bsky.app&#x2F;JQyXa2u" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;go.bsky.app&#x2F;JQyXa2u</a><p>I really like what BlueSky is doing and hope it doesn&#x27;t get enshitified as the future plays out. Even if it does, it seems like now is a goldilocks moment where things are feeling really good there.<p>I highly recommend spending the 5 minutes it takes to setup an account and point it at your domain.

<i>&gt; What happens if we throw the BlueSky matrix into UMAP? Well, we can&#x27;t, at least not directly. Even though UMAP technically accepts sparse matrices, our scale is just to big for my home server. Instead, we can settle for using some other technique to derive embeddings for every user, in a medium-sized dimension like 32, and then feed that into UMAP. Easy!</i><p>How, exactly, are the embeddings derived?

&gt; Building and querying the quadtree is intrinsically heirarchical<p>Glad to see I am not the only one having problems with hierarchy.<p>Interesting work at many levels (no, no pun): starting with the bluesky data availability, the processing and the visualization algorithms.<p>But its not quite clear where to place these visualizations in the data science spectrum. Conventional numerical graphics have (over time) developed a sophisticated grammar that allows fairly precise reasoning and inference. So they are heavily used in scientific publications, in the financial sector etc. for real information transmission (People might even reverse engineer a plot to recover data!).<p>With networks and graphs, besides a general feel for the topology &#x2F; connectivity or clustering its kinda hard to pin down what is the transmitted information. Not clear if useful grammars covering such large graphs are yet to be invented or if this is the nature of the beast.

I&#x27;d love to see a more NLP look at this data, Google trends style. What topics of discourse come up regularly, what spikes during certain time periods? Can you summarize what economists are discussing? Can you find people talking about the same things but are not in each other&#x27;s networks?

Bluesky to me still seems like a place completely dominated by software type (HN crowd). I know there are obvious exceptions there&#x27;s no need for you to list them.<p>Threads has extreme normies, bluesky has the nerds, and twitter seems to have just the right mixture of both.

A lot of high profile commentators were waiting until after the election to move to Bluesky. They felt that they&#x27;d be giving up their influence if they left then, but now that the election is over they have time to rebuild onto a new platform. Bluesky seems quite nice. I was on Mastadon for a while, but after the initial burst of activity, its silo-like orientation led to stagnant servers. That is, it neither fully embraced the community-first services that Discord provides, nor the easy-discoverability of open-platform of Twitter&#x2F;X&#x2F;.<p>Also, this may seem silly, but I like the butterfly logo.

To be honest, bluesky will become the left version of &quot;Truth social&quot;. That&#x27;s good for them in the long run (ad money) but it&#x27;ll be another echo chamber. I follow both left-leaning and right-leaning people on Twitter and I don&#x27;t see the &quot;balance&quot; going one way or another.<p>The other thing is reach. Twitter, Fb, Instagram are global brands. It&#x27;ll be really, and I mean difficult to move the rest of the world to other platforms (TikTok is the exception because they went ahead with video from the get-go).

Fortunately using Bridgy Fed we can connect BlueSky with Fediverse and IndieWeb.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;snarfed&#x2F;bridgy-fed&#x2F;">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;snarfed&#x2F;bridgy-fed&#x2F;</a>

&gt; “I filtered out accounts that follow more than 50k accounts, or follow less than 5 accounts and have less than 5 followers, leaving 7.7 million nodes.”<p>So not quite 13M but almost half of them, pretty cool nonetheless

That looks really cool. I would also be interested to see examples of what commonality links the clusters of nodes- like are there clusters of people with the same hobby? Are there clusters of people speaking the same language, or living in the same city?<p>Another thought since Bluesky is a pretty inclusive place, are the LGBTQIA+ folks clustering into their own respective labels, or is everyone mixing together? Is any of this behavior similar or different to what we see on other social networks?

Signed up due to the hype. My feed is filled with &quot;Welp, he stole my meme&quot; &#x2F; &quot;Would you prefer Go or Rust?&quot; &#x2F; anime images.<p>Social media is dead

&quot;We can&#x27;t make a map of all of Twitter, because the data isn&#x27;t available and scraping it would be difficult and illegal.&quot;<p>What makes scraping illegal?

It looks like the Internet is now being compartmentalized based on one&#x27;s political affiliation and groups.<p>X is turning out to be where Conservatives are going to be living, Bluesky, Reddit and Treads will be for Liberals. These platform don&#x27;t outright ban opposing views but I think moderation policies and the users will shift these groups into one or the other.<p>I&#x27;m not sure if one can have a platform where respectful discourse can take place. The only site I&#x27;ve seen so far is HN and its due to its small community and the relentless effort by Dan.<p>The days of having everyone connected on the same platform is now dead, which might ironically usher a revival of the old, non-centralized web.

As a platform trying to connect aspiring founders with successful experts, is it worth creating a Bluesky grouping consisting of founders, ceo&#x27;s and successful experts wanting to help aspiring founder. Goal is to gain traction for <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.gravi.co" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.gravi.co</a>

&quot;Bot rings show up clearly exposed, for one.&quot;<p>I like the sound of that. Surely there&#x27;s usefulness in that observation.

Bluesky hit 15M this morning, and it is also the top free app in the US App Store.<p>Does anyone know if it is the first time that a truly open source app has hit that top spot?

&gt; can&#x27;t make a map of all of twitter<p>no, but nothing can stop you &amp; a bunch of people from exporting your tweet archive and visualizing that!

It&#x27;s going to look even more mesmerizing if you imagine how tweets propagate in this cloud. It would look somewhat alive.

Love this kind of post! I was surprised to see you really can drink from the firehose:<p><pre><code> brew install websocat websocat wss:&#x2F;&#x2F;bsky.network&#x2F;xrpc&#x2F;com.atproto.sync.subscribeRepos </code></pre> ...haven&#x27;t tried to decode it, though.

As a broader comment about Bluesky, it seems to me that it&#x27;s heavily left-leaning, while Twitter&#x2F;X is obviously leaning more and more to the right. Amazingly, it seems that the BlueSky&#x2F;X dichotomy is another emergent manifestation of a fracturing and continually more polarized society. In my opinion, what we will ultimately end up with is two echo chambers, each catering to opposite ends of the spectrum, each radicalizing their respective userbase, and each further amplifying the divide in society today.

Scraping data is not illegal. Everything a human can see, can be legally scraped.

Is the &quot;scraper&quot; still running? If so, how many users are there today?

How do you guys crosspost to X, Threads, Mastadon and Bluesky?

Mastodon seems to be the most versatile app of all of them. With Mastodon account you can follow people from BlueSky (if they use BridgyFed) and people from Threads (if they turn on fediverse sharing).

Very nice. Modern GPUs really are fast as drawing points.<p>It&#x27;s pretty similar to a project I&#x27;ve been working on for the past year, scraping Facebook instead of BlueSky (which is a bit harder since FB doesn&#x27;t expose an API for that). I currently have about 140 million nodes on my scraped graph and a GUI with pathfinding and stuff like that.<p>It&#x27;s a shame though because as nice as the thing is, I&#x27;m not sure I can publish it online, given it contains names of people. I don&#x27;t think the GDPR would be very happy.<p>Which is why I&#x27;m a bit surprised you published this, aren&#x27;t you afraid of people, uh, disliking the fact that they&#x27;re present in your dataset?

I created a new account and the feed was flooded with anti-X, anti-gop, anti-religion content. Don&#x27;t get me wrong, it&#x27;s not that any of those particularly bother me but it doesn&#x27;t seem any different than X except without the people I follow.

The visualization looks absolutely fantastic. Great work. Would love to dive deeper into the tech behind it.<p>I&#x27;ll just share some irony. They say X&#x2F;Twitter is full of people spreading hate speech. I just logged in into my old BlueSky account. My entire feed is full of people saying how much they _hate_ X&#x2F;Twitter.