Science content on Bluesky attracts more engagement and originality than on X

The social media site Bluesky is emerging as a significant platform for science communication, with substantially higher levels of engagement and content originality than its rival platform, X.

In the first large-scale analysis of science content on Bluesky, researchers at the University of Sheffield, UK, and Renmin University of China collected and analysed over 2.6 million Bluesky posts referencing more than 530,000 scholarly articles from between January 2023 and July 2025. In a preprint that has not been peer reviewed yet, they found a significant increase in scholarly activity on Bluesky between November 2024 and January 2025, highlighting the sizeable migration of researchers and scientific institutions away from X, following increasing concerns about the platform and its new owner, Elon Musk.

Looking at the distribution of scholarly articles referenced on Bluesky across domains and fields from January 2023 to July 2025, the researchers found the most widely referenced field by some margin was medicine, with 25.6% of posts mentioning articles in this field. This was followed by social sciences – general (15%), biochemistry, genetics and molecular biology (11.7%) and environmental science (9.1%). For chemistry and materials science, the proportion of posts was 0.9% and 0.8% respectively.

Almost 50% of posts received at least 10 likes, 34.4% were reposted 10 or more times, 10.4% received 10 or more quotes, and 11% received 10 or more replies. These patterns, the researchers said, reflected a higher baseline of engagement on Bluesky than on X, with a ‘broad share of scholarly posts attracting sustained and diverse forms of audience interaction’.

They also found that Bluesky users tended not to simply reproduce article titles in their posts and were more likely to introduce, reinterpret, summarise or comment on the research, reflecting a more active and interpretive form of science communication.

‘The platform may facilitate not only early visibility of research outputs but also more meaningful scholarly dialogue in the evolving social media landscape,’ the researchers concluded.