Shiffman, the author of Why Sharks Matter, described early Twitter recently on the blog Southern Fried Science as "the world's most interesting cocktail party."
"Then it stopped being useful," Shiffman told Ars. "I was worried for a while that this incredibly powerful way of changing the world using expertise was gone. It's not gone. It just moved. It's a little different now, and it's not as powerful as it was, but it's not gone. It was for me personally, immensely reassuring that so many other people were having the same experience that I was. But it was also important to document that scientifically."
Eager to gather solid data on the migration phenomenon to bolster his anecdotal observations, Shiffman turned to social scientist Julia Wester, one of the scientists who had joined Twitter at Shiffman's encouragement years before, before also becoming fed up and migrating to Bluesky. Despite being "much less online" than the indefatigable Shiffman, Wester was intrigued by the proposition. "I was interested not just in the anecdotal evidence, the conversations we were having, but also in identifying the real patterns," she told Ars. "As a social scientist, when we hear anecdotal evidence about people's experiences, I want to know what that looks like across the population."
Shiffman and Wester targeted scientists, science communicators, and science educators who used (or had used) both Twitter and Bluesky. Questions explored user attitudes toward, and experiences with, each platform in a professional capacity: when they joined, respective follower and post counts, which professional tasks they used each platform for, the usefulness of each platform for those purposes relative to 2021, how they first heard about Bluesky, and so forth.
The authors acknowledge that they are looking at a very specific demographic among social media users in general and that there is an inevitable self-selection effect. However, "You want to use the sample and the method that's appropriate to the phenomenon that you're looking at," said Wester. "For us, it wasn't just the experience of people using these platforms, but the phenomenon of migration. Why are people deciding to stay or move? How they're deciding to use both of these platforms? For that, I think we did get a pretty decent sample for looking at the dynamic tensions, the push and pull between staying on one platform or opting for another."