PONE-D-24-24931“I’m in the Bluesky Tonight”: Insights from a Year Worth of Social DataPLOS ONE

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PLOS ONE

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“This work is supported by (i) the European Union – Horizon 2020 Program under the scheme “INFRAIA-01-2018-2019 – Integrating Activities for Advanced Communities”, Grant Agreement n.871042, ''SoBigData++: European Integrated Infrastructure for Social Mining and Big Data Analytics" (\\url{http://www.sobigdata.eu}); (ii) SoBigData.it which receives funding from the European Union – NextGenerationEU – National Recovery and Resilience Plan (Piano Nazionale di Ripresa e Resilienza, PNRR) – Project: ''SoBigData.it – Strengthening the Italian RI for Social Mining and Big Data Analytics" – Prot. IR0000013 – Avviso n. 3264 del 28/12/2021; (iii) EU NextGenerationEU programme under the funding schemes PNRR-PE-AI FAIR (Future Artificial Intelligence Research).”

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“All code related to generating, processing, and describing the dataset is released alongside it. The code requires Python 3.8 or higher and is mostly based on standard libraries and popular data science packages (e.g., numpy, pandas, matplotlib). The scripts for data collection also require atproto v0.0.46, the official Python wrapper for Bluesky Social API. Please refer to the API documentation for further details [22]. Before running data collection scripts, users should also set a USERNAME and PASSWORD environment variables with their Bluesky credentials, as some methods may require authentication.”

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Additional Editor Comments:

Dear authors,

The reviewers provided extremely positive reports. There just a few small points to be clarified in order to improve the readability of the paper.

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Reviewers' comments:

Reviewer's Responses to Questions

Comments to the Author

1. Is the manuscript technically sound, and do the data support the conclusions?

The manuscript must describe a technically sound piece of scientific research with data that supports the conclusions. Experiments must have been conducted rigorously, with appropriate controls, replication, and sample sizes. The conclusions must be drawn appropriately based on the data presented.

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: Yes

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2. Has the statistical analysis been performed appropriately and rigorously?

Reviewer #1: N/A

Reviewer #2: Yes

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3. Have the authors made all data underlying the findings in their manuscript fully available?

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Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: Yes

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Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: Yes

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5. Review Comments to the Author

Please use the space provided to explain your answers to the questions above. You may also include additional comments for the author, including concerns about dual publication, research ethics, or publication ethics. (Please upload your review as an attachment if it exceeds 20,000 characters)

Reviewer #1: With this publication, the authors provide the community with a dataset of approximately 235 million posts collected from the new social network 'Bluesky'. The data gathered cover about 80% of the accounts on the platform in terms of user involvement.

PROS/CONS

(+) The study presents an original dataset; no other Bluesky dataset with similar coverage appears to be available in the literature.

(+) The dataset represents an alternative approach to an important recent problem, i.e., the difficulty of accessing social media data in the "post-API era." Furthermore, the dataset represents the Bluesky social media at its initial stage.

(-) I believe that some aspects of the data collection could be better clarified by the authors.

This reviewer believes that the paper is well-structured and clear to read. Moreover, although I believe some aspects could be clarified further, the authors describe the data collection process allowing for the reproducibility of the approach. Also, given the recent developments and the increasing difficulty in accessing social data for research purposes ("post-API era"), I believe that the contribution is important for the community.

Here are two aspects regarding the data collection that I think should be clarified (I am confident that the authors will be able to manage them):

- The "relational" data and the posts might not be aligned? I will try to explain better. If I understand correctly, in the first phase, the relational data (followers of various accounts) are collected, and subsequently, all the posts published on the timelines of the collected users. Potentially, some follower/followee relationships might be added or removed during the collection of the posts. I would ask the authors to discuss whether this might represent a limitation in some studies and how to manage it (e.g., if it were a problem, to have "relational" data and posts aligned, one might consider only the posts published up until the start of data collection for the followers?)

- Text from row 98 to 101: I would like to know if the authors have encountered the same problem for replies. In other words, how did they separate replies from reposts? Does the metadata provided by Bluesky already provide this information?

Reviewer #2: The paper presents a very rich dataset of bluesky users, relationships and interactions, made available by the authors together with the software used to collect It and preprocess it.

In addition, the authors present an exploratory analysis of the dataset, that provides a first picture of this OSN, its structure, dinamics and topics of discussion. Leveraging on the analysis, the authors discuss possibile ways to make use of these data to advance open issues in computational social sciences.

I found the paper very easy and pleasant to read. While the analysis is not very deep, the dataset itself may be a very useful tool for other researchers, and the paper successfully delineates possibile use cases and research directions.

I only have 2 very small commenta:

- in line 43, the authors missed an upper case after a dot

- I would rename the "Results" section to something like "Data analysis"

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Reviewer #1: No

Reviewer #2: No

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“I’m in the Bluesky Tonight”: Insights from a Year Worth of Social Data

PONE-D-24-24931R1

Dear Dr. Failla,

We’re pleased to inform you that your manuscript has been judged scientifically suitable for publication and will be formally accepted for publication once it meets all outstanding technical requirements.

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Kind regards,

Fabio Saracco

Academic Editor

PLOS ONE

Additional Editor Comments (optional):

Dear authors,

since all the requests raised by the referees were properly addressed, I believe that the manuscript is ready for publication. Congratulations!

Best,

Fabio Saracco

Reviewers' comments: