We are thrilled to announce the release of three new Bluesky data collectors in Communalytic:
- Bluesky Recent Search Data Collector: Recent public posts plus any then-available corresponding replies based on a given search query. To use this collector, you do not need to create a Bluesky account or apply for a separate API key; a Bluesky API key will automatically be generated by Bluesky during the collection process.
- Bluesky Thread Data Collector: All available replies to a given post, including replies to replies. To use this collector, you do not need to create a Bluesky account or apply for a separate API key; a Bluesky API key will automatically be generated during the collection process.
- Bluesky User Timeline Data Collector: Recent posts, reposts and replies from a given account (aka Timeline). To get a full view of conversations, the collector can also retrieve replies by other users in response to the specified user’s posts. To use this collector, you do not need to create a Bluesky account or apply for a separate API key; a Bluesky API key will automatically be generated during the collection process.
Communalytic EDU users can retrieve up to 5,000 recent posts and replies from Bluesky, while Communalytic PRO users can retrieve up to 50,000. Communalytic users can start collecting data immediately without needing to create a Bluesky account or apply for a separate API key; a Bluesky API key will automatically be generated during the collection process.
These new data collectors will provide researchers with a systematic way to collect publicly available Bluesky data for academic research. They are being released as part of our work developing research tools, techniques, and visualization dashboards to support computational social science research.
For more details, see Communalytic’s Tutorials page.
About Bluesky:
Bluesky is a microblogging social network that provides users an experience similar to X and Mastodon. Bluesky started out as a side project within Twitter in 2019 and became independent from Twitter in 2022 prior to Elon Musk acquisition of Twitter. When it was first announced, Bluesky was touted as a decentralized social network protocol, e.g., a standardized interoperable suite of software that “can be used by multiple competing social networks, each with its own systems of curation and moderation, interact with other social networks through an open standard.” However, by 2023,Bluesky had morphed into a centralized service running on top of an open-source social network protocol called the Authenticated Transfer (AT) Protocol. The new protocol was released under an MIT license in May of 2022 to ensure full transparency about its development process.
About Communalytic
Communalytic is a computational social science research tool for studying online communities and discourse. It is designed to provide researchers with the resources and infrastructure necessary for conducting independent research in the public interest. Communalytic can collect and analyze publicly available data from Bluesky, CrowdTangle (FB/IG), Mastodon, Reddit, Telegram, X (formerly Twitter), and YouTube, or you can import your own CSV or JSON data files – No coding required.
There are two versions of Communalytic: EDU and PRO.
- Communalytic EDU is designed to help students learn about social media data analytics.
- Communalytic PRO is designed for academic researchers and is ideal for large-scale academic research projects.
Communalytic comes with an assortment of easy-to-use social media data collectors and a full suite of built-in data analytics modules, including:
- a Topic Analyzer that uses text embeddings to identify and group together posts that are semantically similar automatically and
- a Network Analyzer that can automatically generate and visualize various types of signed and unsigned networks, including communication and link-sharing networks
- a Toxicity Analyzer powered by two different machine learning APIs: Detoxify and Perspective,
- a Sentiment Analyzer powered by three different text processing libraries: VADER (EN), TextBlob (EN, FR, DE) and Dostoevsky (RU),
These modules can automatically:
- detect anti-social interactions (i.e., harassment, hate speech, extremist content, etc.),
- assess sentiments in online discourse,
- identify and group together social media posts that are semantically similar and identify latent topics within your dataset,
- generate and visualize various types of networks, including communication and link-sharing networks.
When used together, these analytical modules can be used to study online communities and influencers, map shared interests among online actors, study the spread of mis and disinformation, and detect signs of possible coordination among seemingly disparate actors.
