‘Huge influx’ of neuroscientists migrates to Bluesky
In the two years since Elon Musk’s purchase and overhaul of Twitter, now called X, millions of users have left or stopped using the platform. Neuroscientists have been no exception: The “Neurotwitter” community—once a place for researchers to make cross-disciplinary connections, read new papers and share their own work—has become “a bit more barren,” says Kevin Mitchell, associate professor of genetics and neuroscience at Trinity College Dublin.
Some scientists moved to alternative platforms, including Mastodon and Bluesky, in the hopes of finding a viable replacement, but “the community was too small,” says Russell Poldrack, professor of psychology at Stanford University. In August, for example, X had an average of 41 million daily users, whereas Bluesky had 252,000, according to data from Similarweb, a digital intelligence platform.
But the tide may be starting to turn. A surge of users joined Bluesky after the 5 November U.S. election, and more than 115,000 people deactivated their X accounts on 6 November, Similarweb data show. “It’s a super interesting, sudden phenomenon: There’s been this little trickle, and then suddenly a flood,” Mitchell says.
