I’m conflicted. I agree with everything you say but I’m concerned about Bluesky eventually being flooded with AI posts trained on its public dataset. Being open could very easily lead to downfall.
I’m curious to see how things look, say, ten years from now. The way people use social networks, the language they use, even the memes they trade in changes over time. I can absolutely imagine an out of date AI giving themselves away by repeating todays equivalent of “rawr xD” to a future audience.
Is it "scripts.tar.gz. A collection of Python scripts, including the ones originally used to crawl the data, and to perform experiments. These scripts are detailed in a document released within the folder" in the OP?
The "code availability" says it's released "alongside [the dataset]", which appears to be the OP.
Because unlike the authors of this set - who went and stripped the posts out of usernames and permalinks to anonymize it - that set you mention just grabbed data out of the API as-is (at least based on its huggingface description that's left over).
Just a reminder that anonymization is much harder than merely removing metadata:
Every time I hear "anonymous data", I think of that time AOL published anonymized search logs (for academic research). The anonymization was negligent, and an NYT reporter de-anonymized and tracked down one of the users with the local & personal info present in the search queries.
Pollution of online social spaces caused by rampaging d/misinformation is a growing societal concern. However, recent decisions to reduce access to social media APIs are causing a shortage of publicly available, recent, social media data, thus hindering the advancement of computational social science as a whole. To address this pressing issue, we present a large, high-coverage dataset of social interactions and user-generated content from Bluesky Social.
The dataset contains the complete post history of over 4M users (81% of all registered accounts), totaling 235M posts. We also make available social data covering follow, comment, repost, and quote interactions.
Since Bluesky allows users to create and bookmark feed generators (i.e., content recommendation algorithms), we also release the full output of several popular algorithms available on the platform, along with their timestamped “like” interactions and time of bookmarking.
This dataset allows unprecedented analysis of online behavior and human-machine engagement patterns. Notably, it provides ground-truth data for studying the effects of content exposure and self-selection, and performing content virality and diffusion analysis.
Would it make a difference if we were talking about articles on a news website? I'm kind of on the fence on this one but I can see the point of view that just posting something online doesn't necessarily grant the end user an unlimited license to use the data. Source code is another example; open-sourcing a project doesn't automatically give someone else the right to use that code in their own projects.
Does Bluesky explicitly state the license the user will be publishing under (Creative Commons or whatever), or allow them to choose one?
> Would it make a difference if we were talking about articles on a news website.
News articles are pretty explicitly copyrighted and published for a commercial purpose. The websites make their terms clear when you visit. I don't think anyone can argue that it is legal to copy and distribute these articles, same as a book or movie or song.
Data posted on Bluesky on the other hand is meant to be broadly shared using the AT protocol. It is quite literally a feature. If you create your own Bluesky client, for example, you aren't committing copyright violation by downloading someone else's posts on there. Similarly, you aren't going against any terms of service by consuming a firehose of data from an AT relay.
Right, that's why I asked about Bluesky's content license; just because it's not in your face when you visit, doesn't mean you don't have to abide by it.
You understand that categories of usage are important, right? No-one is breaking the GPL by reading source code, but incorporating into your own codebase can be problematic if not done correctly. Similarly, human beings reading the data posted by a Bluesky user is not the same as aggregating and analysing the data of thousands of users. As I said I'm on the fence with this, but I do understand why someone might have a problem with it.
I wonder how much time it takes to run this / what the script is / how resource intensive it is? Bsky is public right, so do you get rate limited? Do you scrape or use an official API? So many questions
Also, I feel like only recently there's been an influx of people who have actually interesting things to say so I'd love to see nextyear's dataset
The trend toward everything being a walled garden is unfortunate.