If there is one development at the moment which I full heartedly enjoy reading about it’s that the remains of what was once called Twitter is seeing a large E𝕏odus.
Since a certain billionaire has taken over that platform, it has continuously become worse and I was hoping that politcians, media outlets and my fellow social scientists would come to Bluesky instead, which is apparently exactly what is happening now.
So after a lot of disappointment with world events this year, my wish that Bluesky would become Twitter’s heir, seems to come true.
The reasons I like Bluesky so much are that it connects me with a peer group that is spread around the world, like Twitter once did, but that it is built on open source infrastructure, which not only makes it billionaire proof, but also incredibly easy to tap into the data.
Overall it is just a place of joy right now and thanks to how serious the developers took community moderation, I’m hopeful that it will stay this way.
However, that led to a problem this week which can only be described as ‘incredibly first world’.
I was getting too many notifications about new followers!
So many that it became impossible to go through all of them and check whom to follow back.
My approach to solving the problem?
Using R and the atrrr package I created with friends ealiers this year.
Who follows me, but I’m not following back?
I start by looking at who follows me, and whom I already follow back:
library(atrrr)
library(tidyverse)
my_followers <- get_followers("jbgruber.bsky.social", limit = Inf) |>
# remove columns containing more complex data
select(-ends_with("_data"))
my_follows <- get_follows("jbgruber.bsky.social", limit = Inf) |>
select(-ends_with("_data"))
not_yet_follows <- my_followers |>
filter(!actor_handle %in% my_follows$actor_handle)
Now not_yet_follows contains 372 people!
More than I thought.
My assumption is that they are interested in similar topics and it would probably enrich my feed if I followed a chunk of them back.
But how to decide?
I came up with three criteria:
- who is already followed by a large chunk of my follows
- who has #commsky, #polsky or #rstats in their description
- who has a big account, which I defined at the moment as 1,000 followers+
Number 1 and 3 are made under the assumption that popular accounts are popular for a reason and I’m relying on the wisdom of the crowd.
Who is followed by the people I follow?
To answer this, we need to get quite a bit of data.
Specifically, I loop through all accounts that I follow and get the follows from them:
follows_of_follows <- my_follows |>
pull(actor_handle) |>
# iterate over follows getting their follows
map(function(handle) {
get_follows(handle, limit = Inf, verbose = FALSE) |>
mutate(from = handle)
}, .progress = interactive()) |>
bind_rows() |>
# not sure what this means
filter(actor_handle != "handle.invalid")
This data is huge, with over 450,000 accounts.
So who in the not_yet_follows list shows up there most often?
follows_of_follows_count <- follows_of_follows |> count(actor_handle, name = "n_following", sort = TRUE) follows_of_follows_count ## # A tibble: 160,440 × 2 ## actor_handle n_following #### 1 jbgruber.bsky.social 400 ## 2 claesdevreese.bsky.social 352 ## 3 rossdahlke.bsky.social 292 ## 4 alessandronai.bsky.social 285 ## 5 favstats.eu 263 ## 6 feloe.bsky.social 263 ## 7 jamoeberl.bsky.social 246 ## 8 brendannyhan.bsky.social 226 ## 9 fgilardi.bsky.social 225 ## 10 dfreelon.bsky.social 224 ## # ℹ 160,430 more rows
Unsurprisingly, I’m on top of this very specific list since this is a network around my own account.
But let’s see who among my not_yet_follows list is popular here:
popular_among_follows <- not_yet_follows |> left_join(follows_of_follows_count, by = "actor_handle") |> filter(n_following > 30)
I put the people who have more than 30 n_following here, which is an arbitry number I picked, and ended up with 76 people I should look into.
Who matches my interest in their description?
Specifically, I look for a couple of key hashtags: #commsky, #polsky or #rstats in their description.
These are the words I look for when checking out someone’s bio and it is very likely I want to follow them then.
Looking for the keywords is pretty simple, since we already have the data:
probably_interesting_content <- not_yet_follows |>
filter(!is.na(actor_description)) |>
filter(str_detect(actor_description, regex("#commsky|#polsky|#rstats",
ignore_case = TRUE)))
Only 20 accounts fit this filter.
Maybe I could find better keywords?
But this is just a demo of what you could do, so let’s move on.
We can look up the user info to see how many followers they have.
popular_not_yet_follows <- not_yet_follows |> mutate(followers_count = get_user_info(actor_handle)$followers_count) |> filter(followers_count > 1000)
Again the 1,000 follower number is arbitrary, but when I look at an account and see four figure follower counts, I still think it’s a lot.
This gave me 80 accounts.
So what could I do now?
Two ways to approach it:
- let’s just follow them all if they fit these criteria:
lets_follow <- bind_rows( popular_among_follows, probably_interesting_content, popular_not_yet_follows ) |> distinct(actor_handle) |> pull(actor_handle) follow(lets_follow)
- More realistically though, I still want to have a look at the 136 accounts before following them.
This can be done relatively conveniently by opening the user profiles in my browser.
I can do that with:
walk(
paste0("https://bsky.app/profile/", lets_follow),
browseURL
)
How else can I find followers?
What you can also do with the data is to simply check follows_of_follows_count which of the accounts that are popular among your friends you don’t yet follow – without the condition that they are following you.
popular_among_follows2 <- follows_of_follows_count |> filter(!actor_handle %in% my_follows$actor_handle) |> filter(n_following > 30)
This gives me another 60 accounts to look through.
Of course the best way to search for intersting accounts when you are new to the platform is to look for starter packs.
The website Bluesky Directory has these ordered by topics and let’s you search through it.
How can I learn more about atrrr?
We collected a couple of tutorials on the package’s website: https://jbgruber.github.io/atrrr/
If there is something you would like to have explained (better) or you went through the docs and found an interesting endpoint, head over to GitHub and create and issue.
We are very open for ideas that make the package better!
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