Bluesky tracking enhancement: an increase to our volume of historical posts

1. What's new?

On 3 December 2024, we launched the newest attention source on Altmetric: Bluesky.

We are now working to enhance the Bluesky content we can track and bring to our users (see section 3 below for a summary). Throughout December 2024, we added the ability to track attention from posts with embedded links, and attention from the alt text of images.

Our newest enhancement, live now, is part of our efforts to track more historical content from pre-launch dates.

As of 15 January 2025, we can retrieve and process all historical posts from Bluesky profiles that match both these conditions:

• The profile has posted, quoted, or reposted a post we are interested in

• The profile is being processed by Altmetric for the first time

2. Value and user impact

Tracking Bluesky attention in Altmetric enables users to capture more research conversations on a platform the community continues to demonstrate a strong interest in. By capturing mentions included in alt text, we can continue to ensure that we are covering as many as possible of the ways research output mentions can occur in Bluesky conversations.

Since going live on 15 January 2025, we have seen 17,698 new Bluesky profiles added. This enables us to process an additional estimated 8,900 posts and 4,000 mentions per day, that we wouldn't have been able to retrieve before this enhancement.

At the time of writing, we are tracking a total of 975,459 mentions from 950,096 individual Bluesky posts.

3. What Bluesky posts can Altmetric track right now?

At the time of writing (21 January 2025), we are tracking:

• Original posts and replies collected since 24 October 2024

• Reposts collected since 5 November 2024

• Quote posts collected since 13 November 2024

• Mentions from posts with embedded links collected since 9 December 2024

• Mentions from posts including images with alt text collected since 12 December 2024

• Mentions from historical posts by user profiles processed in the Altmetric system for the first time (as of 15 January 2025)
  

In addition, we are working to add the features below as post-launch iterations. We will share separate release notes when they are live.

• Cohort data from user profiles

• Larger volumes of posts published before the dates detailed above (we are working on further improvements that will allow us to track more content from pre-launch dates)
  

Due to technical limitations, please note we won’t be able to track:

• Mentions from links created using link shorteners

• Likes

• Follower count updates in real time

• User profile location data

Please contact the Altmetric Support team for any further questions, we'll be happy to help!