Bluesky Social Network and Starter Pack Data from Early 2025

A large-scale social network dataset contains anonymized following relationships and user-curated starter packs from the Bluesky platform in January and February 2025. It includes directed following links and starter pack metadata, such as creator and member lists, for computational network analysis. The dataset was created by Alyssa Smith and harvested by ICPSR.

Use Cases

• Analyze the structure of the anonymized directed following network to identify influential user clusters.
• Study the composition of starter packs by examining the relationship between hashed creator identifiers and hashed member identifiers.
• Model the growth and influence of starter packs on network formation by tracking their creation and adoption patterns.
• Investigate the typical size of user groups in starter packs, which range from 6 to 150 members per pack.

Strengths

• Data covers the entire available Bluesky following network from a specific two-month period in early 2025.
• User and starter pack identifiers are anonymized using a non-reversible hash function for privacy preservation.
• Includes both pairwise following relationships and higher-order network data from user-curated starter packs.

Limitations

• The dataset's size, row count, and specific file formats are unknown, making it difficult to assess computational requirements.
• Data is limited to a two-month snapshot, preventing longitudinal analysis of network evolution over time.
• Anonymization via hashing prevents linking user data to real-world identities or external datasets for enrichment.

Provenance

Source

Bluesky social media platform, harvested via ICPSR Dataverse.

Collection Method

Collected all available starter packs and following network data from the Bluesky platform.

Time Range

January and February 2025.

Freshness

Data was last updated in February 2026, but the underlying data covers January and February 2025.