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Someone Made a Dataset of One Million Bluesky Posts for 'Machine Learning Research' (www.404media.co)

submitted 1 day ago by Stopthatgirl7@lemmy.world to c/technology@lemmy.world

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A machine learning librarian at Hugging Face just released a dataset composed of one million Bluesky posts, complete with when they were posted and who posted them, intended for machine learning research.

Daniel van Strien posted about the dataset on Bluesky on Tuesday:

“This dataset contains 1 million public posts collected from Bluesky Social's firehose API, intended for machine learning research and experimentation with social media data,” the dataset description says. “Each post contains text content, metadata, and information about media attachments and reply relationships.”

The data isn’t anonymous. In the dataset, each post is listed alongside the users’ decentralized identifier, or DID; van Strien also made a search tool for finding users based on their DID and published it on Hugging Face. A quick skim through the first few hundred of the million posts shows people doing normal types of Bluesky posting—arguing about politics, talking about concerts, saying stuff like “The cat is gay” and “When’s the last time yall had Boston baked beans?”—but the dataset has also swept up a lot of adult content, too.

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[–] mosiacmango@lemm.ee 2 points 16 hours ago* (last edited 16 hours ago)

Im not an expert either, but both people in the above links are. They are both worth reading if you want to understand the platforms better.

As to blueskys user data portability, it's part of the protocol to a degree, but it's not a reality. The design is such that only megacorps/giant orgs can host the bluesky service. It doesnt really matter if your data is portable if no one will let you import it. Its akin to google reader and rss. People could export their rss feeds when google shut down google reader, but without an rss reader, it didn't matter. That data had no usable context.

These is a drastic asymmetry problem with bluesky. It demands a giant player to gatekeep, whereas the fediverse lets anyone, anywhere add or even begin a network.

The Fediverse doesnt have a parallel of data portability at all, so even that lackluster implementation is something, but to both protocols defense, the Fediverse is talking about changes to activelypub to add this, and bluesky is attempting to make small services more possible.

Still, in all reality, neither of these platforms offers anything like that today, or likely in the near future.