Using Bluesky for Social Media Analysis

TwiNL (Tjong Kim Sang and Van den Bosch, 2013) is a Dutch archive of Twitter messages (tweets) widely used in research for social media analysis. However, Twitter, currently known as X, restricted access to their API in March 2023, which made collection of new tweets for the archive infeasible. In this paper, we examine the new microblogging platform Bluesky, set up by the founders of Twitter, as an alternative source for Dutch social media messages for research.