Low-vocality engagement and participation dynamics on Bluesky

Abstract

Online participation is often measured through visible expression, especially posting, yet consequential forms of engagement also occur through less vocal actions such as liking and following. We study how users inhabit Bluesky by reconstructing participation profiles from more than three billion activity records produced by a near-complete sample accounting for more than 80% of registered users. Aggregating behavior into monthly user-level observations, we distinguish two dimensions often conflated in platform analytics: intensity, capturing how much users engage, and style, capturing how engagement is expressed across actions. We find that vocal production is highly concentrated, but low-posting behavior does not imply absence from platform participation. High-intensity engagement is most strongly associated with liking rather than posting, while posting-oriented participation is more common among low-intensity users. Transition patterns show that high-intensity liking and posting stabilize active participation, network-building redirects users within the active space, and observed inactivity forms a persistent boundary to re-entry. Higher-order motifs further indicate that inactivity can interrupt rather than erase prior regimes, and that low-intensity liking can precede durable high-intensity engagement. These results call for a shift from post-centered measures of activity toward dynamic accounts of platform presence that incorporate differentiated low-vocality practices.

The authors' abstract, as published at the source. EPJ Data Science, 2026 · DOI ↗