Studying the "Air" of Bluesky: Proposing a New Research Field Called Network Perception in ATmosphere - Nightflight

How to study the ATmosphere, which "consists of multiple layers:

• Layer 4: Social phenomena (communities, discourse, norms)
• Layer 3: User behavior (posts, follows, moderation)
• Layer 2: Applications (Bluesky, various clients, Feeds)
• Layer 1: Protocol (AT Protocol, DID)
• Layer 0: Infrastructure (servers, networks)

Each layer falls under different academic disciplines.... ATmosphere is best understood as an interdisciplinary field: "ATmosphere Studies.""

Nighflight focuses here on "Network Perception" - the phenomenon where people's perception of the network is rarely objectively accurate - at least when it comes to X et al, where the data is unavailable. But as the ATmsphere is "an open protocol, anyone can in principle observe the network structure", so we can study how feeds, labellers etc affect user's network perception.

This will require interdisciplinary collaboration, with "contributions from:

• Network Science: Quantitative analysis of graph structures
• Cognitive Psychology: Mechanisms of perception and cognition
• Sociology: Community formation and social relationships
• Information Science: Design and impact of distributed systems
• Linguistics: Communication and meaning-making".