Decentralized social media for environmental research

Social media data are reshaping environmental research. However, recent ownership and policy changes on centralized platforms like Twitter/X have motivated many users to seek new alternatives while simultaneously accelerating data restrictions for scientists. Decentralized social media, particularly Bluesky and Mastodon, are emerging as alternatives for users seeking greater control over their data and as a more stable and sustainable source of data for researchers. This rise may be instrumental in revitalizing the role of social media in environmental research. This study aims to provide a first-of-its-kind analysis of the potential of these new sources for environmental research, demonstrating their potential usefulness through the examples of climate change discourses and people's appreciation of wildlife. We find an increased adoption of Mastodon and Bluesky, with high linguistic diversity, even if dominated by English. Wildlife image content reveals broad taxonomic diversity, with plants, birds, and insects dominating the records. We find this pattern broadly consistent with that observed on the popular citizen science platform iNaturalist. Climate change discourse is found to broadly reflect the scientific consensus on both platforms, with contrarian claims remaining uncommon. This suggests that researchers may benefit from less polarized opinions and misinformation, arising from interactions that are less driven by engagement maximizing algorithms implemented in other platforms. Our study illustrates the promise of decentralized social media as a new data source for environmental scientists and paves the way for their broader use in environmental research.