Abstract
Large-scale networks have been instrumental in shaping how we think about social systems, and have undergirded many foundational results in mathematical epidemiology, computational social science, and biology. However, many of the social systems through which diseases spread, information disseminates, and individuals interact are inherently mediated through groups, known as higher-order interactions. A gap exists between higher-order models of group formation and spreading processes and the data necessary to validate these mechanisms. Similarly, few datasets bridge the gap between pairwise and higher-order network data. The Bluesky social media platform is an ideal laboratory for observing social ties at scale through its open API. Not only does Bluesky contain pairwise following relationships, but it also contains higher-order social ties known as “starter packs” which are user-curated lists designed to promote social network growth. We introduce “A Blue Start”, a large-scale network dataset comprising 39.7M user accounts, 2.4B pairwise following relationships, and 365.8K groups representing starter packs. This dataset will be an essential resource for the study of higher-order networks.
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Data availability
The dataset is hosted on the Social Media Archive (SOMAR) at the Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR) at https://doi.org/10.3886/ICPSR300499.
Code availability
The code used to analyze the starter pack and following networks is available on GitHub (https://github.com/nwlandry/a-blue-start) and at Ref. 74.
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Acknowledgements
N.W.L. acknowledges support from the University of Virginia Prominence-to-Preeminence (P2PE) STEM Targeted Initiatives Fund, SIF176A Contagion Science. A.H.S. acknowledges support from the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship Program under Grant No. 1938052. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation. Pacific Northwest National Laboratory is operated by Battelle Memorial Institute under Contract DE-ACO6-76RL01830. PNNL Information Release Number: PNNL-SA-211224. The authors would like to thank Tommaso Bertola and Manlio De Domenico for pointing out issues with a previous version of the dataset and being courageous early adopters.
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A.H.S.: project conception, data acquisition, data processing, data analysis, writing. I.A.: data analysis, writing. S.K.: writing. B.F.W.: project conception, writing. N.W.L.: project conception, data acquisition, data processing, data analysis, writing.
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Smith, A.H., Amburg, I., Kumar, S. et al. A Blue Start: A large-scale pairwise and higher-order social network dataset. Sci Data (2026). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41597-026-06920-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41597-026-06920-1
