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Show HN: A livestream of all image descriptions (alt text) on Bluesky
3 bobbiechen 2 9/7/2025, 5:29:59 PM bobbiec.github.io ↗
In 2019, an academic paper by Gleason et al. found that only 0.1% of Twitter image posts had any form of image description (alt text) [1].
I wanted to see the analogous number for Bluesky today - my full blog post is here [2], but I found looking at the live stream was illuminating and fun too:
* Bluesky image posts are frequent enough to keep moving, but not so frequent that it's an unreadable blur.
* There's lots of bot content for things like ADS-B feeds (planes nearby), radio station "Now playing", and good old-fashioned affiliate link spam.
* There is a lot of detailed descriptions for sexual content. This was a surprise to me!
[1] https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3308558.3313605 [2] https://digitalseams.com/blog/image-descriptions-on-bluesky
1. This particular script is client-side, so it reads directly from the Jetstream WebSocket (rather than any service that I host).
2. I also have another server-side version that does store data. But in both cases, the script only captures the ATProto URI and alt text, not the image content itself. The media link is present in the Firehose data but I don't record or fetch it.
Some of the resulting data does ends up being moderated later, e.g. when I went to review suspected bots, some of the accounts had already been banned on the main Bluesky instance.