Public discourse on social media has grown toxic and divisive. Traditional social platforms drive polarization and outrage because they feed users content through a single, centralized algorithm that is optimized for ad revenue and engagement. Unlike those platforms, Bluesky is building a social web that empowers people instead of exploiting them.

Bluesky started as a project within Twitter in 2019 to reimagine social from the ground up — to be an example of “bluesky” thinking that could reinvent how social worked. With the goal of building a healthier, less toxic social media ecosystem, we spun out as a public benefit corporation in 2022 to develop technologies for open and decentralized conversation. We built Authenticated Transfer so Twitter could interoperate with other social platforms, but when Twitter decided not to use it, we built an app to showcase the protocol.

When we built the app, we first gave users control over their feed: In the Bluesky app, users have algorithmic choice — you can choose from a marketplace of over 100k algorithms, built by other users, giving you full control over what you see. There is also stackable moderation, allowing people to spin up independent moderation services, and giving users a choice in what moderation middleware they subscribe to. And of course there is the open protocol, which lets you migrate between apps with your data and identity, creating a social ecosystem with full data portability. Just today, we announced that we are taking the next step in decentralization.

Although we focused on building these solutions to empower users, we still inherited many of the problems of traditional social platforms. We’ve seen how harassment, vitriol, and bad-faith behavior can degrade overall conversation quality. But innovating on how social works is in our DNA. We’ve been continuously working towards creating healthier conversations. The quote-post used to let harassers take a post out of context, so we gave users the ability to disable them. The reply section often filled up with unwanted replies, so we gave users the ability to control their interaction settings.

Our upcoming product changes are designed to strengthen the quality of discourse on the network, give communities more customized spaces for conversation, and improve the average user’s experience. One of the features we are workshopping is a “zen mode” that sets new defaults for how you experience the network and interact with people. Another is including prompts for how to engage in more constructive conversations. We see this as part of our goal to make social more authentic, informative, and human again.

We’ve also been working on a new version of our Community Guidelines for over six months, and in the process of updating them, we’ve asked for community feedback. We looked at all of the feedback you gave and incorporated some of your suggestions into the new version. Most significantly, we added details so everyone understands what we do and do not allow. We also better organized the rules by putting them into categories. We chose an approach that respects the human rights and fundamental freedoms outlined in the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights. The new Guidelines take effect on October 15.

In the meantime, we’re going to adjust how we enforce our moderation policies to better cultivate a space for healthy conversations. Posts that degrade the quality of conversations and violate our guidelines are a small percentage of the network, but they draw a lot of attention and negatively impact the community. Going forward, we will more quickly escalate enforcement actions towards account restrictions. We will also be making product changes that clarify when content is likely to violate our community guidelines.

We were built to reimagine social from the ground up by opening up the freedom to experiment and letting users choose. Social media has been dominated by a few platforms that have closed off their social graph and squashed competition, leaving users few alternatives. Bluesky is the first platform in a decade to challenge these incumbents. Every day, more people set up small businesses and create new apps and feeds on the protocol. We are continuing to invest in the broader protocol ecosystem, laying a foundation for the next generation of social media developers to build upon.

Today’s Community Guidelines Updates

In January, we started down the path of updating our rules. Part of that process was to ask for your thoughts on our updated Community Guidelines. More than 14,000 of you shared feedback, suggestions, and examples of how these rules might affect your communities. We especially heard from community members who shared concerns about how the guidelines could impact creative expression and traditionally marginalized voices.

After considering this feedback, and in a return to our experimental roots, we are going to bring a greater focus to encouraging constructive dialogue and enforcing our rules against harassment and toxic content. For starters, we are going to increase our enforcement efforts. Here is more information about our updated Community Guidelines.

What Changed Based on Your Feedback

• Better Structure: We organized individual policies according to our four principles – Safety First, Respect Others, Be Authentic, and Follow the Rules. Each section now better explains what's not allowed and consolidated related policies that were previously scattered across different sections.
• More Specific Language: Where you told us terms were too vague or confusing, we added more detail about what these policies cover.
• Protected Expression: We added a new section for journalism, education, advocacy, and mental health content that aims to reduce uncertainty about enforcement in those areas.

Our Approach: Foundation and Choice

We maintain baseline protections against serious harms like violence, exploitation, and fraud. These foundational Community Guidelines are designed to keep Bluesky safe for everyone.

Within these protections, our architecture lets communities layer on different labeling services and moderation tools that reflect their specific values. This gives users choice and control while maintaining essential safety standards.

People will always disagree about whether baseline policies should be tighter or more flexible. Our goal is to provide more detail about where we draw these boundaries. Our approach respects human rights and fundamental freedoms as outlined in the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights, while recognizing we must follow laws in different jurisdictions.

Looking Forward

Adding clarity to our Guidelines and improving our enforcement efforts is just the beginning. We also plan to experiment with changes to the app that will improve the quality of your experience by reducing rage bait and toxicity. We may not get it right with every experiment but we will continue to stay true to our purpose and to listen to our community as we go.

These updated guidelines take effect on October 15, and will continue to evolve as we learn from implementation and feedback. Thank you for sharing your perspectives and helping us build better policies for our community.

At Bluesky, we’re working to drive large-scale adoption of technologies for open and decentralized public conversation. We built our app to provide you with better choices when it comes to privacy, expression, and safety. That’s why we give people options for how content moderation works, on top of our baseline policies.

We recognize that promoting safety for young people is a shared responsibility, and we support the idea of collective action to protect children from online risks. We also recognize that governments may have strong, often conflicting, views on these issues and how to weigh competing priorities. In this rapidly evolving regulatory environment, our goal is to respect the law while balancing safety, free expression, and user privacy to serve the greater good of our community. Responding to new laws and regulations will require pragmatism and flexibility.

In the UK, we complied with a new law that requires platforms to restrict children from accessing adult content. In Mississippi, the law requires us to restrict access to the site for every unverified user. To implement this change, we would have had to invest substantial resources in a solution that we believe limits free speech and disproportionately harms smaller platforms. We chose not to offer our service there at this time while legal challenges continue.

South Dakota and Wyoming have also passed online safety laws that impose requirements on services like ours. These are very similar to the requirements of the UK Online Safety Act. So, as we did in the UK, we’ll enable Kids Web Services’ (KWS) age verification solution for users in these states. Through KWS, Bluesky users in South Dakota and Wyoming can choose from multiple methods to verify their age. We believe this approach currently strikes the right balance. Bluesky will remain available to users in these states, and we will not need to restrict the app for everyone.

We’re committed to keeping our community informed as we navigate these new regulations. As more states and countries adopt similar requirements, we will update this blog post accordingly.

Update, September 26: Ohio has a law similar to South Dakota and Wyoming regulations, so we'll be implementing the same solution in Ohio, effective September 29th.

Keeping children safe online is a core priority for Bluesky. We’ve invested a lot of time and resources building moderation tools and other infrastructure to protect the youngest members of our community. We’re also aware of the tradeoffs that come with managing an online platform. Our mission is to build an open and decentralized protocol for public conversation, and we believe in empowering users with more choices and control over their experience. We work with regulators around the world on child safety—for example, Bluesky follows the UK's Online Safety Act, where age checks are required only for specific content and features.

Mississippi's approach would fundamentally change how users access Bluesky. The Supreme Court’s recent decision leaves us facing a hard reality: comply with Mississippi’s age assurance law—and make every Mississippi Bluesky user hand over sensitive personal information and undergo age checks to access the site—or risk massive fines. The law would also require us to identify and track which users are children, unlike our approach in other regions. We think this law creates challenges that go beyond its child safety goals, and creates significant barriers that limit free speech and disproportionately harm smaller platforms and emerging technologies.

Unlike tech giants with vast resources, we’re a small team focused on building decentralized social technology that puts users in control. Age verification systems require substantial infrastructure and developer time investments, complex privacy protections, and ongoing compliance monitoring — costs that can easily overwhelm smaller providers. This dynamic entrenches existing big tech platforms while stifling the innovation and competition that benefits users.

We believe effective child safety policies should be carefully tailored to address real harms, without creating huge obstacles for smaller providers and resulting in negative consequences for free expression. That’s why until legal challenges to this law are resolved, we’ve made the difficult decision to block access from Mississippi IP addresses. We know this is disappointing for our users in Mississippi, but we believe this is a necessary measure while the courts review the legal arguments.

Here’s more on our decision and what comes next.

Why We’re Doing This

Mississippi’s HB1126 requires platforms to implement age verification for all users before they can access services like Bluesky. That means, under the law, we would need to verify every user’s age and obtain parental consent for anyone under 18. The potential penalties for non-compliance are substantial — up to $10,000 per user. Building the required verification systems, parental consent workflows, and compliance infrastructure would require significant resources that our small team is currently unable to spare as we invest in developing safety tools and features for our global community, particularly given the law's broad scope and privacy implications.

Our Concerns About Mississippi’s Approach

While we share the goal of protecting young people online, we have concerns about this law’s implementation:

• Broad scope: The law requires age verification for all users, not just those accessing age-restricted content, which affects the ability of everyone in Mississippi to use Bluesky.
• Barriers to innovation: The compliance requirements disadvantage newer and smaller platforms like Bluesky, which do not have the luxury of big teams to build the necessary tooling. The law makes it harder for people to engage in free expression and chills the opportunity to communicate in new ways.
• Privacy implications: The law requires collecting and storing sensitive personal information from all users, including detailed tracking of minors.

What We’re Doing

Starting today, if you access Bluesky from a Mississippi IP address, you’ll see a message explaining why the app isn’t available. This block will remain in place while the courts decide whether the law will stand.

How This Differs From Our Approach in Other Places

Mississippi’s new law and the UK’s Online Safety Act (OSA) are very different. Bluesky follows the OSA in the UK. There, Bluesky is still accessible for everyone, age checks are required only for accessing certain content and features, and Bluesky does not know and does not track which UK users are under 18. Mississippi’s law, by contrast, would block everyone from accessing the site—teens and adults—unless they hand over sensitive information, and once they do, the law in Mississippi requires Bluesky to keep track of which users are children.

Other Apps on the Protocol

This decision applies only to the Bluesky app, which is one service built on the AT Protocol. Other apps and services may choose to respond differently. We believe this flexibility is one of the strengths of decentralized systems—different providers can make decisions that align with their values and capabilities, especially during periods of regulatory uncertainty. We remain committed to building a protocol that enables openness and choice.

What’s Next

We do not take this decision lightly. Child safety is a core priority, and in this evolving regulatory landscape, we remain committed to building an open social ecosystem that protects users while preserving choice and innovation. We’ll keep you updated as this situation develops.

Since launching Bluesky two years ago, we’ve grown tremendously. As our community has expanded, feedback on our terms of service, community guidelines, copyright, and privacy policies has surfaced opportunities to improve clarity. With more experience under our belt and an evolving regulatory landscape, we’re updating the language in our terms and policies to better explain our approach and provide more detail.

For our Community Guidelines, we’re asking for input from the community. The proposed guidelines enhance clarity, add user safety details, and provide more transparency around moderation. You’ll have until August 28th to submit comments, and then they’ll go into effect on October 15th. You can view our updated Community Guidelines on our Support Page.

Our Terms of Service have been updated to reflect new legal requirements and give users more control in case of disagreements. Changes include clarifying eligibility and age assurance to comply with new regional regulations, as well as introducing a formal appeals process. We’ve also expanded our dispute resolution section to prioritize informal resolution.

The new Terms of Service, Privacy Policy, and Copyright Policy will go into effect on September 15th. You can view these updated policies on our Support Page.

Below is an overview of what’s being updated:

1. Community Guidelines

We believe the best policies are created in partnership with the people they serve. Our draft Guidelines incorporate lessons from our community's growth and feedback, and your input will help us ensure they're ready to support Bluesky's future. We started by creating a draft that we think improves on our current Guidelines. Below are some of the updates we’ve proposed; here is the form to use for feedback.

• Clearer Structure: Organized around four key principles—Safety First, Respect Others, Be Authentic, and Follow the Rules—with specific examples of allowed and prohibited content under each.
• Harm Categories Clarified: Updated with more examples, to align with the UK Online Safety Act (OSA), the EU Digital Services Act (DSA), and the US TAKE IT DOWN Act.
• Enforcement Procedures: Introduced progressive enforcement model and clarified content moderation logic as required by the OSA and DSA.
• Appeals & Redress: Aligned with the DSA and now includes out-of-court and judicial remedy guidance for EEA users.

2. Terms of Service (ToS)

• Eligibility and Age Assurance Section: Updated to clarify compliance with online safety laws and regulations (e.g., US Children's Online Privacy Protection Act [COPPA], OSA, DSA) and to require age assurance where necessary.
• Moderation and Illegal Content: Added detail on proactive moderation and illegal content responses to comply with the DSA.
• Complaints and Appeals: Introduced detailed appeals process to comply with the DSA.
• Dispute process: We have provided users with greater control in the event that we have a disagreement.
  • We’ve added details about using the informal dispute resolution process, including an agreement that we will talk on the phone before proceeding to any formal dispute process. This is because we think most disputes can be resolved informally.
  • We’ve added a specific detail around liability: if a user makes a claim that we did something wrong that caused certain types of harm, they can choose to resolve that claim in court rather than through arbitration.
  • We are giving users a choice when it comes to any dispute we must resolve through arbitration. That means users choose one arbitrator, Bluesky chooses one arbitrator, and those two arbitrators choose a third.

3. Privacy Policy

• User Rights: Enhanced transparency around data subject rights under the EU and UK General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and other global privacy laws.
• International Data Transfers: Updated to explain safeguards used for transfers outside EU and UK.
• Retention and Deletion: Strengthened clarity on deletion limitations due to decentralized architecture; consistent with DSA and data minimization requirements.
• Jurisdiction-Specific Sections: Added information that applies to some of our users based on the jurisdiction where they live.

4. Copyright Policy

• Streamlined Takedown Procedure: Ensures compliance with US Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), DSA, and similar laws.
• Abusive Reporting Clause: Added mechanisms to deter fraudulent takedown misuse, compliant with the DSA.
• Transparency Reporting: Aligned with the DSA by clarifying that we will include required information in transparency reports.

Part of Bluesky’s mission to create a more open and decentralized social web is helping users feel safe and in control of their experience. We always try to balance safety with privacy, and free expression with civility.

To achieve our mission, we also work with governments around the world. In the UK, the Online Safety Act requires that online platforms take specific steps to reduce the risk of children seeing harmful content. Since certain parts of that act come into effect later this month, we’re making some changes for people in the UK.

We’ll use Epic Games’ Kids Web Services (KWS) to give our UK community choices about how to verify their age. If you’re in the UK, you can choose between methods like credit card verification and face scans. (See here to learn more about how KWS safeguards user information.) For people who are under 18 or don’t want to go through this process, we’ll make adult-appropriate content inaccessible, and we’ll disable features like direct messaging.

If you’re in the UK, you’ll see a notification on our platform when this update takes effect, and a way to report unwanted content:

In addition to these updates, we’ll continue to look at how we’re doing to shield children from unwanted content, and how we can improve.

At Bluesky, we're constantly working to help you personalize your experience. We know that staying connected means different things to different people, and sometimes, you just need to cut through the noise. That's why we're excited to introduce three updates to notifications:

• Activity Notifications: Opt-in to receive push notifications from specific accounts.
• Enhanced Notification Settings: Controls to fine tune which notifications you receive.
• Repost Notifications: Receive notifications when someone likes or reposts posts you’ve reposted.

Activity Notifications: Never Miss a Post Again!

Staying connected with the accounts that matter most to you just got easier with Activity Notifications, which let you receive push and in-app notifications directly from specific accounts. Never miss a breaking update, a new thought, or a live moment from the accounts you follow closely.

It's simple to enable these new notifications:

1. Navigate to a profile: Visit the profile of an account you love.
2. Look for the bell icon: If they have this feature enabled, you'll see a small bell icon next to the 'Follow' button.
3. Tap the bell: Press it, and you'll be able to enable notifications specifically for their new posts, and optionally, even their replies.

You can easily opt in to manage the list of people you're receiving "Activity Notifications" from at any time by going to Settings > Notifications > Activity Notifications.

Enhanced Notification Settings: Take Charge of Your Notifications

We’re rolling out new controls over the notifications you receive. Head over to Settings > Notifications to fine-tune your preferences. You can now choose to receive notifications from:

• Everyone: Stay in the loop with all interactions.
• People you follow: Filter out the noise and focus on your close connections.
• No One: For when you need a moment of peace and quiet.

Here are the notification types you can now customize:

• Replies: Control who can notify you when they reply to your posts.
• Mentions: Decide when you're pinged for a mention.
• Quotes: Manage notifications for posts that quote yours.
• Likes: Get notified when someone likes your posts.
• Reposts: See when your posts are reposted.
• New followers: Keep track of your growing audience.
• Likes of your reposts: Get feedback on the content you curate.
• Reposts of your reposts: See how far your shared content travels.
• Everything else: This covers general notifications, like when someone joins via one of your Starter Packs, or verification notifications. We've kept this category flexible so we can add more helpful updates in the future.

You can also enable and disable whether you receive push notifications for each of these categories, giving you even more granular control.

Get Notified About Your Reposts!

Finally, we’re introducing a new improvement for those who love to curate and share posts: you can now receive notifications when someone likes or reposts content you've reposted. Of course, you can adjust these notifications in your settings, choosing to receive them from everyone, just people you follow, or turning them off entirely.

We believe these updates will empower you to shape your Bluesky experience to be exactly what you want. Dive into your settings and explore the new controls you have!

Trust is everything. Social media has connected us in powerful ways, but it hasn’t always given us the tools to know who we’re interacting with or why we should trust them.

In 2023, we launched our first layer of verification: letting individuals and organizations set their domain as their username. Since then, over 270,000 accounts have linked their Bluesky username to their website. Domain handles continue to be an important part of verification on Bluesky. At the same time, we've heard from users that a larger visual signal would be useful in knowing which accounts are authentic.

Now, we’re introducing a new layer — a user-friendly, easily recognizable verification badge. Bluesky will proactively verify authentic and notable accounts and display a blue badge next to their names. Additionally, through our Trusted Verifiers feature, select independent organizations can verify accounts directly. Bluesky will review these verifications as well to ensure authenticity.

To apply for verification or to be a Trusted Verifier, please fill out this form.

Trusted Verifiers

Verification badges issued by platforms are just one form of trust. But trust doesn’t come only from the top down; it emerges from relationships, communities, and shared context.

So, we’re also enabling trusted verifiers: organizations that can directly issue verification badges. Trusted verifiers are marked by scalloped badges, as shown below.

For example, the New York Times can now issue verification badges to its journalists directly in the app. Bluesky’s moderation team reviews each verification to ensure authenticity.

When you tap on a verified account's badge, you’ll see which organizations have granted verification.

You can also choose to hide verification badges within the app — navigate to Settings > Moderation > Verification Settings to toggle it off.

How to Get Verified on Bluesky

Notable and authentic accounts interested in receiving a verification badge or becoming a Trusted Verifier can apply here.

Separately from verification badges, you can also set your domain as your username. We highly encourage official organizations and individuals to do this because it links your web presence to your social account. (This is different from a verification badge.)

We're listening to your feedback and updating the character count for posts on Bluesky. Posts on Bluesky can now be 299 characters long!

For today only. Happy April Fools' Day!

2024 was a year of immense growth for Bluesky. We launched the app publicly in February and gained over 23M users by the end of the year. With this growth came anticipated challenges in scaling Trust & Safety, from adding workstreams to adapting to new harms.

Throughout 2024, our Trust & Safety team has worked to protect our growing userbase and uphold our community standards. Our approach has focused on assessing potential harms based on both their frequency and severity, allowing us to direct our resources to where they can have the greatest impact. Looking ahead to 2025, we're investing in stronger proactive detection systems to complement user reporting, as a growing network needs multiple detection methods to rapidly identify and address harmful content. In Q1, we'll be sharing a draft of updated Guidelines as we continue adapting to our community’s needs.

Overview

In 2024, Bluesky grew from 2.89M users to 25.94M users. In addition to users hosted on Bluesky’s infrastructure, there are over 4,000 users running their own infrastructure (Personal Data Servers), self-hosting their content, posts, and data.

To meet the demands caused by user growth, we’ve increased our moderation team to roughly 100 moderators and continue to hire more staff. Some moderators specialize in particular policy areas, such as dedicated agents for child safety. Our moderation team is staffed 24/7 and reviews user reports around the clock. This is a tough job, as moderators are consistently exposed to graphic content. At the start of September 2024, we began providing psychological counselling to alleviate the burden of viewing this content.

Reports

In 2024, users submitted 6.48M reports to Bluesky’s moderation service. That’s a 17x increase from the previous year — in 2023, users submitted 358K reports total. The volume of user reports increased with user growth and was non-linear, as the graph of report volume below shows:

In late August, there was a large increase in user growth for Bluesky from Brazil, and we saw spikes of up to 50k reports per day. Prior to this, our moderation team handled most reports within 40 minutes. For the first time in 2024, we now had a backlog in moderation reports. To address this, we increased the size of our Portuguese-language moderation team, added constant moderation sweeps and automated tooling for high-risk areas such as child safety, and hired moderators through an external contracting vendor for the first time.

We already had automated spam detection in place, and after this wave of growth in Brazil, we began investing in automating more categories of reports so that our moderation team would be able to review suspicious or problematic content rapidly. In December, we were able to review our first wave of automated reports for content categories like impersonation. This dropped processing time for high-certainty accounts to within seconds of receiving a report, though it also caused some false positives. We’re now exploring the expansion of this tooling to other policy areas. Even while instituting automation tooling to reduce our response time, human moderators are still kept in the loop — all appeals and false positives are reviewed by human moderators.

Some more statistics: The proportion of users submitting reports held fairly stable from 2023 to 2024. In 2023, 5.6% of our active users¹ created one or more reports. In 2024, 1.19M users made one or more reports, approximately 4.57% of our user base.

In 2023, 3.4% of our active users received one or more reports. In 2024, the number of users who received a report were 770K, comprising 2.97% of our user base.

The majority of reports were of individual posts, with a total of 3.5M reports. This was followed by account profiles at 47K reports, typically for a violative profile picture or banner photo. Lists received 45K reports. DMs received 17.7K reports. Significantly lower are feeds at 5.3K reports, and starter packs with 1.9K reports.

Our users report content for a variety of reasons, and these reports help guide our focus areas. Below is a summary of the reports we received, categorized by the reasons users selected. The categories vary slightly depending on whether a report is about an account or a specific post, but here’s the full breakdown:

• Anti-social Behavior: Reports of harassment, trolling, or intolerance – 1.75M
• Misleading Content: Includes impersonation, misinformation, or false claims about identity or affiliations – 1.20M
• Spam: Excessive mentions, replies, or repetitive content – 1.40M
• Unwanted Sexual Content: Nudity or adult content not properly labeled – 630K
• Illegal or Urgent Issues: Clear violations of the law or our terms of service – 933K
• Other: Issues that don’t fit into the above categories – 726K

These insights highlight areas where we need to focus more attention as we prioritize improvements in 2025.

Labels

In 2024, Bluesky applied 5.5M labels, which includes individual post labels and account-level labels. To give an idea of volumes, in Nov 2024, 2.5M videos were posted on Bluesky², along 36.14M images. This comes primarily from automation where every image as well as frames from each video is sent to a provider for assessment, they return verdicts that match to our specific labels, and those are the ones you see from Bluesky Moderation. None of the images or videos are retained by the vendor or used for training generative AI systems. In June 2024, we analyzed the effectiveness of this system and concluded that the overall system was 99.90% accurate (i.e. it labeled the right things with the right labels). Human moderators review all appeals on labels, but due to backlogs, there are currently delays.

The top human-applied labels were:

• Sexual-figurative³ - 55,422
• Rude - 22,412
• Spam - 13,201
• Intolerant - 11,341
• Threat - 3,046

Appeals

In 2024, 93,076 users submitted at least one appeal in the app, for a total of 205K individual appeals. For most cases, the appeal was due to disagreement with label verdicts.

We currently handle user appeals for taken-down accounts via our moderation email inbox.

In 2025, we will transition to responding to moderation reports directly within the Bluesky app, which will streamline user communication. For example, we’ll be able to report back to users what action was taken on their reports. Additionally, in a future iteration, it will be possible for users to appeal account takedowns directly within the Bluesky app instead of having to send us an email.

Takedowns

In 2024, Bluesky moderators took down 66,308 accounts, and automated tooling took down 35,842 accounts for reasons such as spam and bot networks. Mods took down 6,334 records (posts, lists, feed etc.) while automated systems removed 282.

This month (January 2025), we’ve already built in policy reasons to Ozone, our open-source moderation tool. This will give us more granular data on the takedown rationale moving forward.

Legal Requests

In 2024, we received 238 requests from law enforcement, governments, legal firms, responded to 182, and complied with 146. The majority of requests came from German, U.S., Brazilian, and Japanese law enforcement.

In the chart below, User Data Requests are requests for user data; Data Preservation Requests are requests for Bluesky to store user data pending legal authorization to transfer the data; Emergency Data Requests are extreme cases where there’s a threat to life (i.e., someone actively discussing their own suicide with a time and date given for an attempt); Takedown Requests are requests for content removal; Subpoena Requests are largely user data requests, but if Bluesky fails to provide the data in a timely manner, it has to physically show up in court to defend not providing the data.

The demand for legal requests peaked between Sept and Dec 2024.

Copyright / Trademark

In 2024, we received a total of 937 copyright and trademark cases. There were four confirmed copyright cases in the entire first half of 2024, and this number increased to 160 in September. The vast majority of cases occurred between September to December.

We published a copyright form in late 2024, which provided more structure to our report responses. The influx of users from Brazil meant that professional copyright companies began scraping Bluesky data and sending us copyright claims. With the move to a structured copyright form, we expect to have more granular data in 2025.

Child Safety

We subscribe to a number of hashes (digital fingerprints) that match known cases of Child Sexual Abuse Material (CSAM). When an image or video is uploaded to Bluesky and matches one of these hashes, it is immediately removed from the site and our infrastructure without the need for a human to view the content.

In 2024, Bluesky submitted 1,154 reports for confirmed CSAM to the National Centre for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC). Reports consist of the account details, along with manually reviewed media by one of our specialized child safety moderators. Each report can involve many pieces of media, though most reports involve under five pieces of media.

CSAM is a serious issue on any social network. With surges in user growth also came increased complexity in child safety. Cases included accounts attempting to sell CSAM by linking off-platform, potentially underage users trying to sell explicit imagery, and pedophiles attempting to share encrypted chat links. In these cases, we rapidly updated our internal guidance to our moderation team to ensure prompt response times in taking down this activity.

To read more about how Bluesky handles child safety, you can find a co-published blog post on Thorn’s website.

It’s been a big year for Bluesky! As 2024 draws to a close, I’m excited to take a look back at everything that’s happened in the past year.

Alongside users, creators, and the AT Protocol developer community, Bluesky has grown from an invite-only app with only 3 million people to a public app of over 25.9 million people. In the last month and a half, Bluesky has grown by over 13M people, with organizations reporting a 2-10x increase in the amount of engagement they receive.

Here’s a look back at some key milestones of this past year:

Opening Our Doors

Bluesky officially launched in just February of this year. When we opened the app to the public, we removed invites, which were a tool to help us grow the app sustainably and safely.

At launch, Bluesky had an early community of 3M people. One week later, over a million new users had signed up.

Implementing Federation

Just weeks after our public launch, we achieved a long-standing goal by implementing federation. This milestone represents our commitment to creating an open, interconnected social network that respects user choice. Users can now run their own personal data servers, and thousands have opted to use their own servers instead of Bluesky’s infrastructure.

Stackable Moderation

In March, we launched labelers, the first piece of our stackable moderation system that empowers users to take control of their experience. Additionally, we open-sourced Ozone, a collaborative moderation tool that enables independent organizations and people to more easily run their own moderation service.

More Big Features

In 2024, we also launched:

• Hashtags: We added hashtags to make finding content easier.
• Direct Messages: In May, we launched DMs, creating new avenues for connection.
• Starter packs: In June, we launched starter packs, helping communities onboard to Bluesky more easily.
• Video Sharing: In September, we launched videos.
• Trending topics: In December, right around Christmas, we launched trending topics.

Many Small Features

We also launched:

• Account deactivation (June),
• Priority notifications (July),
• Self-moderation tools like detach quotes and hide reply (August),
• Pinned posts (October), and
• The thread composer (November).

Looking forward to 2025

Building on this year's achievements, we're excited to introduce more features and improvements. Your feedback continues to shape Bluesky’s evolution, and we deeply appreciate the trust you've placed in Bluesky this year.

Ever since Bluesky was first launched as a beta app in 2023, scientists and researchers have been an early and core community. We’re excited to share that Altmetric is now tracking mentions of your research on Bluesky.

This makes it easy for you to track where the conversation around your research is happening, especially as Bluesky’s community has grown by over 10 million users in the last month.

To learn more about Bluesky as an Altmetric data source, read Altmetric’s blog here. Login to Altmetric to start tracking your research mentions here.

Bluesky's Open Network

Bluesky's open developer API makes it possible to easily find all mentions of your research on the network. Unlike other closed social platforms that lock users in and lock developers out, Bluesky is an open social network by design.

You can find Bluesky’s developer documentation at docs.bsky.app — we’re excited to see what you build!

We could go on about how we welcome publishers, we don't demote links, we encourage independent developers to build apps and extensions on top of Bluesky's network.... but instead, we'll show you:

The Boston Globe

Traffic from Bluesky to @bostonglobe.com is already 3x that of Threads, and we are seeing 4.5x the conversions to paying digital subscribers.

— Matt Karolian (@mkarolian.bsky.social) November 26, 2024 at 10:19 AM

The Guardian

By which I mean, I'm pretty sure traffic from @bsky.app to @theguardian.com is *significantly* higher than the very obvious 2x that of Threads

This post brought to you by a reply to @mkarolian.bsky.social on Threads, where it has had just 105 engagements, as opposed to the 18k+ here

[image or embed]

— Dave Earley (@earleyedition.bsky.social) November 26, 2024 at 10:30 PM

The New York Times

hard to exaggerate how nuts the engagement is on Bluesky compared to 𝕏. a vastly smaller user base (at least officially), but just look at these stats for one of the biggest newspapers on Earth. Musk has absolutely trashed the platform. folks, you are not locked in on 𝕏. not even a little.

[image or embed]

— Kevin Rothrock (@kevinrothrock.me) November 23, 2024 at 1:21 AM

Open-source Web Dev

We have 6% of the followers here compared to the 100k in X. The vite 6.0 announcement in bluesky already got half the reposts and a third of the likes. And most of the comments and quotes from OSS maintainers happened here. I don't know about other communities, but OSS web dev is a bluesky game now.

[image or embed]

— patak (@patak.dev) November 27, 2024 at 8:01 AM

Democracy Docket

Traffic from Bluesky to @democracydocket.com is surging while X is falling and Threads remains largely irrelevant. This is powering rapid growth of both free subscribers and paid members.

— Marc Elias (@marcelias.bsky.social) November 27, 2024 at 5:31 AM

Join us: bsky.app/download. Publishers, you can find our press FAQ here.

Bluesky now exceeds 13 million users, the AT Protocol developer ecosystem continues to grow, and we’ve shipped highly requested features like direct messages and video. We’re excited to announce that we’ve raised a $15 million Series A financing led by Blockchain Capital with participation from Alumni Ventures, True Ventures, SevenX, Amir Shevat of Darkmode, co-creator of Kubernetes Joe Beda, and others.

Our lead, Blockchain Capital, shares our philosophy that technology should serve the user, not the reverse — the technology being used should never come at the expense of the user experience. Additionally, this fund has a uniquely deep understanding of our decentralized foundation and has extensive experience building developer ecosystems, so it’s a natural partnership as we continue to invest in the ATmosphere (the AT Protocol developer ecosystem). This does not change the fact that the Bluesky app and the AT Protocol do not use blockchains or cryptocurrency, and we will not hyperfinancialize the social experience (through tokens, crypto trading, NFTs, etc.). To ensure we and our users benefit fully from this expertise, partner Kinjal Shah will join our board. Kinjal shares our vision for a social media ecosystem that empowers the people who use it, and we are glad to have her support as we invest in driving the adoption of decentralized social.

With this fundraise, we will continue supporting and growing Bluesky’s community, investing in Trust and Safety, and supporting the ATmosphere developer ecosystem. In addition, we will begin developing a subscription model for features like higher quality video uploads or profile customizations like colors and avatar frames. Bluesky will always be free to use — we believe that information and conversation should be easily accessible, not locked down. We won’t uprank accounts simply because they’re subscribing to a paid tier.

Additionally, we’re proud of our vibrant community of creators, including artists, writers, developers, and more, and we want to establish a voluntary monetization path for them as well. Part of our plan includes building payment services for people to support their favorite creators and projects. We’ll share more information as this develops.

Bluesky’s open technology, the AT Protocol, makes a whole ecosystem of apps possible. We’re excited that developers have already begun building their own applications with totally different purposes from the Bluesky app. For example, Smoke Signal is an events app, Frontpage is a web forum, and Bluecast is an audio app (that includes karaoke with licensed songs)! We hypothesize that monetization strategies like subscriptions, domain-name registrations, and payments to creators will enable these independent apps to grow as well.

With every month that passes, the need for an open social network becomes more clear. We’re very excited about where we’re headed — we’re building not just another social app, but an entire network that gives users freedom and choice. Thank you for joining us.

What have we done since our last fundraise?

Since raising our seed round last year, we have:

• Grown Bluesky from an invite-only app with 1M users to an open app serving more than 13M people! We’ve welcomed millions of people from the United States, Brazil, Japan, the United Kingdom, Germany, and more.
• Launched federation for self-hosters and developers. Now there are over 1,000 other personal data servers (PDS) outside of Bluesky.
• Launched custom feeds, making algorithmic choice a reality. Now there are over 50k+ feeds on Bluesky.
• Invested heavily in anti-harassment tooling and Trust and Safety.
• Built labeling services and opened the ability for anyone to run foundational pieces of stackable moderation. Additionally, open-sourced Ozone, a moderation tool.
• Shipped highly-requested features like direct messaging, GIFs, and video.
• Pioneered novel features like starter packs to help communities find each other in a privacy-preserving way.
• Partnered with organizations like Buffer to add Bluesky integrations and Namecheap to sell domains.
• Announced $20k in developer grants and supported the growth of the ATmosphere through additional developer documentation, talks, and partnerships.
• Much more, including a new logo and a public web interface!

Traditional social media companies have enclosed the online commons, locked down their APIs to shut out independent developers, and deployed black box algorithms that leave us guessing. This era of old social is over — at Bluesky, we’re returning choice and power to you.

In August, we published a blog post on anti-toxicity features that Bluesky’s product team designed with the Trust & Safety team. You can read that blog post here.

Trust and Safety (T&S) encompasses how we make all aspects of the Bluesky app a safe and enjoyable experience for users, covering the processes, policies, and the product. As Bluesky’s Head of T&S, my goal is to understand where the biggest gaps in user needs are and how to address them to ensure that people have a pleasant experience on Bluesky.

This is a big quarter for Trust and Safety at Bluesky, as we work on a large number of improvements. Here’s a preview of everything that is in progress!

Ban evasion and multi-account detection capabilities

People deserve to have an experience free from harassment on Bluesky. While harassers can be infinitely creative in how they avoid detection, we’re working on tooling to reduce their impact. For example, we’re adding more friction to their ability to create new accounts. We currently register users for additional defenses when we see a pattern of new account harassment, but in the future, we'll be able to better detect and surface when multiple new malicious accounts are created and managed by the same user.

Toxicity detection experiments

Addressing toxicity is one of the biggest challenges on social media. On Bluesky, the two areas that made up 50% of user reports in the past quarter are for content that is rude and for accounts that are fake, scams, or spam. Rude content especially can drive people away from forming connections, posting, or engaging for fear of attacks and dogpiles.

In our first experiment, we are attempting to detect toxicity in replies, since user reports indicate that is where they experience the most harm. We’ll be detecting rude replies, and surfacing them to mods, then eventually reducing their visibility in the app. Repeated rude labels on content will lead to account level labels, and suspensions. This will be a building block for detecting group harassment and dog-piling of accounts.

Automating spam and fake account removals

Harm on social media can happen quickly. For example, if a fake impersonation account asks for a fund transfer, it might take only a matter of minutes before someone falls for a scam. We’re launching a pilot project to automatically detect when an account is clearly fake, scamming, or spamming users to hopefully reduce the likelihood this happens. We’re hoping that this project, paired with our moderation team, can cut down the action time for these reports to within seconds of receiving a report.

Feedback on moderation reports

In the coming months, we’re working to move away from communicating with users about violations via email to communicating through the Bluesky app. Users will receive notices of infractions or labels within the app. We’ll also send outcomes of your own reports through the app as well.

Geography-specific labels

In some cases, content or accounts may be allowed under Bluesky's Community Guidelines but violate local laws in certain countries. To balance freedom of speech with legal compliance, we are introducing geography-specific labels. When we receive a valid legal request from a court or government to remove content, we may limit access to that content for users in that area. This allows Bluesky's moderation service to maintain flexibility in creating a space for free expression, while also ensuring legal compliance so that Bluesky may continue to operate as a service in those geographies. This feature will be introduced on a country-by-country basis, and we will aim to inform users about the source of legal requests whenever legally possible.

Designing video on Bluesky for safety

We recently launched video on Bluesky, and the T&S team has been working with the product team to ensure the feature is launched safely.

Here’s a look at how T&S works together with product. The product team puts together a document listing what they intend to build. Trust and Safety then assesses the risks associated with the feature, and makes recommendations to minimize harms that are most likely from that feature. This ensures that we anticipate harms and integrate mitigations before launch.

For video, Trust & Safety has incorporated various features like being able to turn off auto-play or ensuring that reports can be made and labels applied to content. You can read more about the available safety tooling for video here.

We try to be pragmatic in building the safety elements that most people will need prior to launch, but there’s always room for more improvements in response to user feedback. So after a product launches, we pay close attention to reports and support requests as we improve the feature.

List changes to restrict abuse

Lists are a powerful way to have more control over your experience on Bluesky. You’re able to curate your favorite users, or to filter individuals out from your Bluesky experience — and to share those lists with others, so they can benefit from your curation as well.

However, sometimes bad actors use lists to harass others and violate our rules, so we’re making some changes. We have recently updated starter packs to remove members when blocked, and are doing the same for curated lists. Prior to this, the Bluesky Trust & Safety team has only been able to take down entire lists as a moderation action, instead of removing specific individuals. For moderation lists, this would mean that we’d unintentionally erase blocks. Now, when you block the creator of a list that you are on, you will get removed from the list. This behavior doesn’t apply to moderation lists since that would defeat their purpose.

We will also be starting a widespread effort to identify lists with toxic and abusive names or descriptions. Lists with names or descriptions that violate the Bluesky Community Guidelines will be hidden in the app until or unless their creator modifies them to comply with our rules. We will also take further action against users that repeatedly create abusive lists.

Lists continue to be an area of active discussion and development for our team to find the right balance for user safety.

Prioritizing User Concerns

This section provides some transparency on how we prioritize T&S efforts across the organization.

We read your concerns raised via reports, emails, or mentions to @safety.bsky.app. Our overall framework is asking how often something happens vs how harmful it is. Then we focus on addressing high-harm/high-frequency issues while also tracking edge cases that could result in serious harm to a few users.

For example, a small number of accounts have been harassing a few people on the app by creating multiple accounts and targeting the user repeatedly. Although this happens to a tiny fraction of users, it causes enough continual harm that we want to take action to prevent this abuse.

As always, your feedback is welcome through comments or by reaching out to [email protected].

After much anticipation, you can now share videos on Bluesky! Let’s dive right into the quick facts.

Quick facts

• Each post can contain one video.
• Videos can be up to 60 seconds long.
• Bluesky currently supports .mp4, .mpeg, .webm, and .mov video files.
• By default, videos will auto-play. You can turn off auto-play in Settings.

Update to version 1.91 of the mobile app or refresh desktop to begin watching video on Bluesky. We're rolling out the ability to post video gradually to ensure a smooth experience.

Some more details

• You can attach subtitles to your video.
• Currently, you can upload 25 videos / 10 GB of video per day. We may tweak this limit.

At Bluesky, the product team works hand-in-hand with Trust & Safety to develop new features. Here’s the safety tooling available with video:

• You must verify your email before you can upload a video. This is one step to decrease spam and abuse with video.
• You can apply labels to your own videos, for example, for adult content.
• You can submit reports to Bluesky’s moderation team for posts with video. These posts may be labeled or taken down. Video that contains illegal content will be purged from our infrastructure.
• For users that repeatedly violate our community guidelines with video content, Bluesky’s moderation team may remove your ability to upload videos.
• Every video is processed via Hive and Thorn to scan for content that requires a content warning or content that should be taken down (e.g. illegal material like CSAM).
• When you delete a post that contains video, the video will be deleted immediately. Shortly afterwards, the data will be entirely purged from Bluesky infrastructure as well.

Sports, pop culture, politics, breaking news, and so much more just got a lot more exciting on Bluesky! We’re so excited for our community to continue to grow. See you on Bluesky!

Que semana! Nos últimos dias mais de 2.6 milhões de usuários se registraram na plataforma, sendo que mais de 85% são Brasileiros. Sejam muito bem vindos, estamos muito contentes por tê-los aqui!

Qual o diferencial do Bluesky?

Por base, o Bluesky te prioriza e te dá mais controle. Aqui você pode escolher a experiência social que mais te agrada.

Nossa comunidade cresceu organicamente e está cheia de autores, artistas, jornalistas, políticos, entre outros. Os usuários brasileiros que já usam a plataforma notam que eles têm uma qualidade de engajamento com muito mais qualidade do que em qualquer outra plataforma.

Além disso, o Bluesky é um ecossistema aberto. Nós criamos uma rede social aberta para que qualquer desenvolvedor seja capaz de modificá-la através do AT Protocol (o nome dele é Atmosphere). Essa abertura diz respeito ao fato do Bluesky ser um projeto colaborativo, diferente de outras redes sociais que são controladas por uma única empresa. Qualquer um pode construir feeds, moderar e até criar aplicativos completamente novos usando a nossa plataforma.

Quando o Bluesky vai liberar vídeos e trending topics?

Os vídeos já estarão disponíveis na nossa próxima grande atualização, e nós também já estamos trabalhando nos trending topics. Estamos ligados nos feedbacks de vocês e super contentes com essa animação.

Quais são as particularidades do Bluesky?

Feeds Customizados

Além do cronológico feed Seguindo e o clássico Discover, você pode experimentar feeds novos! Por exemplo, caso você queira ver postagens dos seus amigos que não postam muito — tente Quiet Posters. Caso queira ver o conteúdo mais postado no dia anterior em toda a plataforma, experimente o Catch Up.

Qualquer um pode criar e se inscrever nos feeds. Ao invés de providenciarmos apenas um algoritmo, nós deixamos nossos usuários escolherem. Você está no controle. Dessa forma a ideia é promover discussões mais saudáveis mesmo porque não incentivamos esquemas para aumentar engajamento, desinformação, fake news ou qualquer tipo de abuso.

Nomes de Usuário

Caso você seja dono de um site, pode usar o nome dele como nome de usuário. Por exemplo, a Folha de S. Paulo escolheu usar @folha.com como nome. Ah, mas não esqueça que você só pode usar o nome de usuário de um site que seja seu, pois essa é uma forma de mostrar que, por exemplo, você é a Folha de S. Paulo real. Esse é um jeito de se provar legítimo.

Você pode brincar e se divertir inventando! Por exemplo, muitas Swifties escolheram nomes de usuário que terminam com “swifties.social,” coisa que você pode configurar usando essa ferramenta aqui.

Caso tenha interesse em comprar e gerenciar um site através do nosso parceiro Namecheap, você pode fazer isso aqui.

Estou cansado de criar contas novas em redes sociais! É garantia que o Bluesky vai continuar vivo?

Nós sabemos, compreendemos profundamente essa sua preocupação. Mas o Bluesky está aqui para ficar.

Quando uma plataforma como o X fecha você perde contato com todos os seus amigos de lá. Mas como o Bluesky é uma rede cujo código é aberto você consegue levar seus seguidores com você. Dessa forma você sempre será capaz de manter contato com seus amigos. (caso esteja interessado em detalhes técnicos, tem mais informações sobre a portabilidade de contas aqui.)

E digo mais! Por ser uma rede social aberta, desenvolvedores independentes podem construir aplicativos inteiramente novos e promover outras experiências a vocês. Imagine uma plataforma de blog ou um aplicativo de fotos nessa mesma rede com todos os seus amigos já conectados. Você não vai precisar se inscrever em outro aplicativo social desta vez — estará criando uma identidade social online que é apenas sua.

Como o Bluesky lida com liberdade de expressão e moderação de conteúdo?

Segurança e promoção de espaços saudáveis para conversas é uma questão central para o Bluesky. Nosso time de moderação está de pé 24/7 e consegue responder a maioria das denúncias em poucos dias. Para denunciar uma postagem ou uma conta, simplesmente clique no menu indicado com três pontinhos e em “Denunciar Postagem” ou “Denúnciar Conta”.

Ao mesmo tempo, nós entendemos que não existe uma única forma que sirva para moderar todos os espaços. Então, além da base sólida em relação às políticas de moderação do Bluesky, vocês podem se inscrever em outras organizações que confiem, ou mesmo em outras comunidades que tenham algum conhecimento específico e que podem adicionar regras de moderação. (Leia mais sobre formas de acrescentar regras de moderação aqui.)

Como vocês planejam lidar com as fake news eleitorais?

Aaron Rodericks, o cabeça do time de segurança e promoção de saúde na plataforma, já teve que lidar com essas questões no Twitter e trouxe sua experiência para cá. Nosso time de moderação revisa o conteúdo ou a conta em busca de desinformação, coisa que os usuários podem denunciar diretamente do aplicativo. Em caso de violações severas como risco de boicotes a votação ou as eleições oficiais nós poderemos remover o conteúdo ou até a conta. Na maioria dos casos nós revisamos as reivindicações de que um conteúdo é falso buscando informações em fontes confiáveis e nos reservamos o direito de classificar postagens como desinformação.

Jornalistas podem entrar em contato através do [email protected]. Para o nosso kit de media, que é onde você encontra nosso logo e fotos, clique aqui.

What a week! In the last few days, Bluesky has grown by more than 2.6 million users, over 85% of which are Brazilian. Welcome, we are so excited to have you here!

What makes Bluesky different?

By design, Bluesky gives users more control and prioritizes you. Here, you can customize your social experience to fit you.

Our community has grown organically, and is full of creators, artists, journalists, politicians, and more. Brazilian users on Bluesky have noticed that they receive much higher quality engagement on Bluesky than on any other platform.

In addition, Bluesky is an open ecosystem. We’re built on an open network that developers can freely build upon called the AT Protocol (and the ecosystem is called the Atmosphere). This openness means that Bluesky is a collaborative project, unlike other social networks that are controlled by a single company. Anyone can build feeds, moderation services, and even entirely new apps on top of our network.

What are some unique features on Bluesky?

Custom Feeds

Outside of your chronological Following feed and the default Discover feed, you can try out some new feeds! Maybe you want to see posts from your friends who don’t post as often — try Quiet Posters. If you want to see the top posts across the whole network from the last day, try Catch Up.

Anyone can create and subscribe to feeds. Instead of providing only a single algorithm, we let users choose. You’re in control. This promotes healthier discussion because we do not incentivize engagement baiting, misinformation, or harassment.

Usernames

You can set your username to be a website that you own. For example, Folha de S. Paulo set their Bluesky username to @folha.com. You can only set your username to a website that you own, so this shows you that the real Folha de S. Paulo owns this account. It’s one form of self-verification.

There’s lots of room to have fun with this! For example, many Swifties are using usernames that end in “swifties.social,” which you can set up with this community tool here.

If you’d like to purchase and manage a website through Bluesky’s partnership with Namecheap, you can do that here.

I’m tired of creating accounts on new social apps! Will Bluesky stick around?

We know, we’ve been there too. Bluesky is here to stay.

When an app like X shuts down, you lose touch with all your friends there. But because Bluesky is built on an open network, you can easily take your followers with you. You will always be able to stay in touch with your friends. (If you’re interested in the technical details, you can read more about account portability here.)

Additionally, because of the open network, independent developers can build entirely new apps and experiences. Imagine a blogging platform or a photo app built on this same network, with all of your friends already connected. You’re not just signing up for another social app this time — you’re creating a social identity online that you own.

When will Bluesky have video and trending topics?

Video will be available in the next major app release, and we’re working on trending topics too. We’re paying close attention to your feedback and appreciate everyone’s excitement.

How does Bluesky handle content moderation?

Trust and safety is core to Bluesky, and we value spaces for healthy conversation. Our moderation team provides 24/7 coverage and responds to most reports within a few days. To report a post or an account, simply click the three-dot menu and click “Report post” or “Report account.”

At the same time, we recognize that there’s no one-size-fits-all approach to moderation. So, on top of Bluesky's strong foundation, users can subscribe to additional moderation decisions from more organizations they trust with industry-specific or community-specific knowledge. (Read more about our stackable approach to moderation here.)

What is your plan for election misinformation?

Aaron Rodericks, Bluesky's Head of Trust & Safety, formerly led election integrity efforts at Twitter and has brought his experience here. Our moderation team reviews content or accounts for misinformation, which users can report directly within the app. In the case of severe violations such as a risk to polling places or election officials, we may remove content or accounts. In most cases, we review claims against credible sources and fact checkers, and may label posts as misinformation.

Journalists can reach us with inquiries at [email protected]. For our media kit, where you can find our logo and headshots, click here.

To learn how to create a starter pack in English, read our guide here.

Hoje, estamos lançando os pacotes iniciais — convites personalizados que permitem que você traga amigos diretamente para o seu espaço no Bluesky!

Recomende feeds personalizados e usuários para ajudar sua comunidade a se encontrar. Comece na aba Pacotes Iniciais no seu perfil do Bluesky.

O que há em um pacote inicial?

• Feeds personalizados. No Bluesky, você pode definir qualquer algoritmo ou tópico como sua linha do tempo principal. Exemplos incluem Postadores Quietos (posts dos seus seguidores mútuos mais silenciosos) e Colocando em Dia (posts mais populares das últimas 24 horas).
• Recomendações de quem seguir. Adicione suas contas favoritas e encoraje novos usuários a segui-las.

Como criar um pacote inicial?

1. Clique na aba Pacotes Iniciais. No seu perfil, ao lado das abas de mídia e curtidas, você verá uma nova aba.

2. Crie um pacote inicial. Use nossa ferramenta de geração automática para criar um pacote inicial ou faça o seu próprio do zero! Você pode criar mais de um pacote inicial.
   1. Clique em "Faça um para mim" para obter um pacote inicial pré-preenchido com usuários e feeds personalizados sugeridos. Você pode adicionar ou remover itens desta lista.
   2. Ou clique em "Criar" para adicionar usuários e feeds ao seu pacote inicial você mesmo.

3. Compartilhe seu pacote inicial! Cada pacote inicial vem com um link e um código QR que você pode compartilhar. Envie seu pacote inicial por mensagem para um amigo, compartilhe com sua rede profissional e poste em outros apps sociais!

4. Diga olá! Você será notificado sobre os usuários que se juntarem ao Bluesky através do seu pacote inicial.

Quem pode usar os pacotes iniciais?

Qualquer pessoa com uma conta no Bluesky pode criar pacotes iniciais.

Se você ainda não tem uma conta no Bluesky, pode se juntar através do pacote inicial de um amigo e começar com as personalizações recomendadas por ele. Assim que estiver no Bluesky, você pode adicionar/remover essas recomendações e personalizar ainda mais sua experiência.

Se você já está no Bluesky mas quer se integrar a outra comunidade ou obter as recomendações de seu amigo, você também pode usar o pacote inicial dele para adicionar à sua experiência!

FAQ sobre Pacotes Iniciais

Quantas pessoas e feeds posso adicionar ao meu pacote inicial?

Você pode recomendar até 150 pessoas e até 3 feeds personalizados. Novos usuários terão automaticamente os feeds Seguindo e Descobrir fixados.

Como posso compartilhar meu pacote inicial com mais pessoas?

Envie um link por mensagem para seus amigos, poste sobre ele em outras redes sociais, compartilhe com sua rede profissional! Cada pacote inicial vem com uma imagem de prévia gerada automaticamente que mostra o nome do seu pacote inicial e alguns usuários sugeridos para facilitar o compartilhamento.

Como encontro mais pacotes iniciais no Bluesky?

Você pode compartilhar pacotes iniciais diretamente no Bluesky, e verá uma prévia incorporada para esses links. Atualmente, os pacotes iniciais não aparecem na busca, então para encontrar um pacote inicial, um amigo terá que lhe enviar o link ou você poderá ver a prévia incorporada dentro do app do Bluesky.

Fui adicionado como usuário recomendado no pacote inicial de alguém. Posso me remover?

Quando você bloqueia o criador de um pacote inicial, você será filtrado e removido do pacote inicial dele. Você também pode denunciar um pacote inicial para a equipe de moderação do Bluesky (veja abaixo).

Posso denunciar um pacote inicial para a equipe de moderação do Bluesky?

Sim. Você pode denunciar um pacote inicial clicando no menu de três pontos no topo do pacote inicial. A equipe de moderação do Bluesky revisará todas as denúncias e as avaliará de acordo com nossas Diretrizes da Comunidade.

Posso incluir um serviço de rotulagem no meu pacote inicial?

Atualmente, não incluímos serviços de rotulagem nos pacotes iniciais — estamos trabalhando primeiro na melhoria da descoberta desses serviços no app e na confiabilidade dos serviços.

We are publishing a series of blog posts on Trust & Safety efforts at Bluesky. This is the first in the series.

Trust and Safety (T&S) affects everything — from community policy and spam detection, all the way to the order that replies show up on a post. At Bluesky, the product team works hand-in-hand with T&S to design features that balance safety, ease of use, and fun.

In this blog, we’re taking a look at specifically toxicity (harassment, dunking, etc.) and some steps we’re taking to mitigate it from the product perspective. Be sure to update your app to the latest version (1.90) to access many of these features!

Detaching quote posts

As of the latest app version, released today (version 1.90), users can view all the quote posts on a given post. Paired with that, you can detach your original post from someone’s quote post.

This helps you maintain control over a thread you started, ideally limiting dog-piling and other forms of harassment. On the other hand, quote posts are often used to correct misinformation too. To address this, we’re leaning into labeling services and hoping to integrate a Community Notes-like feature in the future.

Note: Like blocks, quote post removals are public data. The Bluesky app won’t list all the quote post removals directly on your post, but developers with knowledge of the Bluesky API will be able to access this data.

Hiding replies

In app version 1.90, you can now hide replies on your post. Only the original creator of the thread can hide replies. All hidden replies will be placed behind a Hidden replies screen — so they’re still accessible, but much less visible.

Note: Hidden replies – and which posts were hidden by the author – are still public data.

Priority notification filters

If you navigate to Notifications and click the Settings cog in the top right corner, you can now manage your notifications more. With the priority notifications feature, you can filter your notifications to only receive updates from people you follow. We hope this is helpful for people with large followings who are always receiving an influx of notifications, and also for people who may not have expected that their post would get so much attention.

We’ll keep tuning this feature and adding additional options for notifications.

Changes to how replies show in timelines

Historically, in the Bluesky app, we show every reply in the Following feed. This means that every reply has the same visibility as a top-level post, which is often not a user’s intention. We’re reducing the frequency of showing replies in the Following feed to only show conversations that involve replies between at least two people you follow.

Additionally, this update should make it much easier for you to update older threads. Now, when you reply to an older thread of yours, it’ll get bumped to the top of your followers’ feeds. (You’ll no longer have to repost your own reply to surface it to your followers.) This update also prevents replies from being separated from the top-level post, making them easier to understand.

Applying blocks to lists

Bluesky has three kinds of lists: starter packs, curational user lists, and moderation lists.

Now, when you block the creator of a starter pack or a curational user list, you’ll be filtered out of any lists they create. (Blocks still have no effect on moderation lists, because that would defeat their purpose.)

Additionally, we’re updating our policies around acceptable list titles and descriptions and will be labeling lists more aggressively. We’ll share more on this in a blog post next week from the Trust & Safety team.

Future work

Product work, especially as it relates to Trust & Safety, is always a continuous effort. We’re also making some updates on our backend infrastructure to combat ban evasion, botnets, and other forms of toxicity.

We’ll be publishing an update next week from the Trust & Safety team on some of these efforts.

In June, we released starter packs — personalized invites that allow you to bring friends directly into your slice of Bluesky.

Check out and join some of the starter packs that the Bluesky community has created!

I've made a start, only a few here so far so will keep searching - but if anyone knows any UK MPs I've missed let me know and I will add go.bsky.app/FACCR8t #ukpolitics

[image or embed]

— Geoff (@geoffdeburca.bsky.social) Aug 13, 2024 at 2:31 AM

New here and like comics? Well @gregpak.bsky.social has you covered! Here are two starter sets of folks to follow! First a bunch of creators go.bsky.app/R4eqmGf

[image or embed]

— Adam P. Knave (@adampknave.com) Aug 13, 2024 at 7:44 AM

I have made a ChemSky starter pack and am posting here to help boost visibility. This list is not exhaustive, but should hopefully help newcomers or rejoiners find some accounts and feeds to follow go.bsky.app/C9BtrLj

[image or embed]

— Laura Howes (@laurahowes.bsky.social) Aug 15, 2024 at 11:44 AM

I made a starter pack for those fleeing #EduTwitter and joining #EduSky which should let you find a bunch of good people. go.bsky.app/HQHD4R1

[image or embed]

— Caroline Spalding (@mrsspalding.bsky.social) Aug 15, 2024 at 6:34 AM

Calling all folk with an interest in UK public policy: I’ve created a starter pack of think tankers, policy analysts & commentators active on @bsky.app go.bsky.app/LtNiL1o

[image or embed]

— Jessica Studdert (@jesstud.bsky.social) Aug 14, 2024 at 7:46 AM

starter pack of OC artists who are under 100 followers at the time of making this list! 🩷 go.bsky.app/6LGDx5g

[image or embed]

— Saba 🏳️‍🌈 (@ace-of-dragons.bsky.social) Aug 14, 2024 at 11:36 AM

Starter pack for #nufc fans here. go.bsky.app/HmjNT4

[image or embed]

— Kev Lawson (@editkev.football) Aug 11, 2024 at 2:09 PM

I love this starter pack business, so I've made one of some of the women I follow on here (including the estate of Ursula K Le Guin because I'm obsessed). I'm sure I'm missing a ton of great people. Anyone else I should include? go.bsky.app/2rubRr3

[image or embed]

— Alona Ferber (@aloner.bsky.social) Aug 15, 2024 at 6:21 AM

Starter Pack for Seismology and Earthquake people. Add missing accounts in the comments and I'll add them to the pack! ⚒️🧪 #Geology go.bsky.app/ND4oS9k

[image or embed]

— Henning ⚒️ (@geohenning.bsky.social) Aug 12, 2024 at 11:28 AM

Find more communities directly on Bluesky! See you there: bsky.app.

We’re thrilled to announce that Mike Masnick has joined Bluesky’s Board of Directors. He is the author of the Protocols, not Platforms paper that first inspired the Bluesky initiative, and he is the founder and editor of Techdirt, among other accomplishments.

Mike has been an early supporter of Bluesky’s mission to create a global, open social network, as full of possibility as the early web. In the past, we’ve gone to Mike for inspiration and advice already, and formalizing that relationship is the natural next step. His deep understanding of our approach — iterating towards widespread adoption while enabling trust & safety in a decentralized system — makes him an invaluable addition to our board.

As Bluesky’s network of more than 6 million users continues to grow, we’re excited to tap into Mike’s expertise as a reporter, editor and publisher. His familiarity with how policy, technology, and legal issues affect a company’s ability to innovate and grow is directly relevant to Bluesky, an open social network challenging incumbents who have kept innovation locked behind closed doors for the last decade.

“Mike's work has been an inspiration to us from the start,” says Jay Graber, CEO of Bluesky. “Having him join our board feels like a natural progression of our shared vision for a more open internet. His perspective will help ensure we're building something that truly serves users as we continue to evolve Bluesky and the AT Protocol.”

Mike shares his enthusiasm below:

“I’m excited to join the Bluesky board and to support its vision of building an open social network. Over the last few years, I’ve been thrilled to see how the Bluesky team has turned these ideas into reality, and I look forward to helping the company continue to build a better internet.”

Mike’s balanced perspective and strong advocacy for open networks will play a pivotal role in shaping the future of Bluesky and the AT Protocol. You can follow Mike Masnick on Bluesky here.

We're thrilled to announce that Bluesky has partnered with Buffer, a social media toolkit with scheduling and cross-posting features, to make posting to Bluesky even easier!

With Buffer’s scheduling feature, you can plan and organize your Bluesky posts alongside your other social media content. This means you can maintain a consistent presence on Bluesky without the need to switch between multiple apps or platforms.

At Bluesky, we’re building an open social network. By teaming up with Buffer, we’re making it easier for you to seamlessly integrate Bluesky into your broader social media habits, breaking down barriers between platforms and giving you more control over your online presence.

Ready to get started? Head over to Buffer's website to learn more about how to connect your Bluesky account and begin scheduling your posts. Happy posting!

Today, we’re releasing starter packs — personalized invites that allow you to bring friends directly into your slice of Bluesky!

Recommend custom feeds and users to help your community find each other. Get started in the Starter Packs tab on your Bluesky profile.

What’s in a starter pack?

• Custom feeds. On Bluesky, you can set any algorithm or topic as your home timeline. Examples include Quiet Posters (posts from your quieter mutuals), Science (posts from the science community), and Catch Up (most popular posts from the last 24 hours).
• Recommended follows. Add your favorite accounts and encourage new users to follow them.

How do I create a starter pack?

1. Click the Starter Packs tab. On your profile, next to your media and likes tabs, you’ll see a new tab.

2. Create a starter pack. Use our auto-generation tool to create a starter pack or make your own from scratch! You can create more than one starter pack.
   1. Click “Make one for me” to get a pre-populated starter pack of suggested users and custom feeds. You can add or remove items from this list.
   2. Or, click “Create” to add users and feeds to your starter pack yourself.

3. Share your starter pack! Every starter pack comes with a link and QR code you can share. Text your starter pack to a friend, share it with your professional network, and post it to other social apps!

4. Say hi! You’ll get notified for users who join Bluesky via your starter pack.

Who can use starter packs?

Anyone with a Bluesky account can create starter packs.

If you don’t have a Bluesky account yet, you can join via a friend’s starter pack and get started with their recommended customizations. Once you’re in Bluesky, you can add/remove these recommendations and further customize your experience.

If you’re already on Bluesky but want to onboard to another community or get your friend’s recommendations, you can also use their starter pack to add to your experience!

Starter Packs FAQ

How many people and feeds can I add to my starter pack?

You can recommend up to 150 people and up to 3 custom feeds. New users will automatically have Following and Discover pinned.

How can I share my starter pack with more people?

Text a link to your friends, post about it on other social networks, share it with your professional network! Every starter pack comes with an auto-generated preview image that shows the name of your starter pack and some suggested users for handy sharing.

How do I find more starter packs on Bluesky?

You can share starter packs directly on Bluesky, and you’ll see an embed preview for these links. Currently, starter packs do not show up in search, so to find a starter pack, a friend will have to send you the link or you can see the embed preview within the Bluesky app.

I was added as a recommended user in someone’s starter pack. Can I remove myself?

When you block the creator of a starter pack, you will be filtered out of their starter pack. You can also report a starter pack to Bluesky’s moderation team (see below).

Can I report a starter pack to Bluesky’s moderation team?

Yes. You can report a starter pack by clicking the three-dot menu at the top of the starter pack. Bluesky’s moderation team will review all reports and evaluate them according to our Community Guidelines.

Can I include a labeling service in my starter pack?

We currently don’t include labeling services in starter packs — we’re working on improving in-app discovery of these services and service reliability first.

There's a post that hasn’t left your mind since you read it, and now you want to send it to a friend… but you can't find it anymore. We’ve been there before too. Let’s dive into all the tips and tricks for advanced Bluesky search!

Over time, we’ll make these features easier to use directly within the Bluesky app. Think of these as advanced features!

Find a specific phrase

Use quotes around keywords, like "hello world".

• Results include posts that use the phrase in its alt text on images as well.

Find posts with a specific hashtag

Any term that has the # prefix will show you posts with that tag. For example, if you searched for #hello, you’d see all posts that contain that hashtag.

Find posts that mention a specific user

Search for a handle like @jay.bsky.team to see posts that mention that user (in this example, Jay). If the user has changed handles, you may still get posts that mention their previous username too.

• to:jay.bsky.team or mentions:jay.bsky.team also show posts that mention the user.
• mentions:me will show you posts that mention your username, if you’re logged in.
• If you use quotes around the username, like "@jay.bsky.team", you will see results that include the text @jay.bsky.team, whether or not it actually tags Jay’s account.

Find posts from a specific user

Use from:jay.bsky.team to see posts from that user (in this example, Jay). If you’re logged in, you can use from:me to show your own posts.

• You can use a combination of these keywords. For example, to:jay.bsky.team from:me shows my own posts that mention Jay.

Find posts that mention or are from you

If you are logged in, you can use the me keyword or search for your own username.

• from:me shows your own posts
• mentions:me shows posts that mention your username

Find a specific URL

Paste in a URL to see posts that have also shared that URL.

• To see all posts with links from a specific domain, use domain:example.com. For example, searching for domain:npr.org shows you all posts that have linked an NPR article.

Find posts in a specific language

Use the keyword lang to search for posts in a specific language.

• Use the two-character ISO language code. Wikipedia has a handy chart here — use the codes under the column “Set 1.”
• For example, to see posts in English that have the keyword "science", use the search term lang:en "science". To see posts in Japanese that have the keyword "science", use lang:ja "science".

Find posts within a specific date range

Specify your date range with since: and/or until:. You can use full dates (YYYY-MM-DD format), or full UTC timestamps (YYYY-MM-DDTHH:MM:SSZ).

• This currently does not work for local datetime/date or other time formats. Please use the UTC date. Here is a timezone converter.

Searching while logged in

We can customize your search results for you more when you are logged in, though users that are logged out are also able to search Bluesky.

• You can use the me keyword when searching for your own posts or posts that mention you.
• People that you follow are prioritized in search results when you search for accounts.

Developer API

Bluesky’s search API allows HTTP query params for most of these facets and filters. Read more in the developer documentation here.

You can now send direct messages (DMs) to people on Bluesky! Say hi to a friend, colleague, or a crush.

These are private one-to-one messages directly within the Bluesky app. By default, your permissions allow anyone you follow to DM you. You can change these settings to allow no one or anyone to message you.

How do I send a DM?

1. Click the Chat icon. On mobile, you can find the icon at the bottom of your screen. On desktop, this is a chat bubble on the side bar (or go to https://bsky.app/messages).
2. On mobile, click the plus icon to start a new conversation. On desktop, click “New chat” in the top right to start a new conversation. Search for the user you want to message.
3. Write your message, and hit send!
4. If the app says a user cannot be messaged, they may have set their account to only allow messages from people they follow or from no one.

DM Privacy and Safety

Who can message me?

By default, only people you follow can send you DMs. To change this, check the settings in the DM interface. You can allow DMs from no one, only people you follow, or all Bluesky users.

Blocked users will not be able to DM you. Muted users are able to DM you. Additionally, you can easily block users right from within the DM feature.

Reporting DMs

You can report DMs directly to mods, who will review reported messages for Community Guidelines violations. Moderators are able to view the reported message and surrounding messages for context to assess the report. Infractions may result in temporary or permanent loss of DM privileges or even full account takedowns.

DM Privacy

In rare cases, the Bluesky moderation team may need to open your DMs to investigate broader patterns of abuse, such as spam or coordinated harassment. This would only be done when absolutely necessary to keep Bluesky safe. Access is extremely limited and tracked internally.

This first version of DMs has limited features (no images or encryption yet), but we'll be adding more safety enhancements in future updates.

Future Updates

• Media in DMs: Currently, Bluesky DMs allow you to send text messages. In the future, you’ll be able to send images and other forms of media!
• Group DMs: In the future, you’ll be able to create direct messages for groups.
• Encrypted DMs: We intend to fully support end-to-end encrypted messaging down the line. Read more about our technical plans for E2EE messaging in our 2024 protocol roadmap.
• Safety improvements: We’ll continue iterating on anti-harassment and safety tooling for direct messages.

In the past year, Bluesky has grown from 40K users to 5.8M users. We’ve made it possible to create custom algorithms, introduced community-driven moderation, and opened up federation. This has laid the foundation for a social protocol that can exist long after Bluesky the app does.

What’s coming next? Over the next few months, we’ll be putting more of our energy into the application. This includes a lot of “Quality of Life” improvements and some long-requested features. The biggest changes will be:

• DMs (✅ shipped!)
• Video
• Improved Custom Feeds
• Improved anti-harassment features
• OAuth

We’re very excited to deliver these features you’ve been asking for. We don’t have exact timelines, but you can expect to see all of these in the next few months.

DMs (direct messages)

Update: DMs are now available on Bluesky!

Historically, all Bluesky posts have been public. But there’s a world of interactions that are opened up when users can directly message each other. Making personal connections, finding job opportunities, organizing events, workshopping posts – there’s a lot of reasons to slide into the DMs.

We’re currently working on a DM service that will integrate into the Bluesky app. This service will be “off protocol” at first so we can develop iteratively. We’ll use what we learn to land protocol-driven DMs in the future. For an update on what’s next for the protocol, see our protocol roadmap.

The v1 of DMs will be one-to-one. You’ll be able to restrict who can DM you (open, followed users only, and disabled). If you’ve used DMs on other social networks, it should feel familiar.

Video

Our devs keep getting told about cute animal videos which our users can’t share. The guilt is terrible.

We’re still finalizing the details, but it’s looking like the v1 of video integration on Bluesky will be 90-second clips that you can share on your posts.

Improved Custom Feeds

“Custom Feeds” are one of the best features of Bluesky, allowing users to completely customize their timeline, but they’re still pretty tough to work with. Our community has done an incredible job filling in the gaps, but we want to finally invest some more energy into making Feeds better.

Here’s the list of ideas in the works:

• In-app feed creation.
• The ability to submit posts to feeds, curate the submissions, and manually moderate what’s included.
• Better feed discovery, and a way to see trending feeds.
• New feedback mechanisms which the algorithmic feeds can request, such as “show more” and “show less” buttons, and a way to track which posts have been seen to stop duplicates from showing so often.
• The ability to move “Following” out of the leftmost tab of your homepage.
• Feed “following” to drive superfeeds which show what’s happening in each of your communities.
• Better caching strategies to improve performance.

Algorithmic choice has been a key goal of Bluesky from the start, and we can’t wait to move Custom Feeds forward. It’s incredible how much our community has done with them already, and we think a little extra love will enable you to go even further.

What you see on social media is mostly determined by algorithms, and giving you the power to control your algorithms like this is one of the most important things we do.

Improved Anti-harassment Features

Public social networks unfortunately all have to deal with the problem of users who want to troll, harass, and just make other people’s lives miserable. Over the past year, we’ve implemented tooling like reply controls for threads, user lists, and community-driven moderation through labeling, but there is still more work to be done.

In the months to come, we’ll be doing another pass over moderation tooling, with a focus on anti-harassment mechanisms. We’ll be publishing more on this soon.

OAuth

You know those “Log in with Facebook” or “Log in with Google” buttons you see in apps? What if there was a “Log in with Bluesky” button? We think there should be! OAuth is the internet standard that makes that possible, and we’re bringing it to Bluesky and atproto.

OAuth is especially important for third-party clients – it’ll make signing in easier and safer for users. You never share your password with other clients, and “App Passwords” will no longer be required.

Once OAuth lands, we’ll expand on our 2FA model to enable more factors than email (which landed last week).

You can read about our technical design here.

See you on Bluesky!

If you haven't tried Bluesky yet, sign up here and give it a spin. We'll see you there!

How do I embed a Bluesky post?

For the post you'd like to embed, click the dropdown menu on desktop. Then, select Embed Post. Copy the code snippet.

Alternatively, you can visit embed.bsky.app and paste the post's URL there for the same code snippet.

The embedded post is clickable and can direct your readers to the original conversation on Bluesky. Here's an example of what an embedded post looks like:

logging on for my shift at the posting factory

— Emily 🦋 (@emilyliu.me) Jul 3, 2023 at 11:11 AM

Your Own Website

Directly paste the code snippet into your website's source code.

WordPress

Insert a HTML block by typing /html or pressing the + button.

Paste the code snippet. When you switch the toggle to "Preview," you'll see the Bluesky post embed.

Ghost

Insert a HTML block by typing /html or pressing the + button. Paste the code snippet.

Below is what the block will look like. Then, click Preview on your blog draft to see the Bluesky post embed formatted.

Substack

Currently, Substack does not support custom CSS or HTML in the post editor. We recommend taking a screenshot of Bluesky posts and linking the post URL instead.

Other Sites

For your site of interest, please refer to their help center or documentation to learn how to embed Bluesky posts.

Este guia do usuário foi traduzido da versão em inglês aqui. Por favor, desculpe quaisquer imprecisões na tradução!

Bem-vindo ao aplicativo Bluesky! Este é um guia do usuário que responde a algumas perguntas comuns.

Para perguntas gerais sobre a empresa Bluesky, por favor, visite nosso FAQ aqui.

Entrando no Bluesky

Como faço para me juntar ao Bluesky?

Você pode criar uma conta em bsky.app. (Não é necessário código de convite!)

Você pode baixar o aplicativo Bluesky para iOS ou Google Play, ou usar o Bluesky via desktop.

Moderação

Qual é a abordagem do Bluesky para a moderação?

A moderação é uma parte fundamental das redes sociais. No Bluesky, estamos investindo em segurança de duas formas. Primeiro, construímos nossa própria equipe de moderação dedicada a fornecer cobertura contínua para manter nossas diretrizes comunitárias. Além disso, reconhecemos que não existe uma abordagem única para a moderação — nenhuma empresa pode garantir a segurança online corretamente para todos os países, culturas e comunidades do mundo. Portanto, também estamos construindo algo maior — um ecossistema de moderação e ferramentas de segurança de código aberto que dá às comunidades o poder de criar seus próprios espaços, com suas próprias normas e preferências. Ainda assim, usar o Bluesky é familiar e intuitivo. É um aplicativo simples à primeira vista, mas por baixo do capô, habilitamos uma verdadeira inovação e competição nas mídias sociais ao construir um novo tipo de rede aberta.

Você pode ler mais sobre nossa abordagem para moderação aqui.

O que a função de silenciar faz?

Silenciar impede que você veja quaisquer notificações ou postagens principais de uma conta. Se eles responderem a um tópico, você verá uma seção que diz "Postagem de uma conta que você silenciou" com uma opção para mostrar a postagem. A conta não saberá que foi silenciada.

O que o bloqueio faz?

O bloqueio impede a interação. Quando você bloqueia uma conta, tanto você quanto a outra conta não poderão mais ver ou interagir com as postagens uma da outra.

Como eu denuncio abuso?

Você pode denunciar postagens clicando no menu de três pontos. Você também pode denunciar uma conta inteira visitando o perfil dela e clicando no menu de três pontos lá.

Onde posso ler mais sobre seus planos para moderação?

Você pode ler mais sobre nossa abordagem para moderação aqui.

Feeds Personalizados

O que são feeds personalizados?

Feeds personalizados é um recurso no Bluesky que permite escolher o algoritmo que define sua experiência nas mídias sociais. Imagine querer que sua linha do tempo exiba apenas postagens dos seus contatos mútuos, ou apenas postagens com fotos de gatos, ou somente postagens relacionadas a esportes — você pode simplesmente selecionar seu feed preferido de um mercado aberto.

Para os usuários, a capacidade de personalizar seu feed devolve o controle de sua atenção para si mesmos. Para os desenvolvedores, um mercado aberto de feeds proporciona a liberdade de experimentar e publicar algoritmos que qualquer um pode usar.

Por exemplo, experimente este feed.

Você pode ler mais sobre feeds personalizados e escolha algorítmica em nosso post no blog aqui.

Como eu uso feeds personalizados?

No Bluesky, clique no ícone de hashtag na parte inferior do aplicativo. A partir daí, você pode adicionar e descobrir novos feeds. Você também pode explorar diretamente os feeds através deste link.

Como posso criar um feed personalizado?

Desenvolvedores podem usar nosso kit inicial de gerador de feeds para criar um feed personalizado. Eventualmente, forneceremos ferramentas melhores para que qualquer pessoa, incluindo não desenvolvedores, possa construir feeds personalizados.

Além disso, SkyFeed é uma ferramenta criada por um desenvolvedor independente que possui um recurso de Construtor de Feeds que você pode usar.

Domínios Personalizados

Como posso configurar meu domínio como meu identificador?

Por favor, consulte nosso tutorial aqui.

Posso comprar um domínio diretamente pelo Bluesky?

Sim, você pode comprar um domínio e definí-lo como seu nome de usuário pelo Bluesky aqui.

Privacidade de Dados

O que é público e o que é privado no Bluesky?

O Bluesky é uma rede social pública. Pense nas suas postagens como postagens de blog – qualquer pessoa na web pode vê-las, mesmo aquelas sem um código de convite. Um código de convite simplesmente concede acesso ao serviço que estamos executando e que permite publicar uma postagem você mesmo. (Desenvolvedores familiarizados com a API podem ver todas as postagens, independentemente de terem ou não uma conta própria.)

Especificamente:

• Postagens e curtidas são públicas.
• Bloqueios são públicos.
• Silenciamentos são privados, mas as listas de silenciamento são listas públicas. Suas assinaturas de lista de silenciamento são privadas.

Por que minhas postagens, curtidas e bloqueios são públicos?

O Protocolo AT, no qual o Bluesky é construído, foi projetado para suportar conversas públicas. Para tornar as conversas públicas portáteis em todos os tipos de plataformas, seus dados são armazenados em repositórios de dados que qualquer pessoa pode visualizar. Isso significa que, independentemente de qual servidor você escolher para se juntar, você ainda poderá ver postagens em toda a rede, e se escolher mudar de servidor, poderá facilmente levar todos os seus dados com você. É isso que faz com que a experiência do usuário do Bluesky, um protocolo federado, seja semelhante a todos os outros aplicativos de mídia social que você usou antes.

Posso definir meu perfil para ser privado?

Atualmente, não existem perfis privados no Bluesky.

O que acontece quando eu excluo uma postagem?

Depois de excluir uma postagem, ela será imediatamente removida do aplicativo voltado para o usuário. Qualquer imagem anexada à sua postagem também será imediatamente excluída em nosso armazenamento de dados.

No entanto, leva um pouco mais de tempo para o conteúdo de texto de uma postagem ser completamente excluído no armazenamento. O conteúdo do texto é armazenado de forma não legível, mas é possível consultar os dados via API. Realizaremos periodicamente exclusões no back-end para apagar completamente esses dados.

Posso obter uma cópia de todos os meus dados?

Sim — o Protocolo AT mantém os dados do usuário em um arquivo endereçado por conteúdo. Este arquivo pode ser usado para migrar dados de conta entre servidores. Para desenvolvedores, você pode usar este método para exportar uma cópia do seu repositório. Para não desenvolvedores, as ferramentas ainda estão sendo construídas para facilitar.

Atualização: Pessoas técnicas podem ler mais sobre o download e a extração de dados em este post no blog de desenvolvedores do atproto.

Você pode ler nossa política de privacidade aqui.

O que acontece quando eu excluo uma postagem?

Após excluir uma postagem, ela será imediatamente removida do aplicativo voltado para o usuário. Qualquer imagem anexada à sua postagem também será imediatamente excluída em nosso armazenamento de dados.

No entanto, leva um pouco mais de tempo para o conteúdo de texto de uma postagem ser completamente excluído no armazenamento. O conteúdo do texto é armazenado em uma forma não legível, mas é possível consultar os dados via API. Realizaremos periodicamente exclusões no back-end para apagar completamente esses dados.

Posso obter uma cópia de todos os meus dados?

Sim — o Protocolo AT mantém os dados do usuário em um arquivo endereçado por conteúdo. Este arquivo pode ser usado para migrar dados de conta entre servidores. Para desenvolvedores, você pode usar este método para exportar uma cópia do seu repositório. Para não desenvolvedores, as ferramentas ainda estão sendo construídas para facilitar.

Atualização: Pessoas técnicas podem ler mais sobre download e extração de dados em este post no blog de desenvolvedores.

Você pode ler nossa política de privacidade aqui.

Segurança

Como posso redefinir minha senha?

Clique em "Esqueci" na tela de login. Você receberá um e-mail com um código para redefinir a senha.

E se eu não receber o e-mail para redefinição de senha?

Confirme o e-mail da sua conta nas suas configurações e adicione [email protected] à sua lista de remetentes permitidos.

Como posso alterar o e-mail da minha conta?

Você pode atualizar e verificar o e-mail da sua conta nas Configurações.

Vocês implementarão autenticação de dois fatores (2FA)?

Sim, a implementação da 2FA está em nosso plano de desenvolvimento a curto prazo.

Bluesky, o Protocolo AT e Federação

Qual a diferença entre Bluesky e o Protocolo AT?

Bluesky, a empresa de benefício público, está desenvolvendo dois produtos: o Protocolo AT, e o aplicativo de microblogging Bluesky. O aplicativo Bluesky tem como objetivo demonstrar as funcionalidades do protocolo subjacente. O Protocolo AT é construído para suportar um ecossistema inteiro de aplicativos sociais que vai além do microblogging.

Você pode ler mais sobre as diferenças entre Bluesky e o Protocolo AT em nosso FAQ geral aqui.

Como a federação me afeta, como usuário do aplicativo Bluesky?

Estamos priorizando a experiência do usuário e queremos tornar o Bluesky o mais amigável possível. Independentemente de qual servidor você se juntar, você pode ver postagens de pessoas em outros servidores e levar seus dados com você se escolher mudar de servidor.

O Bluesky é construído em uma blockchain? Ele usa criptomoeda?

Não e não.

O Bluesky suporta domínios Handshake (HNS)?

Não, e não há planos para isso.

Diversos

Como posso enviar feedback?

No aplicativo móvel, abra o menu lateral esquerdo e clique em "Feedback". No aplicativo web, há um link para "Enviar feedback" no lado direito da tela.

Você também pode enviar e-mails para [email protected] com solicitações de suporte.

Como uma postagem no Bluesky é chamada?

O termo oficial é "postagem".

Como posso incorporar uma postagem?

Existem duas maneiras de incorporar uma postagem do Bluesky. Você pode clicar no menu de três pontos diretamente na postagem que deseja incorporar para usar o snippet de código.

Você também pode visitar embed.bsky.app e colar o URL da postagem para obter o snippet de código.

Como posso encontrar amigos ou contatos mútuos de outras redes sociais?

Desenvolvedores terceirizados mantêm ferramentas para encontrar amigos de outras redes sociais. Alguns desses projetos estão listados aqui. Por favor, gere uma Senha de Aplicativo via Configurações > Avançado > Senhas de Aplicativos para fazer login em quaisquer aplicativos de terceiros.

Existe um modo escuro?

Sim. Você pode alterar as configurações de exibição para o modo claro ou escuro, ou para combinar com as configurações do seu sistema, através de Configurações > Aparência.

As respostas aqui estão sujeitas a alterações. Atualizaremos este guia regularmente conforme continuamos a lançar mais recursos. Obrigado por se juntar ao Bluesky!

Today we're thrilled to introduce Bluesky Shorts: a unique way of expression that redefines creativity on Bluesky. Join 5M users and try Shorts! Sign up for Bluesky (no invite code required): bsky.app

Stop, Stare, and Share

Capture attention in your Shorts. Record your Shorts dunking a basketball. Use Shorts on a hot day at the beach. On Bluesky, your Shorts will help you express who you are. Bluesky Shorts move with you, seamlessly.

How It Works

Find Shorts that fit your life.

• Audio: You can record directly in Shorts, or even silence your videos — your Shorts speak for themselves! If a picture is worth 1000 words, Shorts say more than you could fit into any character limit.
• AR Effects: Come alive in 3D with Shorts, and prominently display those assets. Your audience will appreciate it.
• Speed: Shorts moves with you. Whether you’re on the run or being a couch potato, you can capture every moment in your Shorts.

Creating Shorts

Tailor your Shorts to fit you! If your Shorts are too long, crop them. If your Shorts are too short, patch them with some other Shorts. You can even add different filters to adapt your Shorts to different occasions:

• Glitter It: Add a layer of glitter to your Shorts to help you shine bright and far, so that you can be the star you are.
• Badge It: Apply different badges that display your interests, because you contain multitudes and no one can put you in a box!
• Make It Composable: Want to pair your Shorts with other interesting pieces? Mix and match Bluesky Shorts anyway you want.

Shorts gives you new ways to express yourself, discover more of who you love and who loves you, and helps anyone with the ambition of becoming a star take center stage.

To be clear, we're talking about literal shorts that you wear. Grab yourself some Bluesky Shorts here or here!

Bluesky was created to put users and communities in control of their social spaces online. The first generation of social media platforms connected the world, but ended up consolidating power in the hands of a few corporations and their leaders. Our online experience doesn’t have to depend on billionaires unilaterally making decisions over what we see. On an open social network like Bluesky, you can shape your experience for yourself.

Today, we’re excited to announce that we’re open-sourcing Ozone, our collaborative moderation tool. With Ozone, individuals and teams can work together to review and label content across the network. Later this week, we’re opening up the ability for you to run your own independent moderation services, seamlessly integrated into the Bluesky app. This means that you'll be able to create and subscribe to additional moderation services on top of what Bluesky requires, giving you unprecedented control over your social media experience.

At Bluesky, we’re investing in safety from two angles. First, we've built our own moderation team dedicated to providing around-the-clock coverage to uphold our community guidelines. Additionally, we recognize that there is no one-size-fits-all approach to moderation — no single company can get online safety right for every country, culture, and community in the world. So we’ve also been building something bigger — an ecosystem of moderation and open-source safety tools that gives communities power to create their own spaces, with their own norms and preferences. Still, using Bluesky feels familiar and intuitive. It's a straightforward app on the surface, but under the hood, we have enabled real innovation and competition in social media by building a new kind of open network.

In designing these moderation services, Bluesky operated by three principles:

• Simple and Powerful: Give users a pleasant default experience, with customization options under the hood
• User Choice: Empower users and communities to develop their own moderation systems
• Openness: Create an open system that increases trust in the governance of our digital spaces

We first shared our vision for composable moderation before Bluesky even had 20,000 users last year. Now, we serve over 5 million users. In this blog post, we’ll dive into how moderation works on the network, where you can choose and customize all the pieces that make up your social media experience.

Sensible Defaults with User Choice

In everything we build, we aim to provide a polished user experience with further customization options for those you who want them. When you sign up for Bluesky, you will be subscribed to Bluesky’s built-in moderation service by default. This is similar to how custom feeds work on Bluesky — we’ll show you a couple feeds by default, but you can also create and subscribe to more. Bluesky’s moderation service combines around-the-clock coverage by our team to resolve user reports according to our community guidelines with several automated moderation systems. This provides a strong foundation for moderation on the app. You can read our 2023 Moderation Report for more details.

Bluesky’s vision for moderation is a stackable ecosystem of services. Starting this week, you'll have the power to install filters from independent moderation services, layering them like building blocks on top of the Bluesky app's foundation. This allows you to create a customized experience tailored to your preferences (see example below).

In the first stage of this week’s rollout, these independent moderation services filters will be available on the desktop version of the app. Soon, they’ll also be available on mobile, so you can shape your social media experience across all platforms.

This hybrid approach is intended to provide a cohesive experience, where our in-house moderation works in conjunction with additional layers customized to each community. The Bluesky app, as an online space that we created and maintain, will always have the foundation of the moderation we provide. Independent moderation services will let you and community builders further customize your own spaces, and open APIs will let developers evolve and innovate on these systems.

One team will never be perfect at moderation and curation for the entire world, with its wide variety of contexts, cultures, and preferences. So we’re excited about opening the ecosystem to empower experts, developers, and users with local context to provide their own input that you can additionally subscribe to, on top of Bluesky’s moderation service.

For additional information, read our technical explainer for moderation architecture across the AT Protocol here.

How will this all work?

Here’s what users, moderators, and developers can expect to see this week:

From a user perspective:

First and foremost, we want Bluesky to be a great and intuitive experience as soon as you install the app. But if you want to customize your experience, you can easily browse and select from other independent moderation services and subscribe to them in the Bluesky app — as easily as you’d follow another account.

For example, someone could make a moderation service that blocks photos of spiders from Bluesky — let’s call it the Spider Shield. If you get a jump scare from seeing spiders in your otherwise peaceful nature feed, you could install this moderation service and immediately any labeled spider pictures would disappear from your experience.

Moderation services can also accept reports, so if you came across an unlabeled picture of a spider, you could report it to the Spider Shield for review.

From a moderator perspective:

If you want to offer a moderation layer on top of what the Bluesky app provides, you can do this without running a lot of infrastructure or building your own client app. We’ve built open source software to simplify the process of running a moderation service. While you need some technical know-how for now, we expect this process to get simpler over time.

Today, you can already run a mute list or block list that other users can subscribe to. But it often gets tied to your account in a way that makes it hard to delegate responsibility to others. Once you’re running a popular blocklist, that list becomes associated with your account, and users may start directly tagging you in the app. This can get overwhelming at scale.

Ozone, the open source moderation labeling system we’re releasing today, lets you set up a service like a blocklist, but more nuanced — instead of just adding accounts, you can label specific posts too. You will have access to a reporting queue, and users will be able to send reports via the in-app reporting flow. You will be able to set custom labels, and specify what those labels should do. Moderation services will not be tied to individual users, and multiple people can manage them. Tooling designed for teams and communities can help take the burden off individuals and make it possible to run a sustainable moderation service.

To make this more concrete, let’s say you’re the creator of the previously mentioned Spider Shield labeler that labels photos of spiders. You can set up an Ozone dashboard that provides a queue of spider pictures that have been reported, reducing the need for people to tag you directly every time they find a new spider picture online. It’s customizable — you could create one kind of label that blocks pictures of real spiders, and one kind of label that blurs out illustrations of spiders. You could recruit others who don’t like spiders to help you manage the reports, and even hand the project off to someone else altogether without disrupting the people who are using it.

From a developer perspective:

As a developer, you've got options when it comes to labeling content. You can use our software, like Ozone, or you can apply labels directly through the API. Ozone is built to help humans review moderation reports, but you can also use automated labeling to power your moderation services. Check out Ozone's open-source repo here.

If you want to set up Spider Shield as a fully automated service that uses machine learning to find and label spider pictures, you can do that without even touching Ozone, our moderation tool. And if you want to customize Ozone for your own purposes, you can submit a PR or fork the project. Our goal in building this open source moderation tooling is to help apps in the AT Protocol ecosystem handle trust & safety challenges without having to start from scratch.

The generic, customizable nature of labels allows you to get creative with them — it would be possible to use labels to “verify” nature accounts that don’t post pictures of spiders, for example. Although the initial functionality of labelers is intended to hide, block, or blur content, it could eventually be used for curation or verification too. We think that the atproto developer ecosystem will find even more ways to use labels and independent moderation services, and will drive innovation in how moderation works on social networks.

Moderation services can work across the entire atproto network, not just the Bluesky app. Imagine if someone creates a new photo-sharing app called Skygram. The Spider Shield moderation service built for Bluesky could easily be used on Skygram too. That's the power of "composable moderation" — all the pieces can be mixed and matched in tons of different ways, even across completely separate apps.

We think it's important for Bluesky to lay the groundwork for a great experience in the app, which is why our moderation service is the default for all Bluesky app users. But we also believe in giving users the freedom to choose and the right to leave. So if Bluesky's moderation doesn’t meet your needs and you want an altogether different experience, you can make that happen. You'll need to build or use a different client app with your own moderation service, but this option gives you full flexibility to implement your own moderation system from the ground up. However, all content shown in the Bluesky app must adhere to Bluesky’s community guidelines.

FAQ

Where can I find the open-sourced Ozone tool?

You can find the GitHub repository here.

Why are you open-sourcing Ozone?

By making Ozone open-source and providing it as a ready-to-use tool for independent moderators on the AT Protocol, we're creating a system that encourages collaboration and transparency. Unlike most social media companies that develop their safety tools in private, Ozone's development will be out in the open. This means that new social apps built on the AT Protocol can benefit from all the improvements made by Bluesky and other organizations. By working together and sharing knowledge, we can create better tools faster and build a social media ecosystem that works for everyone.

How is this different from community moderation on Mastodon?

Moderation on Bluesky is not tied to your server, like it is on Mastodon. Defederation, a way of addressing moderation issues in Mastodon by disconnecting servers, is not as relevant on Bluesky because there are other layers to the system. Server operators can set rules for what content they will host, but tools like blocklists and moderation services are what help communities self-organize around moderation preferences. Our post on federation goes into more detail on how Bluesky differs from Mastodon.

What do I need to do to moderate my own community on Bluesky?

All users of Bluesky’s client app are subscribed by default to Bluesky’s moderation. If you would like to run a moderation service that layers on top of these defaults, you can create a new account for that new service and get it up and running with Ozone.

However, if you want to opt out of our defaults, this is still possible — we believe it’s important to give users the right to leave and not lock you in. You would need to use or develop a separate client app that connects to the AT Protocol, but this option gives you full flexibility to implement your own moderation system from the ground up.

How will running a moderation service be sustainable?

Moderation services, much like feed generators, will likely start off as community-run projects. Just like the 40,000+ custom feeds on Bluesky, or the many Mastodon instances that exist, they may continue to operate as independent projects of individuals or organizations. However, there is also nothing stopping a moderation service from having paid subscribers.

Today, we’re excited to announce that the Bluesky network is federating and opening up in a way that allows you to host your own data. What does this mean?

Your data, such as your posts, likes, and follows, needs to be stored somewhere. With traditional social media, your data is stored by the social media company whose services you've signed up for. If you ever want to stop using that company's services, you can do that—but you would have to leave that social network and lose your existing connections.

It doesn't have to be this way! An alternative model is how the internet itself works. Anyone can put up a website on the internet. You can choose from one of many companies to host your site (or even host it yourself), and you can always change your mind about this later. If you move to another hosting provider, your visitors won't even notice. No matter where your site's data is managed and stored, your visitors can find your site simply by typing the name of the website or by clicking a link.

We think social media should work the same way. When you register on Bluesky, by default we'll suggest that Bluesky will store your data. But if you'd like to let another company store it, or even store it yourself, you can do that. You'll also be able to change your mind at any point, moving your data to another provider without losing any of your existing posts, likes, or follows. From your followers' perspective, your profile is always available at your handle—no matter where your information is actually stored, or how many times it has been moved.

Federation lets services be interconnected, so there are a variety of apps and experiences that users can move between as fluidly as they do on the open web. The version of federation that we’re releasing today is intended for self-hosters. There are some guardrails in place to ensure we can keep the network running smoothly for everyone in the ecosystem. After this initial phase, we’ll open up federation to people looking to run larger servers with many users. For a more technical overview of what we’re releasing today and how to participate, check out the developer blog.

Some of our existing features already follow the federated philosophy, including usernames and feeds. Today, we’re opening up federation for data hosting. Below, we wanted to answer some common questions about what federated hosting is, what it means for your experience using Bluesky, and why we’re so excited about it.

How does this affect my experience on Bluesky?

The short answer is: it doesn’t! If you don’t run your own server, Bluesky will stay the same. Even if you do run your own server, you may be surprised by how little things change. In fact, it should feel so similar that you might have to double check that you’ve logged into the right server.

This is all intentional: we've made self-hosting your own data both easy and affordable, so when you do so, you should be able to get just as good (or better) of an experience than letting Bluesky host your data.

If my experience doesn’t change, why federate?

We set out to build a protocol for the future of social media that returns control to users. From the apps you use, the feeds you browse, or the moderation preferences you prefer, your experience on Bluesky is yours to customize. But the abundance of choice and innovation here will be short-lived if it’s dependent on one company. We think that the future of social media needs to be a public good, mutually owned by the people and companies that participate in it. Social media should be as open and reliable as the internet itself.

The ability to host your own data, just as you might run your own website, provides the fundamental guarantee that social media will never again be controlled by only one company. Even if Bluesky were to disappear, if the data is hosted across different sites, the network can be rebuilt. The fact that it requires no permission to set up a new website is what has made the open web such a dynamic and creative force. Larger services, like search engines, have come and gone (anyone remember Ask Jeeves?). But the underlying foundation of independently hosted sites continues to let the web evolve. Making social open in the same way will create a foundation for better public conversations.

Today, we’re taking another step towards the vision of a self-sustaining social web — social media that isn’t controlled by any single company and is free to evolve on its own terms.

Does this mean Bluesky is going to be like Mastodon?

Mastodon is another federated social network built on a protocol called ActivityPub. While Bluesky — built on a protocol called the AT Protocol (atproto) — shares the term “federation” with other networks, the way it works is very different.

On Bluesky, server choice doesn’t affect what content you see. Servers are only one piece of the protocol — when you browse Bluesky, you see posts that are pulled together from many different servers. This is why you can change your server after signing up without losing your username, friends, or posts.

A summary of some ways Bluesky differs from Mastodon:

• A focus on the global conversation: On Mastodon, your “instance”, or server, determines your community, so your experience depends on which server you join. An instance can send and receive posts from other instances, but it doesn’t try to offer a global view of the network. Your Mastodon server is part of your username, and becomes part of your identity. On Bluesky, your experience is based on what feeds and accounts you follow, and you can always participate in the global conversation (e.g. breaking news, viral posts, and algorithmic feeds). You can use your own domain name as your username, and continue participating from anywhere your account is hosted.
• Composable moderation: Moderation on Bluesky is not tied to your server, like it is on Mastodon. Defederation, a way of addressing moderation issues in Mastodon by disconnecting servers, is not as relevant on Bluesky because there are other layers to the system. Server operators can set rules for what content they will host, but tools like blocklists and moderation services are what help communities self-organize around moderation preferences. We’ve already integrated block and mute lists, and the tooling for independent moderation services is coming soon.
• Composable feeds: We designed your timeline on Bluesky so that it’s not tied to your server. Anyone can build a feed, and there are currently over 40,000 algorithmic feeds to choose from. Your Mastodon timeline is only made up of posts from accounts you follow, and does not pull together posts from the whole network like Bluesky’s custom feeds.
• Account portability: We designed federated hosting on Bluesky so that you can move servers easily. Moving hosting services should be like changing your cell phone provider — you should be able to keep your identity and data. Changing servers on Bluesky doesn’t disrupt your username, friends, or posts.

So how can I self-host and join the network?

It will become easier to host your own server over time, but at the moment you’ll need a bit of technical know-how to get up and running. If you’re excited to jump in, checkout the developer blog, the PDS repo on our Github, and the PDS Administrators Discord.

Bluesky is building an open social network where anyone can contribute, while still providing an easy-to-use experience for users. For the past year, we used invite codes to help us manage growth while we built features like moderation tooling, custom feeds, and more. Now, we’re ready for anyone to join.

Join more than three million people discussing news, sharing art, and just posting.

What is Bluesky?

To mark the occasion, we teamed up with Davis Bickford, an artist on the network, to share why we’re excited about Bluesky.

To learn more about Bluesky and how to get started, read our user FAQ here.

And if deep dives are more your style, we worked with Martin Kleppman, author of Designing Data-Intensive Applications and technical advisor to Bluesky, to write a paper that goes into more detail about the technical underpinnings of Bluesky.

Looking Forward

We’ve been working on more features that put you in control of your social media experience. Here’s what you can expect to see soon:

Stackable Moderation Services

Safety is core to social media. Bluesky moderates the app according to our community guidelines, and our vision for composable moderation allows users to stack more moderation services together, such as subscribable moderation lists.

In the coming weeks, we’re excited to release the labeling services which will allow users to stack more options on top of their existing moderation preferences. This will allow other organizations and people to run their own moderation services that can account for industry-specific knowledge or specific cultural norms, among other preferences.

One potential use case for labeling is fact-checking. For example, a fact-checking organization can run a labeling service and mark posts as “partially false,” “misleading,” or other categories. Then, users who trust this organization can subscribe to their labels. As the user scrolls through posts in the app, any labels that the fact-checking organization publishes will be visible on the post itself. This helps in the effective distribution of the fact-check and keeps users better informed.

We’ll be sharing more in the coming weeks. In the meantime, if you’re interested in partnering with Bluesky and setting up a labeling service, contact us at [email protected].

An Open Social Network

When you log in to Bluesky, it might look and feel familiar — the user experience should be straightforward. But under the hood, we’ve designed the app in a way that puts control back in your hands. Here, your experience online isn’t controlled by a single company. Whether it's your timeline or content filters, on Bluesky, you can easily customize your social experience.

This month, we’ll be rolling out an experimental early version of “federation,” or the feature that makes the network so open and customizable. On Bluesky, you’ll have the freedom to choose (and the right to leave) instead of being held to the whims of private companies or black box algorithms. And wherever you go, your friends and relationships can go with you.

For developers: We’ve already federated the network among multiple servers internally, and later this month, you’ll be able to self-host a server that connects to the main production network. You’ll be part of the first batch of servers that federate with the network, so expect to experiment alongside us! We’ll share more information on how to join the production network with your own server soon. In the meantime, you can test out your server set up via our developer sandbox. Find instructions here.

Safety is core to social media. Transparency is essential to building trust in moderation efforts, and the data we are providing here is a first step towards full transparency reports. We hope these early disclosures provide some visibility into our behind the scenes operations, and we intend to deliver more granular data and reporting in the future. Given the transparent nature of the network, independent researchers also already have direct access to relatively rich data on labeling and moderation interventions.

High-Level Overview

Over the past year, the Bluesky app has grown from a handful of friends and developers to over 3 million registered accounts. We have hired and trained a full-time team of moderators, launched and iterated on several community and individual moderation features, developed and refined policies both public and internal, designed and redesigned product features to reduce abuse, and built several infrastructure components from scratch to support our Trust and Safety work.

We’ve made a lot of progress, and we know we still have a long way to go to deliver on the vision we set out — including composable moderation, mute words, temporary account deactivation, and collaborative programs to combat misinformation (such as Community Notes). We will have more to share in coming weeks! But first here is an overview of 2023.

Reporting By The Numbers

One of the most obvious and visible forms of moderation on Bluesky is the report-and-review feedback loop. Any user can report content such as posts, accounts, or lists through the app. We then review reported content and behavior against both the Community Guidelines and Terms of Service, and take action when appropriate.

Our team of proactive and very-much-appreciated full-time moderators have provided around-the-clock coverage since spring. We’re doing things differently than a lot of social media sites, and hired our moderators directly, rather than relying on a third-party vendor. While we might use automated tools to handle reports in the future, right now every single report filed has been reviewed by humans, with no automated resolution. In 2023 we reviewed 358,165 individual reports.

A relatively small fraction of accounts was responsible for creating the majority of reports, and separately a small fraction of accounts received the majority of reports. In total 76,699 individual accounts (5.6% of our active users) created one or more reports, and 45,861 individual accounts (3.4% of our active users) received one or more reports (either on the overall account, or on a piece of content created by the account).

When we take action on a report, our interventions have ranged from sending warning emails, to labeling, to takedowns of content or entire accounts. Takedowns can be either temporary suspensions or take effect permanently. While we used all of our interventions over the course of 2023, this post only includes a breakdown of takedowns: 4,667 accounts taken down, and an additional 1,817 individual pieces of content taken down.

In addition to reports from the community, we have a number of automated tools to proactively detect suspicious or harmful conduct without a user first reporting it to the moderation team, such as slurs in handles and spam accounts. Some of these tools take direct action on visual content by applying labels like "gore" to violent imagery, while others simply file automated reports for human review. Users can appeal labels applied to their account through the same in-app reporting flow, which the moderation team will then take another look at. The numbers above do not include the large volume of reports created by our own automated systems.

Child sexual abuse and exploitation, including the distribution of child sexual abuse material (CSAM), is obviously unacceptable anywhere on the Internet, including Bluesky. We built AT Protocol and Bluesky to ensure we can rapidly identify and remove this content anywhere it appears on our network, even when federation becomes available in the future. To help proactively detect, take down, review, and report CSAM to the applicable authorities (including NCMEC in the United States), we partnered with an established non-profit vendor who provides both hash matching APIs and specialist web apps for review and reporting. While any instance of this behavior is dangerous and warrants prompt action, to date we have thankfully not yet encountered a significant volume of such content in the network. However, our systems proactively identified four instances of potential CSAM, of which two were statistical false-positives, and two were confirmed to meet reporting requirements and were reported to NCMEC.

For this report, we are not yet including counts of legal requests and the fraction of requests serviced, nor are all of our moderation actions (such as labels) fully represented in the numbers we’ve shared here. We look forward to providing more granular data and reporting in the future. Given the transparent nature of the network, independent researchers also already have direct access to relatively rich data on labeling and moderation interventions.

Interaction Controls

No amount of reactive moderation will help if the base design of a product rewards abuse or inflames inter-community conflict. In 2023, we added a number of app and protocol features that give individuals and groups more control over their interactions in the network, with the aim of building safety options into the design of Bluesky itself.

Moderation lists can be used for muting and blocking. Individuals can maintain curated lists of accounts for an entire community, reducing duplicated efforts. Lists themselves are always public, and the behaviors of lists match the privacy of individual-level actions: blocking a list is public, while muting a list is private. Like all technical safety features, lists have both advantages and disadvantages as a moderation primitive. They can be a vector for harassment and abuse (and thus themselves require moderation), become difficult to maintain at larger scale, and have no built-in affordances for collaborative control or accountability. On the other hand, they are relatively familiar and easy to understand, have a low barrier to adoption, and integrate easily with everyday use of the app.

Self-labeling of individual posts lets authors ensure appropriate content warnings are in place for viewers. This feature is currently limited to posts with visual images and adult content, but there is a clear path to expanding the scope to more labels.

Reply controls give authors choice over who can interact in their threads, including the ability to close all replies to a post.

There are several more basic interaction controls in development or on the horizon. The ability to hide individual posts and to appeal labeling decisions on your own posts are both available now as beta-quality features. We are also tracking requests for the ability to mute keywords, and for users to be able to temporarily deactivate their own account. We’ll share more about these planned features in the coming months.

Supporting Tools and Infrastructure

Trust and safety efforts rely on tooling — and a lot of our work has been building the supporting tooling and infrastructure for this work from scratch. We’ve made a lot of progress in 2023 behind the scenes to support our moderation teams and policies.

Our moderation review tools have gone through major refactors and workflow improvements over the year, based on feedback from our moderators and policy experts. What started as a minimal admin interface can now handle tiered review queues, templated email workflows, moderation event timelines, and more. From a technical perspective, the APIs driving this system, both reporting and review, are defined the same way as other atproto endpoints, which supports interoperability with other alternative clients and workflow systems. We named the front-end interface of the moderation review system Ozone, and we plan to open-source it soon. We’re also in the process of pulling out the moderation back-end as a standalone service that other organizations can self-host.

Lastly, we have developed a rule-based automod framework to augment our moderation team when battling spam, and to proactively flag unacceptable content before it gets seen and reported by human users. This has helped identify some patterns of engagement farming and spam, and we will continue to develop and refine abuse detectors as we move towards open federation and growing the network.

Today, we announced a new logo for Bluesky:

Why did we choose a butterfly?

Well, of course, it flies. But more importantly, it is a symbol of change and transformation. Early on, we noticed that people were organically using the butterfly emoji 🦋 to indicate their Bluesky handles. We loved it, and adopted it as it spread. The butterfly speaks to our mission of transforming social media into something new.

Like a butterfly emerging from its chrysalis, we are starting to open up. Posts on Bluesky have been public from the start through the open protocol, but today we’re making them publicly accessible through the app. We’re unfolding a little bit at a time, and are excited to bring you along on this journey of metamorphosis!

What’s in a name?

The name “Bluesky” was originally a placeholder for the project started by Twitter to build an open social protocol. I decided to keep the name when I was chosen as the lead of the project. It’s memorable and symbolizes the open space of possibilities: the Twitter bird freed from a closed platform to fly in Bluesky’s open ecosystem.

As the project matured, we named the underlying standard the AT Protocol, or atproto. Bluesky, as the more colorful (and less technical) name everyone was familiar with, is also what we named the first app we built on atproto. But Bluesky is not the limit. Many more apps and experiences are already beginning to emerge — there are thousands of custom feeds, dozens of other clients, and atproto will eventually support other apps. We hope that Bluesky, as the first app, will be a catalyst for change and transform how social media works, like a butterfly flapping its wings.

What if I don’t like butterflies?

The great thing about an open network is that anyone can build on top of it and customize it further! Maybe you like birds more. Well, someone could build BirdSky, and you could switch to using that and still be in the same network, still have the same friends, and still see the same posts.

The protocol that makes Bluesky, BirdSky, and endless other options possible is also what makes Bluesky “billionaire-proof.” Just like you can change email providers or cell phone carriers and bring all your contacts, photos, or messages with you, in an open network, you’ll always have the freedom to choose (and to exit) instead of being held to the whims of private companies or black box algorithms. And wherever you go, your friends and relationships will be there too.

Explore Bluesky

We built Bluesky to be a home for public conversation — breaking news, commentary and analysis, jokes and more. And we’re taking one step closer to this goal by releasing a public web view, which means that you don’t have to be logged in to view posts on Bluesky.

Starting today, you can easily view Bluesky posts without being logged in. Sharing will be more convenient — whether it's a joke you want to text a friend, or a post you want to embed in an article.

If you’re a member of the press, check our FAQ for journalists or get an invite here.

Remember: Posts on Bluesky have always been public via developer tooling and other apps. This update simply makes content on the Bluesky app easily viewable from the https://bsky.app/ website. Read more about what’s public and private on Bluesky here.

Opt-Out Setting

All posts on Bluesky are public, but sometimes, added friction matters. That’s why we’re also including an opt-out setting, so if you don’t want your Bluesky profile to be easily publicly viewable, you can opt out by following these steps:

1. Update your Bluesky app to the latest version, 1.60, in the App or Play Stores.
2. Click Moderation in the menu on the left side.
3. Toggle on Logged-out visibility.

Exactly one year ago, on November 16, 2022, the first post on Bluesky was created:

Fast forward a year later, and we’ve just crossed two million users after opening the app to users around February. We’re excited to continue growing a truly open social network.

Toward Federation

Imagine you’ve just spent 10 years building your audience and making friends on a social platform, only to decide that it’s no longer for you. When you leave this platform, you’re essentially leaving behind all of your relationships, your saved posts, and more.

We’ve been there too, and we’re similarly tired of packing our bags each time another platform winds down and everyone collectively moves to the next big thing. Signing up for a new social network every few years and losing all our data on former ones shouldn’t be the price that we have to pay in order to keep our relationships online.

That’s why our biggest priority right now is launching federation, which is timelined for early next year. This is one of the core features of Bluesky that makes it “billionaire-proof” — you’ll always have the freedom to choose (and to exit) instead of being held to the whims of private companies or black box algorithms. And wherever you go, your friends and relationships will be there too.

A Public Network

More exciting news: around the end of this month, we’ll release a public web interface. With this, you’ll be able to view posts on Bluesky without being logged in on an account.

This will make posts on Bluesky much more accessible, which will be especially useful for real-time commentary and breaking news.

As a reminder, Bluesky is a public social network, so your posts, likes, etc. have always been publicly accessible through the API. We designed Bluesky with the openness of the internet in mind, and you can think of your profile as a blog on the internet. To read more about data privacy on Bluesky, here’s our user FAQ.

Other Updates

In between all of the above, we’ve also shipped some much-requested features, including:

• Mobile push notifications: receive notifications on your phone
• General user lists: add users to shareable lists and see their posts in one feed
• Email verification: verify your account email for added security
• Advanced feed and thread preferences: sort replies by time, likes, or randomly; see replies from your follows first; show/hide replies or quote posts in your feeds, and more
• Media tab for user profiles: easily find and see the photos that a user has posted
• A Likes tab on your own profile: see all your liked posts in one place
• Improved startup and loading time: reduces the time spent loading the app
• Suggested follows: get recommended follows based on each user
• Accessibility improvements: improvements to alt text, component labels, screen flashing, and more

And there’s much more to come — join us for the ride! See you on Bluesky!

How do I get verified as a journalist?

Notable and authentic accounts interested in receiving a verification badge or becoming a Trusted Verifier can apply here.

Separately from verification badges, you can also set your domain as your username. We highly encourage official organizations and individuals to do this because it links your web presence to your social account. (This is different from a verification badge.)

How can I embed a post?

There are two ways to embed a Bluesky post. You can click the dropdown menu directly on the post you'd like to embed for the code snippet to use.

You can also visit embed.bsky.app and paste the post's URL there for the code snippet.

Read our user guide for post embeds here.

What are custom feeds and how can journalists use them?

Custom feeds are a feature on Bluesky that allow you to pick the algorithm that powers your social media experience. Imagine you want your timeline to only be posts from your mutuals, or only posts that have cat photos, or only posts related to sports — you can simply pick your chosen feed from an open marketplace of feeds developed by our team and third-party developers.

For users, the ability to customize their feed gives them back control over how they spend their attention. For developers, an open marketplace of feeds provides the freedom to experiment and publish algorithms that anyone can use.

This means that Bluesky does not control a single algorithmic timeline for all users. Instead, users have created feeds of their own, including feeds specifically for news.

We encourage journalists to experiment with custom feeds too. For example, a local journalist in Portland could create a feed specifically for Portland. Similarly, a finance journalism organization could create a feed specifically for financial news.

Do you have a media kit?

You can access Bluesky's media kit here.

For media inquiries, please contact [email protected].

Today, we reached over 1,000,000 users on Bluesky!

We’re grateful to the early users and developers who have helped us reach this point. Thank you for joining us early on this journey and helping test all aspects of the network before the open public launch. We’re excited for many more people to join soon.

Our current focus is on preparing to open up and getting the network to a state that can support many more users. This means improving moderation and curation on the network through increased staffing and tooling, scaling our infrastructure and federating the network to support this growth, and iterating on the user experience of the app. As always, if you have feedback you’d like to share with the team, you can find a submission form in the app under “Send feedback.”

Milestones

Here’s a look back at some of our milestones over the last few months:

• Releasing a beta app for our protocol (January). We started inviting a handful of people to test out the Bluesky app. By February, we still only had a few hundred people.
• Launching custom domains as handles (March), allowing users to self-verify and own their username across the network.
• Launching custom feeds (May), which allows users to choose their own algorithmic timelines.
• Open sourcing the social app (May), providing transparency into development and opening the app to third-party contributions.
• Launching the federation sandbox (June). This is our testing environment for the federation architecture that gets us another step closer to launching federation.
• Announced our first paid service (July), allowing users to easily purchase and manage domains through Bluesky.

Thank you for being part of our journey, and we’re excited for many more milestones ahead!

If you’re still waiting for an invite code, sign up for the waitlist at https://bsky.app. To date, we've invited 1M users through the waitlist, and we currently have 2 to 3M more to send out. We email tens of thousands of invite codes weekly, and existing users receive invite codes periodically as well.

You can read more about Bluesky on our company blog and prior beta updates can be found here.

Bluesky is one of the first social media companies that has made algorithmic choice a reality. On Bluesky, anyone can create a feed — cat lovers, coffee aficionados, Swifties, NBA fans, and more. As a user, you’re given a few default feeds to start out with as you get settled into the app, but you can easily swap them out for one of the many feeds that others have created.

Welcome to a new paradigm in social media where users have more choice and control. Our implementation of algorithmic choice lets users customize one of the most important parts of their social media experience: their feed.

In May, we launched custom feeds, a feature that lets users choose between feeds and helps developers build them. Custom feeds allow third party developers to create entirely new feeds that users can install.

How Custom Feeds Work

Instead of using a black box algorithm that leaves users guessing how posts are ranked or how to get to the “top” of an algorithm, we provide an open marketplace of feeds and let users choose which ones they want to use.

This changes the game — for example, news publishers no longer need to guess what media format gets ranked at the top in order to deliver crucial information to readers. You can also think of these feeds as super-powered hashtags or lists. Whether you want to subscribe to a feed of only cat pictures or to posts from only your mutuals, this is possible.

For now, it’ll take a bit of developer familiarity to create your own custom feed. We’re still working on improving the search & discovery of custom feeds, as well as the developer experience, but the basics of what it looks like to have a customizable social experience are here. In the meantime, third-party developers have built tools like SkyFeed, which not only allows users to easily create their own custom feeds, but also provides a Tweetdeck-like experience where you can view multiple feeds in one dashboard.

What Can You Do With Custom Feeds?

The Bluesky team initially provided six custom feeds for users to subscribe to, but now, the vast majority of feeds on the network are built by independent third-party developers.

We asked our current users about how they’ve been using custom feeds:

• When Taylor Swift released one of her albums, Swifties created a custom feed to find each other and discuss the album
• Use feeds as superpowered hashtags to follow along with live events like sports games and TV show premieres.
• Use keywords to add your posts to topic-specific feeds. For example, any post with the test tube emoji 🧪appears in the popular What’s Science feed.
• Be intentional about when you consume news by subscribing to a feed specifically for news.
• Prioritize posts over replies and quote-posts by subscribing to a feed that contains only posts.
• Only see posts from your friends and their circles, instead of viral posts across the whole network, by subscribing to algorithmic custom feeds that prioritize your local social graph.
• Use custom feeds to advertise which artists have open submissions or stores that you can purchase their art from.
• Create novel algorithmic feeds tailored to your specific interests — for example, a feed that prioritizes posts from your mutuals with some network-wide viral posts sprinkled in, or a feed that priorities posts that received the most engagement.

This is still just the beginning of custom feeds, and we’re excited to see where the Bluesky community takes them!

Default Feeds

Now that we’ve arrived at a stable first iteration of how custom feeds will work, we’re improving the default experience. Even though users have a wide variety of custom feeds to choose from, defaults are still powerful.

We’ve added Discover, a more complex feed that you can expect to evolve over time. Unlike our earlier iterations of simple feeds, Discover is customized for what you like to see, while still giving you a view into what’s trending in the network. The initial version of Discover mixes in a global view of what’s trending in the network with posts from accounts you follow and posts from accounts near your social graph. We’ll continue to improve this algorithm, with the goal of making a feed full of interesting content that refreshes often and takes your unique interests into consideration.

Our approach to making an algorithmic feed isn’t new. Most social networks take into account your interests and social graph to curate an unique feed for you. What’s new is our focus on algorithmic choice — letting you unpin feeds you don’t like, and discover and install new feeds that better suit your interests. If you don’t like our default Discover feed, you can simply remove it and replace it with any other custom feed. This mirrors our overall design philosophy: give users sensible defaults but leave them the option to fully customize their experience if they don’t like our choices.

If you have feedback on the updates, feel free to contact us via our feedback form here.

Last updated: August 17, 2023

Bluesky is a public benefit corporation with the mission to “to develop and drive large-scale adoption of technologies for open and decentralized public conversation.” The public benefit corporation status allows us to pursue our mission above profit, but we still need to make Bluesky a sustainable service in order to build an open ecosystem that lasts. In order to do this, we’ve raised an $8M seed round to support our mission and growth, and are taking the first steps towards a services-led business model.

Our Seed Round

The hardest part of building a new social network is bootstrapping growth. As you might recall, Bluesky started as a project funded and supported by Twitter, and even after our incorporation as a separate company, we retained a close relationship with them. However, once Twitter changed hands, the relationship was terminated, and our original plan of building the AT Protocol to support Twitter as a client was no longer possible.

Last fall, we started building our own client app to drive adoption and development of the AT Protocol. This summer, we converted from a public benefit LLC to a public benefit C Corp in order to gain more independence from the legacy of the past. Our mission and board have stayed the same, but along with this conversion, we’ve raised funding from an array of values-aligned investors who share our vision for an open and decentralized commons for public conversation. Our goal for this raise was to find new partners and to give ourselves room to grow the network and experiment with new business models.

We raised $8M in a seed round led by Neo, a community-led firm with amazing partners like Ali Partovi and Suzanne Xie, and a wonderful cast of additional investors including Joe Beda who co-created Kubernetes, Bob Young of Red Hat, Amjad Masad of Replit, Amir Shevat of Darkmode, Heather Meeker, Mana Industries, Automattic, Protocol Labs, Katelyn Donnelly, Ali Evans, Stav Erez, Kris Nóva, Brad Fitzpatrick, Abdul Ly, and many other operators who have much wisdom to share.

With this funding, we can expand our team, manage increasing operation and infrastructure costs, and grow the AT Protocol ecosystem as well as the Bluesky app. It’s a lot to tackle at once, but we’re excited to have seasoned allies who want to help us realize our vision of an open commons for public conversation.

Just as we’ve made the source code for the protocol and the client public, we also want to be transparent about our business plans. We’ll be experimenting with different strategies and services to see what provides real value to our users, and will continue to share what we learn as we build a sustainable social network.

Our First Paid Service

Traditionally, social media companies have supported business costs through advertising. While advertising can subsidize services to make them free to the end user, it comes with negative long-term consequences like incentivizing platforms to lock their users in. In the business of advertising, where social media companies exchange user data to serve ads to specific audiences, users become the product.

Bluesky’s business model must be fundamentally different — we are a public social network and our code is all open source, so we have no “moat” when it comes to data. We set out to build a protocol where users can own their data and always have the freedom to leave, and this approach means that advertising couldn’t be our dominant business model. So, we’ve been exploring other avenues of monetization.

We believe that there must be better strategies to sustain social networks that don’t require selling user data for ads. Our first step in another direction is paid services, and we’re starting with custom domains. While setting up a custom domain to use with Bluesky and the AT Protocol is fairly straightforward, it does require some familiarity with domain registrars and DNS settings. Yet, over 13,000 users have already either repurposed domains they already owned to use as handles, or purchased a domain solely because of Bluesky. Domains have so much potential as a personalized way to customize identities and as a decentralized way to verify reputation that builds off the existing web. For example, U.S. Senators have used the senate.gov domain to verify their identity on Bluesky without our involvement, and a third-party developer built a web extension that checks if websites are linked to an AT Protocol identity. The possibilities are wide in the domain-as-a-handle space.

We’re partnering with Namecheap, a popular domain registrar, to offer a service for easy domain purchasing and management. With this, people can set a custom domain as their handle on Bluesky and the AT Protocol in under a few minutes. Of the domain registrars, Namecheap has one of the best reputations for defending their users against unauthorized domain transfers and protecting their domain names. Our shared values of putting users first and moving towards a more open internet makes us confident that together, we can provide a great service to our users. To learn more about how to easily get your own custom domain through Bluesky, read our product announcement here.

We’re excited to announce a new feature that allows users to seamlessly purchase and manage domains directly through Bluesky. With this, you can easily set a custom domain as your Bluesky handle and much more.

On Bluesky and the AT Protocol, you can set domains that you own like bsky.team or alice.lol as your username. Typically, this requires buying a domain name from a registrar and configuring DNS records in their portal. We’re partnering with Namecheap, one of the leading domain name registrars, to let you pick out a domain name and link it to your Bluesky account in under a minute.

Namecheap, an ICANN accredited registrar that supports the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the open internet, has existed for over 22 years, and their reputation for dependable and affordable domain services aligns with our dedication to providing users with more choice in managing their digital presence.

Here’s what this means for you:

• Custom Bluesky handle. Set your new domain as your username in Bluesky with just a few clicks.
• Easy domain purchasing. Simply type in your desired domain and browse the listed options to purchase your desired domain.
• Increased privacy. Bluesky offers an additional layer of privacy protection by acting as your domain registrar agent. We do not register your personal information with the WHOIS directory, which is a searchable database that holds information on domain ownership.
• Convenient domain management. Manage your domain settings and configurations within Bluesky.
• Email forwarding. Emails sent to your domain can be easily forwarded to an email address of your choice.
• URL forwarding Your domain will redirect to your Bluesky profile or URL of your choice.

Buying a domain through Bluesky does not lock you in — you will still be able to transfer your domain away if you wish.

We’re excited to provide domain management as our first service. We’re also exploring other services that we can bundle to users to provide a more seamless experience. You can read more about our business plan here, and more about why we use custom domains as handles here.

Great! How do I get started?

Simply navigate to https://account.bsky.app and login with your Bluesky account. From there, type in your desired domain to view the available options.

Here’s a demo of this process:

If you have questions or need support, please email [email protected].

The goal of Bluesky is to turn social media into a shared public commons. We don’t want to own people’s social graphs or communities. We want to be a tool that helps communities own and govern themselves.

The reason we focus on communities is that for an open commons to work, there needs to be some sort of structure that protects the people who participate. Safety can’t just be left up to each individual to deal with on their own. The burden this puts on people — especially those who are most vulnerable to online abuse and harassment — is too high. It also doesn’t mirror how things work in the real world: we form groups and communities so that we can help each other. The tooling we’re building for moderation tries to take into consideration how social spaces are formed and shaped through communities.

Today, we’re publishing some proposals for new moderation and safety tooling. The first focuses on user lists and reply controls which can be used for community-driven moderation. The second will focus on moderator services and how they can handle problems that small communities can’t. The third is for Hashtags, which are not directly related to moderation but can have a large effect on customizing what you see. (We wanted to include this to distinguish between the labeling proposal, which is intended to address moderation, and mechanisms for discovery.)

• User Lists, Reply-Gating, and Thread Moderation
• Labeling and Moderation Controls
• Hashtags

These proposals are published on GitHub, and we’d love to hear your feedback and discussion there. In the rest of this post, we want to first share some insight into why we believe a public commons is important for social media.

Why build a public commons?

We’re a public benefit company that was formed with the mission “to develop and drive large-scale adoption of technologies for open and decentralized public conversation.” We believe that public conversations, which form the basis of a democratic society, should be held in spaces that can be a shared public commons.

A company is an efficient structure for building out a cohesive vision of how things should work, but locking users into our systems would be antithetical to our mission. An open commons can’t be governed at the sole discretion of one global company. We offer services like professional moderators so that we can help protect people and provide a good experience, but we shouldn’t exert total control over everyone’s experience, for all time, with no alternative. Users should be able to walk away from us without walking away from their social lives.

The reason we’re building in decentralization is because we observed that business interests and the open web have a habit of coming into conflict. Third-party developers often get locked out. Moderation policies come into conflict with the diverse interests and needs of different groups of users. Ads push towards algorithms that optimize for engagement. It’s a systemic problem that keeps playing out as centralized social media companies rise and fall.

Some might think this isn’t a big deal. Maybe social media is like a club, and the place can be happening one day and dead the next. Would it be so bad if people just moved on to the next joint...? The problem is that people put their lives and livelihoods into these networks. When a network shuts down, people lose out on a lot: they lose their connections, they lose their creative work, and they lose their places of business. Social networks are not just products; they’ve become digital homes.

Even when things are working correctly on social platforms, there are weird dynamics caused by people’s relationships being mediated by a single company. The Internet is pretty obviously real life in the sense that its management has real-world consequences. When these places control our identities and our ability to connect and to make money, having no way out from the founding company is a precarious situation. The power difference is daunting.

The goal of Bluesky is to rebuild social networking so that there’s not a lock-in to the founding company, which is us. We can try to provide a cohesive, enjoyable experience, but there’s always an exit. Users can move their accounts to other providers. Developers can run their own connected infrastructure. Creators can keep access to their audiences. We hope this helps break the cycle of social media companies coming into conflict with the open web.

What should this feel like?

Social media has a reputation for being emotionally chaotic. Some days it can be fulfilling, and other days it can be a box of horrors. If we’re going to succeed in our mission of creating social media that operates as a sustainable public commons, these tools need to not just be good in theory, but actually help create a better social space than what has come before. Our goal for investing in moderation tooling and processes is to create a better public commons for conversations to take place in. Perhaps it can even be a happy, healthy, and predominantly enjoyable space.

Here’s some of what we think it takes to create a great experience:

A great experience should be simple to use. It shouldn’t be overly complex, and there should be sensible defaults and well-run entry points. If things are going well, the average user shouldn’t have to notice what parts are decentralized, or how many layers have come together to determine what they see. However, if conflict arises, there should be easy levers for individuals and communities to pull so that they can reconfigure their experience.

A great experience should recognize that toxicity is not driven only by bad actors. Good intentions can create runaway social behaviors that then create needless conflict. The network should include ways to downregulate behaviors – not just amplify them.

A great experience should respect the burden that community management can place on people. Someone who sets out to help protect others can quickly find themselves responsible for a number of difficult choices. The tooling that’s provided should take into account ways to help avoid burnout.

A great experience should find a balance between creating friendly spaces and over-policing each other. The impulse to protect can sometimes degrade into nitpicking. We should drive towards norms that feel natural and easy to observe.

A great experience should reflect the diversity of views within the network. Decisions that are subjective should be configurable. Moderation should not force the network into a monoculture.

Finally, a great experience should remember that social networking can be pleasant one day and harsh the next. There should be ways to react to sudden events or shifts in your mood. Sometimes you need a way to be online but not be 100% available.

What’s our development process?

During the private beta, we’ve been actively responding to user feedback. For example, based on user feedback, we recently introduced an optional “context” field to add a few lines of text to reports so that moderators can better understand issues that require more context to make a decision on. With these upcoming proposals, we’re looking for feedback ahead of time so we can get to the best outcomes quickly and prepare for opening up the network.

The proposals we’re publishing have been in the works for awhile; we focused on moderation and safety from the earliest moments of developing Bluesky and the AT Protocol, even if they didn’t always appear to be front and center. We’ve been fleshing out our ideas over the last few months through the practical experience of engaging with users during the Bluesky app’s beta. In designing these, we researched existing tooling implemented on other sites, discussed with users from different communities on the app, consulted with trust & safety advisors, and above all, constantly asked ourselves what tools would reduce harm, protect people, and decrease the likelihood of bad outcomes.

Decisions such as who has the right to speak or moderate an online space are intrinsically controversial. And it isn’t just about platforms making moderation decisions. For example, the ability to moderate replies to your own threads introduces complex tradeoffs around safety, counterspeech, and accountability. Replies are an area where some of the nastiest forms of abuse can happen, so we felt that per-thread moderation was a good idea. But there are downsides, too: For example, if a thread contains misinformation, then giving reply controls to the author means they might use it to suppress corrections from other users. Our hypothesis, reflected in the moderation proposals we’re sharing, is that giving users more tools to protect themselves from harassment is worth some downsides like not always having the record corrected in the replies.

We’re presenting proposals for community discussion and developer feedback to help develop a rough consensus around these approaches — these tools won’t be effective unless people actually use them. They’re a set of tools that are meant to overlap, work together, and provide the building blocks for new ideas.

An updated Community Guidelines

In addition to working on moderation tooling, we’ve also been developing new policies and processes to moderate the services we run. As we explain in the community guidelines:

Bluesky Social is one service built on top of the AT Protocol. While we won’t always be able to control everything that happens on other services that use the AT Protocol, we take our responsibility to the users of Bluesky Social seriously. Our community guidelines are designed to promote a safe and enjoyable experience. To achieve this goal, we moderate the content on Bluesky Social, and you can also adjust content filters within the app according to your preferences.

An important site of moderation is the servers themselves, and we want our policies to provide a safe and enjoyable experience for users who enter the network through our services. If the moderation tooling we’re building is like the building blocks and foundations of a city, the norms and policies we’re setting are how we’re actually going to run the city.

For the Bluesky servers we run (that is, the Bluesky app you’ve been using up to this point), we’re publishing updated Community Guidelines next week, linked to in our Terms of Service, which includes the following:

• Treat others with respect. For example, no:
  1. Threats of violence or physical harm, or content that encourages, promotes, or glorifies violence against people, groups, or animals
  2. Repeated harassment or abuse directed at a specific person or group
  3. Encouraging self-harm or suicide
  4. Promoting hate or extremist conduct that targets people or groups based on their race, gender, religion, ethnicity, nationality, disability, or sexual orientation
  5. Depictions of excessive violence, torture, dismemberment, or non-consensual sexual activity
  6. Misleading impersonation of other individuals, organizations, or entities

The actions that we take to enforce these guidelines will include removing individual posts and suspending and removing users from our services.

In the future, other services built on the AT Protocol might choose to adopt their own community guidelines that differ from ours. In a federated model, each server has discretion over what they choose to serve and who they choose to connect to. If you disagree with a server’s moderation policies, you can take your account, social connections, and data to another service.

Proposals

We’ve created a new GitHub repository to host some of these proposals to streamline discussion. You can find the links to them here:

• User Lists, Reply-Gating, and Thread Moderation
• Labeling and Moderation Controls
• Hashtags

These proposals, and our implementation of them, are not the end of what is possible in an open network — they are part of a process of development that will go through multiple iterations. Other companies or communities can also help set norms and build tooling, but we are investing in a best-effort first pass at creating a safe, pleasant, resilient public social commons. Your feedback, both in the app and through GitHub, is appreciated. Thanks for joining us on this journey.

Bluesky: A Short Overview

Our digital lives are fragmented — we all maintain profiles across multiple social sites. If you move from one site to another, you have to start over with no history of the friends or content you created there. This is because the original web protocol made it easy to link websites, but had no built-in way to link people and their content, making it hard for people to maintain control over their online identities.

When a centralized platform owns your online identity and is the only host of your content, you’re vulnerable to getting cut off without warning. It’d be like if the city you lived in one day decided to kick you out, and there was no way to move your stuff to a new city and keep in touch with your friends. An analogy for what Bluesky is building is an identity and transport system between cities, so you can move from one place to another and keep your friends.

Bluesky’s goal is to rebuild social so that:

• Users own their data and can take it anywhere they want to go.
• Developers will never get locked out of the ecosystems they help build.
• Creators will always own their relationships with their audience.

To achieve these goals, Bluesky has developed a social protocol — in other words, we designed a new approach to storing and retrieving information about people in a social network. This is where the “decentralization” part of Bluesky comes in. A protocol is a set of instructions for computers to talk to each other. It creates a set of rules for how your data can move across different services, even ones not run by us. This open protocol is why most data – your posts, follows, likes, and blocks – is public on Bluesky right now. Making a post on Bluesky is like making a blog post you publish to the web. The underlying protocol for Bluesky is ATP, much like the underlying protocol for the web is HTTP. Our goal was to make social media work more like the open systems that defined the early web, like blogs and email.

A Network of Cities

ATP, or the Authenticated Transfer Protocol, is a federated social protocol. Here’s an analogy using cities in the real world to describe federation online: Centralized social platforms are like one big city that everyone lives in, and federated protocols are like a network of cities, of all different sizes. In the federated network, people can move between cities depending on what kind of community they’d like to be in. The Bluesky social app we’re running right now is just one city in a network that will grow over time. The AT Protocol gives you a passport (identity) to travel with, and lets you take all of your belongings (data) with you, enabling an eventual network of cities to interoperate. When we launch federation, more cities (servers) will pop up.

Just as different cities can have different laws and cultures, different parts of a federated network can be governed differently. Systems like composable community moderation can help create a system for governing the different “cities” in the network. In the future, we hope to see many new and different kinds of cities (i.e. other social apps like dating apps or video feeds) get built by users and developers, as well as the bridges and tunnels that connect these cities. With your Bluesky passport, you can travel freely between digital spaces, with the tools to create your own or to curate your experience at home. We believe that the future of social media is co-created and open. Join us!

This blog post is written for a general audience. For more about Bluesky, please visit our FAQ. To learn more about the AT Protocol, please visit our protocol documentation.

Since our last update, quite a bit has changed. Just a few months ago in February, we only had a couple hundred users, and in April, we crossed 50,000 users. We recently passed 100,000 users, and are excited that so many people have joined us. Our priorities continue to be a focus on moderation and curation to ensure a safe and pleasant environment for users, and protocol work to launch federation.

Recently Released Features

• Custom feeds. Users can have more ownership over their social media experience by picking the algorithms that power their feeds. So far, third-party developers have created feeds ranging from mutuals only, first posts from new users, cat photos, the #nba hashtag, and more.
• Blocks and mutelists. Blocks on Bluesky prevent interaction, and organizations and community leaders can maintain shared mutelists for others to subscribe to.
• More fine-grained content moderation controls. Users are able to select hide, warn, or show for content categories ranging from nudity to impersonation.
• Custom domains as handles. Both individuals and organizations can set their account handle to their domain, creating a unique identifier across the network. Read our tutorial here for how to set this up.
• Production desktop app. We launched the desktop web app at https://bsky.app/.
• Invite codes per account. We added server-level tooling to distribute invites on a regular cadence. Previously, accounts did not have invite codes of their own.
• Accessibility improvements. We added alt text to images, an improved dark mode, and more.
• App passwords. We released this as a short-term solution for people to use with third-party apps while we continue to work on Single Sign-On (SSO).

The AT Protocol Developer Ecosystem

As the number of beta testers on Bluesky continues to grow, so too does the size of our developer community. Recent updates from our team include:

• Open-sourced client. We published the code that powers the Bluesky social app publicly on GitHub and are accepting community contributions (but please read the rules and guidelines first!).
• Feed generator starter kit. We published a GitHub repository with a template for developers to build custom feeds.
• Community documentation. We’ve published a community page on our protocol documentation site with links to a quick start guide, community projects, and developer groups to join.

To see projects from community developers, you can visit this page, or if you have a Bluesky account, check out the @atproto.com account. Some highlights include:

• Flipboard added Bluesky integration, so now you can browse Bluesky content from within Flipboard
• Skylink is a Chrome and Firefox extension that detects if the domain is linked to a Bluesky profile as you browse the web, which really exemplifies the “social internet”
• Atlas maps the social clusters on the network, and is a fun way of visualizing communities joining the beta
• SkyFeed surfaced custom feeds even before we released them in the official Bluesky app

Roadmap and Growth

A few weeks ago, we intentionally slowed our invite roll-out while we built more moderation tooling and capacity for users on the app. We staffed a content moderation team with shifts that cover a 24/7 schedule, and consulted with trust and safety experts to establish new processes and policies to support a growing userbase. We’ve resumed sending out daily invites to the waitlist, which is where the majority of users already on Bluesky received their invites. For those who don’t know someone personally with an invite code, the waitlist is the fastest way to receive a code, though please be patient as we work through the list.

We recently shared our technical architecture for federation and are releasing a sandbox environment for developers to test soon.

Thanks to all who have used the feedback form within the app; we’ve heard your product feedback over the last few months. In the near future, you can expect these features and improvements as we move towards federation:

• Improved labeling, reporting, and related moderation tooling
• Account portability between servers
• Updated community guidelines for the app
• Protocol documentation and specifications

Meanwhile, we’re actively hiring. If you’re eager to join our effort to build the open social web, please apply to one of the listings on our jobs page.

Giving Feedback

When the population of beta testers was even in the tens of thousands, it was still fairly manageable for the team to receive bug reports and requests from tags and mentions directly in the app. However, this method of feedback does not scale, so we’ve implemented some changes to our preferred feedback routes. Please do not tag the entire team’s personal profiles for bug reports or support requests in the app — this makes it difficult to surface important notifications. Instead:

1. To flag specific posts or profiles for the team’s attention, please use the in-app reporting feature. Our mods review every report we receive.
2. For bug reports or app feedback, please use the feedback form in the app itself (located in the side menu on mobile or the right side on desktop).
3. If you’re familiar with GitHub, you can also file an issue on our repos, though please read our contribution guidelines in the README first.
4. For support requests, please email us at [email protected].
5. For security reports, please email us at [email protected] or visit https://bsky.app/.well-known/security.txt.

Welcome to the Bluesky app! This is a user guide that answers some common questions.

For general questions about the Bluesky company, please visit our FAQ here. If you’re interested in learning more about the protocol Bluesky is built on (the AT Protocol), please refer to our protocol documentation or our protocol FAQ.

Joining Bluesky

How do I join Bluesky?

You can create an account at bsky.app. (No invite code required!)

You can download the Bluesky app for iOS or Google Play, or use Bluesky via desktop.

Moderation

What is Bluesky's approach to moderation?

Moderation is a core part of social networks. At Bluesky, we’re investing in safety from two angles. First, we've built our own moderation team dedicated to providing around-the-clock coverage to uphold our community guidelines. Additionally, we recognize that there is no one-size-fits-all approach to moderation — no single company can get online safety right for every country, culture, and community in the world. So we’ve also been building something bigger — an ecosystem of moderation and open-source safety tools that gives communities power to create their own spaces, with their own norms and preferences. Still, using Bluesky feels familiar and intuitive. It's a straightforward app on the surface, but under the hood, we have enabled real innovation and competition in social media by building a new kind of open network.

You can read more about our approach to moderation here.

What does muting do?

Muting prevents you from seeing any notifications or top-level posts from an account. If they reply to a thread, you’ll see a section that says “Post from an account you muted” with an option to show the post. The account will not know that they have been muted.

What does blocking do?

Blocking prevents interaction. When you block an account, both you and the other account will no longer be able to see or interact with each other’s posts.

How do I flag abuse?

You can report posts by clicking on the three-dot menu. You can also report an entire account by visiting their profile and clicking the three-dot menu there.

Where can I read more about your plans for moderation?

You can read more about our approach to moderation here.

Custom Feeds

What are custom feeds?

Custom feeds is a feature on Bluesky that allows you to pick the algorithm that powers your social media experience. Imagine you want your timeline to only be posts from your mutuals, or only posts that have cat photos, or only posts related to sports — you can simply pick your feed of choice from an open marketplace.

For users, the ability to customize their feed returns control of their attention to themselves. For developers, an open marketplace of feeds provides the freedom to experiment and publish algorithms that anyone can use.

You can read more about custom feeds and algorithmic choice in our blog post here.

How do I use custom feeds?

On Bluesky, click the hashtag icon on the bottom of the app. From there, you can add and discover new feeds. You can also directly explore feeds via this link.

How can I create a custom feed?

Developers can use our feed generator starter kit to create a custom feed. Eventually, we will provide better tooling such that anyone, including non-developers, can build custom feeds.

In addition, SkyFeed is a tool built by an independent developer that has a Feed Builder feature that you can use.

Custom Domains

How can I set up my domain as my handle?

Please refer to our tutorial here.

Can I purchase a domain directly through Bluesky?

Yes, you can purchase a domain and set it as your username through Bluesky here.

Data Privacy

What is public and what is private on Bluesky?

Bluesky is a public social network. Think of your posts as blog posts – anyone on the web can see them, even those without an invite code. An invite code simply grants access to the service we’re running that lets you publish a post yourself. (Developers familiar with the API can view all posts regardless of whether they have an account themselves.)

Specifically:

• Posts and likes are public.
• Blocks are public.
• Mutes are private, but mutelists are public lists. Your mutelist subscriptions are private.

Why are my posts, likes, and blocks public?

The AT Protocol, which Bluesky is built on, is designed to support public conversations. To make public conversations portable across all sorts of platforms, your data is stored in data repositories that anyone can view. This means that regardless of which server you choose to join, you’ll still be able to see posts across the whole network, and if you choose to change servers, you can easily take all of your data with you. This is what causes the user experience of Bluesky, a federated protocol, to be similar to all the other social media apps you have used before.

Can I set my profile to be private?

Currently, there are no private profiles on Bluesky.

What happens when I delete a post?

After you delete a post, it will be immediately removed from the user-facing app. Any images attached to your post will be immediately deleted in our data storage too.

However, it takes a bit longer for the text content of a post to be fully deleted in storage. The text content is stored in a non-readable form, but it is possible to query the data via the API. We will periodically perform back-end deletes to entirely wipe this data.

Can I get a copy of all of my data?

Yes — the AT Protocol keeps user data in a content-addressed archive. This archive can be used to migrate account data across servers. For developers, you can use this method to export a copy of your repository. For non-devs, the tooling is still being built to make it easy.

Update: Technical folks can read more about downloading and extracting data in this developer blog post.

You can read our privacy policy here.

Security

How can I reset my password?

Click “Forgot” on the sign-in screen. You will receive an email with a reset code.

What if I didn’t get a password reset email?

Confirm your account email in your settings, and please add [email protected] to your allowed senders list.

How can I change my account email?

You can update and verify your account email in Settings.

Will you implement two-factor authentication (2FA)?

Yes, implementing 2FA is on our short-term roadmap.

Bluesky, the AT Protocol, and Federation

What’s the difference between Bluesky and the AT Protocol?

Bluesky, the public benefit company, is developing two products: the AT Protocol, and the microblogging app Bluesky. Bluesky, the app, is meant to demonstrate the features of the underlying protocol. The AT Protocol is built to support an entire ecosystem of social apps that extends beyond microblogging.

You can read more about the differences between Bluesky and the AT Protocol in our general FAQ here.

How does federation affect me, as a user of the Bluesky app?

We’re prioritizing user experience and want to make Bluesky as user-friendly as possible. Regardless of which server you join, you can see posts from people on other servers and take your data with you if you choose to move servers.

Is Bluesky built on a blockchain? Does it use cryptocurrency?

No, and no.

Does Bluesky support Handshake (HNS) domains?

No, and there are no plans to do so.

Miscellaneous

How can I submit feedback?

On the mobile app, open the left side menu and click “Feedback.” On the web app, there is a link to “Send feedback” on the right side of the screen.

You can also email [email protected] with support requests.

What is a post on Bluesky called?

The official term is “post.”

How can I embed a post?

There are two ways to embed a Bluesky post. You can click the dropdown menu directly on the post you'd like to embed for the code snippet to use.

You can also visit embed.bsky.app and paste the post's URL there for the code snippet.

Read our user guide for post embeds here.

How can I find friends or mutuals from other social networks?

Third-party developers maintain tools to find friends from other social networks. Some of these projects are listed here. Please generate an App Password via Settings > Advanced > App Passwords to login to any third-party apps.

Is there a dark mode?

Yes. You can change the display settings to be light or dark mode, or to match your system settings, via Settings > Appearance.

The answers here are subject to change. We’ll update this guide regularly as we continue to release more features. Thank you for joining Bluesky!

Many of our experiences with social media today are defined by the same constraining dynamics — one private company owns all of our data, populates our feeds with an algorithm of their choice, and we’re unable to take our followers and posts with us to a new home if we ever decide to leave. The AT Protocol, a federated networking model which Bluesky is built upon, changes this.

Soon, we’re launching a sandbox environment to begin the testing phase of federation for the AT Protocol with allow-listed servers. In advance of this launch, we want to share some technical details about our design decisions with you.

At a high level, federation means that anyone can run the parts that make up the AT Protocol themselves, such as their own server. Sandbox mode means that people can start experimenting with federation without interfacing with the actual network — think of it as a test network. If you’d like to run your own server, you’ll be able to do so in the near future.

Update: Join the atproto federation developer sandbox here!

Federation Architecture

The AT Protocol is made up of a bunch of pieces that stack together. (Technically, the lower-level primitives that can get stacked together differently are the repositories, lexicons, and DIDs.) This means that the architecture we’re proposing for launching federation is not the only network architecture that’s possible – it’s just what we expect to be the most powerful and robust way of supporting public conversations on a global social network, so we implemented it first.

The three main services of our first federation are personal data servers (PDS), relays, and App Views. Developers can also run feed generators (custom feeds), and labelers are in active development.

• Personal Data Server (PDS)
  • A PDS acts as the participant’s agent in the network. This is what hosts your data (like the posts you’ve created) in your repo. It also handles your account & login, manages your repo’s signing key, stores any of your private data (like which accounts you have muted), and handles the services you talk to for any request.
• Relay
  • The Relay handles "big-world" networking. It crawls the network, gathering as much data as it can, and outputs it in one big stream for other services to use. It’s analogous to a firehose provider or a super-powered relay node.
• App Views
  • An App View is the piece that actually assembles your feed and all the other data you see in the app, and is generally expected to be downstream from a Relay's firehose of data. This is a highly semantically-aware service that produces aggregations across the network and views over some subset of the network. This is analogous to a prism that takes in the Relay's raw firehose of data from the network, and outputs views that enable an app to show a curated feed to a user. For example, the Relay might crawl to grab data such as a certain post’s likes and reposts, and the app view will output the count of those metrics.

The federation architecture allows anyone to host a Relay, though it’s a fairly resource-demanding service. In all likelihood, there may be a few large full-network providers, and then a long tail of partial-network providers. Small bespoke Relays could also service tightly or well-defined slices of the network, like a specific new application or a small community.

There will also be an ecosystem of App Views for each lexicon, or “social mode,” deployed on the network. For example, Bluesky currently supports a micro-blogging mode: the app.bsky lexicon. Developers who create new lexicons would likely deploy a corresponding App View that understands their lexicon to service their users. Other lexicons could include video or long-form blogging, or different ways of organizing like groups and forums. By bootstrapping off of an existing Relay, data collation will already be taken care of for these new applications. They need only provide the indexing behaviors necessary for their application.

“Big World” Design

When we were architecting the topology of the AT Protocol, we looked at the web as an example. We see the web as the most successful decentralized system in existence — millions of devices globally connected on an open network — so we’re taking it as a null hypothesis of what works best.

As a result, we opted to architect the protocol in a “big world with small world fallbacks” way. With the web, individual computers upload content to the network, and then all of that content is then broadcasted back to other computers. Similarly, with the AT Protocol, we’re sending messages to a much smaller number of big aggregators, which then broadcast that data to personal data servers across the network. Additionally, we solve the major problems that have surfaced from the web through self-certifying data, open schematic data and APIs, and account portability.

On a technical level, prioritizing big-world indexing over small world networking has multiple benefits.

• It significantly reduces the load on PDSs, making it easier to self-host — you could easily run your own server.
• It improves discoverability of content outside of your immediate neighbors — people want to use social media to see content from outside of their network.
• It improves the quality of experience for everyone in the network — fewer dropped messages or out-of-sync metrics.

Given all that, our proposed methodology here of networking through Relays instead of server-to-server isn’t prescriptive. The protocol is actually explicitly designed to work both ways.

What’s Next For Us

We strongly believe that for federation to matter, all the pieces must be easy for you to set up. When we launch our sandbox environment publicly, we’ll provide straightforward instructions.

Meanwhile, we’re working on two more pieces of federation: feed generators and labelers. Currently, Bluesky’s App View generates some “opinionated” data (as in, it differentiates between pieces of data, unlike a giant firehose of data), like the feeds that we show users and the labels we use in content moderation. But we’re experimenting with splitting feed generators and labelers out as services of their own, and when that’s complete, anyone may host a feed generator and advertise it to users in the marketplace of algorithms.

From a technical perspective, here’s one potential architecture: A feed generator can exist downstream of some Relay and App View, where the feed generator is constrained to offering “candidates” for the feed. Then, the App View presents the actual view of that data to the user.

Similarly, a labeler would also be downstream of a Relay. Its labels would then be ingested by either an App View or a semantically-aware PDS.

Sandbox Mode

We will be initially launching federation in sandbox mode with allow-listed servers. This means we’ll be running it in a staging environment that gets reset at least once a week, allowing the network to test it out before going live with all existing user data. Having a sandbox environment is very useful, as it will allow us and all developers in the ecosystem to stress-test and debug the system. The sandbox environment we’ve set up can be used to test out future major protocol changes as well. You can participate in the sandbox as a developer or a user — just be aware that things will break, and your data will get wiped!

The sandbox environment is also useful to us as we finish building out our moderation and curation tooling. Before we open federation entirely, we want to provide other servers with the same toolbox that we’re using to curate a safe social media experience, and developers can also build more moderation tools on top of atproto themselves.

We’ll be sharing more soon about moderation, and about how to start experimenting with the sandbox environment.

Update: Join the atproto federation developer sandbox here!

On Bluesky, you can set your website as your username. This is one form of verification on Bluesky. We highly recommend that official organizations and high-profile individuals do this.

If you work for an organization with an IT team, you can send them a link to this guide and they can likely help you set this up.

How do I set a website as my username?

By default, Bluesky usernames end with the bsky.social suffix, but you can set your website as your username. For example, the Bluesky team’s official account has the username @bsky.app, NPR has the username @npr.org, and U.S. Senators have verified their accounts with senate.gov.

The screenshots below will show you how to set your website as your username in your mobile app, but similar steps apply on desktop.

1. First, create a Bluesky account. If you're planning on setting your website as your username, then pick any placeholder username when you sign up.

2. Open the left side menu. Click “Settings," then "Account," then "Handle."

3. On the “Change my handle” screen, click “I have my own domain.”

4. Now, you’ll have a screen that looks like this. This includes information that you will need to add to your domain registrar.

5. Navigate back to your domain registrar, which is the company you bought your domain from (Namecheap, Google Domains, etc.). The specific steps here depend on which company you used, but you’ll want to navigate to DNS management for your domain. This might be under an “Advanced DNS” tab.

Advanced: If you're using a hosting company other than the registrar, for example Cloudflare, navigate there to add your TXT record, not your original registrar.

6. We want to add a TXT (text) record to your domain. Step 3 above contains all of the information you’ll need to add to your domain. The DID value is public and not sensitive information.

   • Set the domain: _atproto
   • Set the type: TXT
   • Set the value field (also sometimes called “data”), except use your own DID value: did=did:plc:[your value here]

7. After you add the TXT record, wait a couple of minutes for the change to propagate across the internet. Then, just click “Verify DNS Record.” You’re done! Check your Bluesky profile to see if it has updated. Remember, DNS propagation might take some time.

8. Congratulations, you just set your website as your username and verified your account!

Any tags or mentions with your old handle will still point to your account.

Update as of December 12, 2024: If you change your default Bluesky username (with the .bsky.social suffix) to a website URL, your old .bsky.social username will be reserved for you. You no longer need to create a second account to reserve your most recent .bsky.social username. For every account, only your most recent .bsky.social username is reserved for you, and this reservation does not expire.

How can I set a subdomain as my handle?

Let's take this example: you work for newspaper.com, and you want to set your Bluesky username to be @me.newspaper.com. Here's how.

Follow the above steps, but for Step 6, your TXT record will be slightly different:

• Set the domain: _atproto.me (Note that this includes the subdomain you're using.)
• Set the type: TXT
• Set the value field (also sometimes called “data”), except use your own DID value: did=did:plc:[your value here]

How can I set and manage multiple subdomain handles?

Organizations like newsrooms or companies may want to verify multiple affiliated individuals' accounts via subdomains. For example, a newsroom could set its journalists' handles to be @name.newsroom.com, or have multiple accounts for different verticals like @sports.newsroom.com. But managing many individual subdomains via TXT records can be cumbersome. In that case, you can use a non-DNS option by resolving multiple handles via HTTP under a .well-known route.

Note: This section is intended for a developer audience, and most organizations' tech teams are able to implement this easily. You can also reach us for assistance at [email protected].

Instead of using DNS TXT records, you can return each account's DID from the route https://${handle}/.well-known/atproto-did. The expected payload is a DID (such as did:plc:abcdef...) with content-type text/plain. The handle resolution function explicitly expects a HTTP 200 OK status.

This is a code snippet for how handle resolution is implemented:

async function resolveHandle(handle: string) {
  const res = await fetch(`https://${handle}/.well-known/atproto-did`)
  const did = await res.text()
  assert(typeof did === 'string' && did.startsWith('did:'))
  return did
}

These handles are revalidated periodically. For handles that get invalidated, all of the account's data will still be secure — the owner will not lose any posts, followers, etc. We will provide an in-app option to simply revalidate or pick a new handle.

What’s a custom domain?

A custom domain is a unique name that identifies a website on the internet. For example, Bluesky’s domain is bsky.social.

Every device that connects to the internet has a unique IP address that identifies it. But it’s much easier to remember bsky.social instead of a series of numbers. The Domain Name System (DNS) acts like a phonebook for the internet and points a domain like bsky.social to its IP address, so we don’t have to remember the numbers ourselves.

Domains can be further divided into subdomains. For example, if your domain was example.com but you had a blog hosted at blog.example.com, then blog is the subdomain.

Why does Bluesky use domains as usernames, and why would I want to do this?

The AT Protocol, which the Bluesky app is built upon, was designed to use domains for multiple reasons:

• Identity: Bluesky is just one application built on top of the AT Protocol. Let’s say you set your handle to example.com on Bluesky. You’ll be able to use that same handle across all applications built on the AT Protocol (and there’s a growing number!). Now, you no longer have to list five different usernames based on what was available at the time you signed up for an app — just use your domain!

• Verification: Websites have a long history of verification already, so using domains borrows their authority. For example, a newsroom like NPR could set their handle to be @npr.org. Then, any journalists that NPR wants to verify could use subdomains to set their handles to be @name.npr.org. Brand accounts could set their handle to be their domain as well.

• Portability: Maybe you want to switch to a different server. Then, there’s no need to switch your handle from something server-specific if you’re using your domain as your handle.

Read our previously published blog post on domain names as handles here for more information.

I don't own a domain. How can I get one?

You can purchase and manage domains directly through Bluesky here. With this, you can easily set a custom domain as your Bluesky handle and much more. You can read more about the service here.

You can also directly purchase a domain from any ICANN-accredited domain registrar or reseller, like Namecheap or Google Domains. Domains are unique, so you must choose one that hasn’t already been registered by someone else. During registration, you’ll likely pay an annual fee and provide personal information. Note that this isn’t required to join Bluesky; you could use our server’s off-the-shelf naming (in the format of @name.bsky.social) if you prefer.

Your personal information is used to populate the WHOIS directory, which is a searchable database that holds information on domain ownership. You might prefer to keep your information private for various reasons — in that case, most domain registrars offer WHOIS privacy protection as a service.

The AT Protocol already has a growing developer ecosystem. Although some protocol components are still under development, we’ve made it a priority to simplify the complexity of building on top of it. This effort extends to not only new clients, but also new experiences, such as algorithmic choice and composable moderation.

Today we’re shipping app passwords, a short-term solution for authentication that will let users experiment with new clients without having to fully trust them with their passwords. In the long term, we plan to implement SSO (Single Sign-On) with scoped permissions.

We published an atproto ecosystem overview on GitHub awhile ago, but did not widely publicize it until we had an auth solution that didn’t put user credentials at risk. With the release of app passwords today, we’re ready to share it! There are AT Protocol implementations in 6 languages, and 13 clients across web, iOS, and Android: https://github.com/bluesky-social/atproto-ecosystem

There are also many projects building on the “firehose” of Bluesky app data. Some highlights include a VR experience with a feed you can spatially explore and an avatar that summarizes recent activity in the network for you, and a heatmap generator that plots a user’s posts like a GitHub commit graph.

This is only the beginning. If you’d like to explore more, here’s a longer list of projects in the atproto ecosystem so far.

A big part of our development philosophy has been to build on existing software stacks that make interoperability simple. For example:

• All the data in the atproto ecosystem is valid IPLD and can be manipulated and explored through existing IPFS dev tooling
• Our top level handles are simple DNS text records
• We use the DID specification for our identity layer
• Our API is well specified and is simply JSON over HTTP

The Bluesky app demonstrates how a microblogging client can be built on the AT Protocol with an intuitive user experience. However, there is still much more to be done to fully explore the potential of this architecture.

Our core dev team is currently focused on finishing the AT Protocol. Our near-term priorities are open federation with account portability and shipping moderation tooling, as described in our March update. If you’d like to join the conversation, feel free to join our Matrix dev chat*.

Thank you for following atproto’s progress! We’re excited to share more with you soon.

*In August 2023, the Bluesky team transferred ownership of the Matrix chat to the Matrix team. It is no longer officially affiliated with the Bluesky team.

Moderation is a necessary feature of social spaces. It’s how bad behavior gets constrained, norms get set, and disputes get resolved. We’ve kept the Bluesky app invite-only and are finishing moderation before the last pieces of open federation because we wanted to prioritize user safety from the start.

Just like our approach to algorithmic choice, our approach to moderation allows for an ecosystem of third-party providers. Moderation should be a composable, customizable piece that can be layered into your experience. For custom feeds, there is a basic default (only who you follow), and then many possibilities for custom algorithms. For moderation as well, there should be a basic default, and then many custom filters available on top.

The basics of our approach to moderation are well-established practices. We do automated labeling, like centralized social sites, and make service-level admin decisions, like many federated networks. But the piece we’re most excited about is the open, composable labeling system we’re building that both developers and users can contribute to. Under the hood, centralized social sites use labeling to implement moderation — we think this piece can be unbundled, opened up to third-party innovation, and configured with user agency in mind. Anyone should be able to create or subscribe to moderation labels that third parties create.

An Ecosystem of Moderation Labeling

Here’s the way we’re designing an open, composable labeling system for moderation:

• Anyone can define and apply “labels” to content or accounts (i.e. “spam”, “nsfw”). This is a separate service, so they do not have to run a PDS (personal data server) or a client app in order to do so.
• Labels can be automatically generated (by third-party services, or by custom algorithms) or manually generated (by admins, or by users themselves)
• Any service or person in the network can choose how these labels get used to determine the final user experience.

So how will we be applying this on the Bluesky app? Automated filtering is a commoditized service by now, so we will be taking advantage of this to apply a first pass to remove illegal content and label objectionable material. Then we will apply server-level filters as admins of bsky.social, with a default setting and custom controls to let you hide, warn, or show content. On top of that, we will let users subscribe to additional sets of moderation labels that can filter out more content or accounts.

Let’s dig into the layers here. Centralized social platforms delegate all moderation to a central set of admins whose policies are set by one company. This is a bit like resolving all disputes at the level of the Supreme Court. Federated networks delegate moderation decisions to server admins. This is more like resolving disputes at a state government level, which is better because you can move to a new state if you don’t like your state's decisions — but moving is usually difficult and expensive in other networks. We’ve improved on this situation by making it easier to switch servers, and by separating moderation out into structurally independent services.

We’re calling the location-independent moderation infrastructure “community labeling” because you can opt-in to an online community’s moderation system that's not necessarily tied to the server you're on.

Community Labeling

Community labeling can be done by automated systems, or it can consist of humans manually labeling things. The human-generated label sets can be thought of as something similar to shared mute/block lists.

Here’s how we think a manual community labeling system will work:

• Anyone can create a label set, then add admins or mods to help manage it
• Mods can add labels that the set defines to accounts or content (“rude”, “troll”, etc.)
• Anyone can subscribe to the set and have the labels be applied to their experience

What's Ahead

We’re landing a first pass on automated filtering in the app today, and will improve it based on user feedback. Community labeling is still in the works. We’ll be publishing more details soon.

Through this approach of a composable, customizable moderation system, we aim to prioritize user safety while giving people more control. An open labeling system for moderation contributed to by both developers and users will allow for innovation, transparency, and agency in this critical piece of social networking infrastructure where technical and social systems collide.

Recent advances in AI have opened up new challenges and opportunities for social media. As content-generation costs drop, algorithms to help people sort through information must evolve rapidly.

At Bluesky, we’re approaching this challenge from a marketplace perspective. Our goal isn't to create every algorithm in-house, but to enable the developer community to bring new algorithms to users swiftly and effortlessly. In this blog post, we’ll provide an overview of our motivation behind creating a system that enables composable, customizable feed generation, and embraces third-party development.

Owning your attention

Your attention is an invaluable resource. A social platform's algorithm is responsible for curating the content in your feed. The algorithm, more than the content type or the app's appearance, is the core of social media because it directs how you spend your attention there.

Unfortunately, there’s usually very little transparency into how things are selected or why content is being shown to you. While you have the choice to open or close a social app, you often lack control over the content you see while using it. You might have some control over their feed through choosing who to follow or selecting a chronological feed option, but your ability to truly customize your experience is limited.

Due to the backlash against the perceived algorithmic manipulation of people’s timelines, some people say they really just want a chronological feed of who they follow. A feed of content from the people you follow ordered only by time is also an algorithm (albeit a very simple one). This should be an option if you want, but we think there are also many more ways this could work. The problem isn’t “algorithms” — the problem is a lack of transparency and control around how algorithms are used to direct your attention.

A Marketplace of Algorithms

We want a future where you control what you see on social media. We aim to replace the conventional "master algorithm," controlled by a single company, with an open and diverse "marketplace of algorithms."

With the AT Protocol v1 launch around the corner, we can confidently share our vision for this marketplace. Algorithms in ATP will act as aggregator services, similar to search engines. Users will be able to find, share, and add algorithms to their clients. Our UX design allows users to swipe between favorite algorithms or view a multi-algorithm feed.

Here’s how we’ve started building towards a world where users have control over what they see:

• Developing APIs for feed generation: These APIs will be architecturally separate from the rest of the system, allowing for custom feed and moderation systems to be created as independent services.
• Designing interfaces for third-party algorithm selection: We’re developing a feed selection system that enables users to explore third-party feeds and access them as effortlessly as their home timeline.

For developers, an open marketplace of algorithms will provide the freedom to experiment with and publish algorithms that anyone can use. Recent advances in machine learning will make it easy and exciting to experiment with new ways of structuring content.

For users, the ability to customize their feed will give them back control of their most valuable resource: their attention. Life is made up of all the little moments you spend your time on. We hope that the future of social apps is a framework that allows you to express your agency over how you spend your time.

While feed algorithms and search are the primary focus here, we’re using a similar approach to address reputation, misinformation labeling, and moderation.

Our goal is to assemble a social media architecture that composes third-party services into a seamless user experience, because an open ecosystem is likely to evolve more quickly than a single approach to curation or moderation developed within one company. By creating the interfaces for innovation in these areas, we hope to provide a dynamic and user-driven social experience.

Today we got our first custom domain name handle registered on Bluesky. Daniel was previously @dan.bsky.social. Now his handle is @dholms.xyz, because he owns the domain dholms.xyz.

Here’s why we’ve designed the AT protocol to let you join a social network with a custom domain and prioritized it as a feature in Bluesky:

• You can tell which accounts are authentic based on the websites they’re associated with. Custom domain handles are a decentralized way for us to achieve a level of account verification. Curious if “@potus.bsky.social” is actually the president of the US? Once this feature fully lands, you should assume the actual president of the US would have an official domain handle like “@potus.whitehouse.gov”.
• You can use the same handle to identify you across social media services. I own jaygraber.com, so if I set my handle to @jaygraber.com on Bluesky, I can tell my friends to find me at this stable handle across any AT Protocol social site that supports custom domains.
• You can keep a custom domain handle when you switch services. If you’re currently using the bsky.social service we’re running, but you decide you don’t like our policies and want to switch to another, you’ll be able to keep the same domain handle.

Custom domain handles are a way for us to improve the state of trust and control users have over their social identities online. It builds off the existing infrastructure of DNS, the naming system for websites.

We’re excited for this feature to ship as the first step in our roadmap for protocol features that will create a more user-controlled social network.

When Bluesky started, we set out to build a protocol that would turn the fundamental functions of social media into basic infrastructure like the web itself. Last year we open sourced the AT protocol, a foundation for next generation social apps that can bring back the openness and creativity of the early web. It’s a few months* away from being ready to build on, but in the meantime, we’ve started inviting people from our waitlist to test out a beta app.

What’s this app all about? We expect the app to serve as a reference client for developers to learn how to build on atproto, as well as a landing place for users to see how a decentralized social app can be pleasant to use, customizable, performant, and safe. While we could’ve built the protocol in isolation, we knew we needed to work with real users to build pragmatic specs. We built an app to drive protocol development through product learnings, and chose a very simple microblogging format to show how Twitter could have been built on atproto (the AT protocol).

Our focus right now is on finishing atproto and surfacing its novel features in the app. Here’s what you can expect to see in the next few months:

• Domain names as usernames & account portability
• Composable moderation & reputation systems
• Algorithmic choice & custom feeds

We’ll write more about each of these features as they get introduced. The app is currently invite-only while we finish pieces that we believe to be critical — in particular the moderation system. We want to enable people to have a safe, enjoyable experience, so we’re regulating growth and building moderation tooling as a first-order feature and not as an afterthought.

We believe decentralization is a means to end. The end goal is to provide choice to users, freedom to developers, and control to creators. The AT Protocol is a fresh start for social because it creates a composable ecosystem where the convenience and scale of centralized services can be combined with the openness and resilience of decentralized protocols.

• As a user, you can create an account and use our Bluesky app with few recognizable differences from using a centralized social app. However, if you decide you want to host your own server, or have a username that’s your personal website, you can also switch over to doing that. If you don’t like the way we show you posts or moderate your experience, you can switch services without losing your friends or data, or swap out your feed or moderators though a plugin ecosystem.

• As a developer, you can freely build apps on atproto (AT Protocol) because open protocols are locked-open APIs. However, if you just want to introduce another way of showing people posts, or moderating content in the network, we are designing interfaces for you to plug in and do exactly that, accessible through our app. If you’re building a new social app, you’ll be able to tap into the social graph and interest graph of atproto users the way you are currently able to bootstrap off of a user’s phone contacts.

• As a creator, you’ve probably invested a lot of time building an audience on social platforms, but you always want to keep an email list of subscribers because email is an open protocol that a platform can’t take away from you. The promise of building an audience on apps built on atproto is that long term, it should become a protocol like email that lets you keep direct connections with people regardless of how the services mediating that relationship change.

People have been saying for years that it would be great if users could own their data and their relationships; if we could have transparent algorithms and algorithmic choice; if there could be more accountability and user control over how social platforms are moderated. We’ve been wanting this for years too. We’ve now designed and built a system that we think achieves the goals stated above. We’re excited for the future of social we’re building towards, and hope you join us on this journey of bringing an open, self-governing ecosystem to life.

• timelines fuzzy, but feel free to watch our progress on GitHub or join our dev chat in Matrix.
• In August 2023, the Bluesky team transferred ownership of the Matrix chat to the Matrix team. It is no longer officially affiliated with the Bluesky team.

Bluesky was created to build a social protocol. In the spring, we released “ADX,” the very first iteration of the protocol. Over the summer we improved and simplified ADX’s design, and today we’re sharing a preview of what’s to come.

ADX is now the “Authenticated Transfer Protocol” — or, more simply, the “AT Protocol.”

A protocol for social networking

The “AT Protocol” is a new federated social network. It integrates ideas from the latest decentralized technologies into a simple, fast, and open network.

What’s a “federated” network? It’s a way for servers to communicate with each other — like email. Instead of one site running the network, you can have many sites. It means you get a choice of provider, and individuals and businesses can self-host if they want.

What makes AT Protocol unique:

Account portability. A person’s online identity should not be owned by corporations with no accountability to their users. With the AT Protocol, you can move your account from one provider to another without losing any of your data or social graph.

Algorithmic choice. Algorithms dictate what we see and who we can reach. We must have control over our algorithms if we're going to trust in our online spaces. The AT Protocol includes an open algorithms mode so users have more control over their experience.

Interoperation. The world needs a diverse market of connected services to ensure healthy competition. Interoperation needs to feel like second nature to the Web. The AT Protocol includes a schema-based interoperation framework called Lexicon to help solve coordination challenges.

Performance. A lot of novel protocols throw performance out of the window, resulting in long loading times before you can see your timeline. We don’t see performance as optional, so we’ve made it a priority to build for fast loading at large scales.

Up now: atproto.com

Since May, we’ve been doing protocol work in a public repository on GitHub, but we’ve mostly been quiet on our blog and Twitter.

This is starting to change: as of today, there’s an AT Protocol website. It’s not completely finished — you’ll find a few “TODOs” in the specs — but the technology is stable enough that we can start to communicate what we’re doing now.

Coming soon: the Bluesky app

The World-Wide Web wouldn’t have been much fun if it was created without a browser, and the same is true of the AT Protocol. So we’re also building a social app called Bluesky.

The word “Bluesky” evokes a wide-open space of possibility. It was the original name for this project before it took shape, and continues to be the name of our company. We’re calling the application we’re building Bluesky because it will be a portal to the world of possibility on top of the AT Protocol.

We’re looking forward to sharing more about the Bluesky application as it develops.

Initiate testing sequence

The next step is to start testing the protocol. Distributed protocol development is a tricky process. It requires coordination from many parties once a network is deployed, so we’re going to start in private beta to iron out issues. As we beta test, we’ll continue to iterate on the protocol specs and share details about how it works. When it’s ready, we’ll move to the open beta.

If you’re interested in participating in the private beta, sign up for the waitlist on the Bluesky website.

And if you’re interested in joining the team, we’re hiring a mobile developer to help build the Bluesky app. Check out our open position here.

It’s been four months since the Bluesky company got funding and started hiring a team. Now that we have a few people on board, we’re starting to work in public.

Today we’re releasing ADX, the “Authenticated Data Experiment”. Our company's name, “bluesky,” describes the open-ended nature of this project, and the freedom we were given to start from first principles. As we get more concrete, we’ll give more specific names to what we’re building, starting with ADX.

The Process

What does “working in public” mean? It’s a process of being transparent and available to the public, and takes place on a spectrum. On one extreme, I could be livestreaming the writing of this post, taking feedback from the audience as I go. Our teammate Paul actually did this for a prior decentralized social network app he built – you can check out the livestream history at each git commit here. On the other extreme, we could try to fully develop everything before releasing it to the world. At Bluesky, we’re going to take a middle path of releasing work before it’s complete, but also giving ourselves time to workshop new directions at early stages. Going forward, we’ll be experimenting with some different ways to engage publicly to figure out how to strike that balance.

The Writing: Words & Code

This week we’re releasing code for an experimental personal data server and a command-line client. We’re also sharing a high-level overview of the network architecture grounded in a technical description of what the data repository is and how it works. Feel free to play around, but don’t try to build your next big social app on this yet. Things are missing, and things are going to change. We’ve been writing code to validate ideas and discover edge cases as a part of the research process, as opposed to writing code to produce a finished product.

Along with the code, our architecture overview should give you some insight into the ideas we are pursuing. The analogy for this demo is “git, for your social posts.” And if this is git, it only begins to indicate how GitHub or GitLab works. There’s a lot of other parts to the system that will shape the user experience, so you’ll probably have some questions. We’ll try to engage with incoming questions and feedback over the coming weeks.

As we release the first experiment, we anticipate a common question will be “why didn’t you use X?” In places where it made sense, we used existing building blocks that were flexible, modular, and had good tooling. More opinionated stacks might contain good ideas, but we needed the freedom to optimize for our own requirements without designing around existing architectures. There’s always the possibility of integration or interop in the future.

We’re in R&D mode at the moment, experimenting with pieces that point in the right direction. We don’t have a finished product or a fully-specified protocol, but we’re putting together components that we believe will enable a social media ecosystem with a healthier balance of power. This isn’t a complete picture yet, and doesn’t lay out how we’ll be getting from here to there. These are the first steps — there’s still a lot more to do.

If you have questions about the architecture or code, drop in to our Matrix dev channel* to talk to the developers. Let’s move from platforms to protocols!

*In August 2023, the Bluesky team transferred ownership of the Matrix chat to the Matrix team. It is no longer officially affiliated with the Bluesky team.

Bluesky’s mission is to drive the evolution from platforms to protocols. The tools for public conversation should exist outside of private companies as common infrastructure, like the Internet itself. An open and durable decentralized protocol for public conversations can allow users a choice in their experience, creators control over their relationships with their audience, and developers freedom to innovate without permission from a platform.

We started with a research-intensive process to learn what can be applied from existing decentralized protocols. This research began with the ecosystem review and has continued while the Bluesky team was forming. We will be publishing our preliminary work and research this month, starting with this high level introduction. There are many projects that have created protocols for decentralizing discourse, including ActivityPub and SSB for social, Matrix and IRC for chat, and RSS for blogging. While each of these are successful in their own right, none of them fully met the goals we had for a network that enables global long-term public conversations at scale.

Some of the most important objectives we have been evaluating are portability, scale, and trust. Portability allows people to keep their social life intact even if they switch providers. Scale allows people to participate in global discourse. And trust is created by giving people insight into what services are doing with their data and how information is being promoted into or removed from their feed. To dive a bit deeper into each topic:

Portability

Portability is the ability to move between services without losing everything, like how we can switch mobile carriers without losing our phone numbers. User choice requires portability for identity, data, payments, and any other service. When people can switch providers without losing their identity or social graph, then social media can work as a competitive open market again.

With email, if you change your provider then your email address has to change too. This is a common problem for federated social protocols, including ActivityPub and Matrix. If your ActivityPub server shuts down, you lose your identity and relationships tied to your account on that server, just like you would if any other social platform shut down. Since ActivityPub servers are much smaller than the existing platforms, and often run by volunteers, this scenario is not unlikely and has happened before. We want users to have an easy path to switching servers, even without the server’s help.

Scale

Social networking platforms bring hundreds of millions of people together in a global conversation. Some people prefer smaller communities, and ActivityPub and SSB are great for those tight-knit groups, but with Bluesky we want to give users the option to participate in global conversations the way they do on large social networking platforms.

Operating at scale requires engineering for scale. Early on, Twitter’s site crashed so often that the “fail whale” became a meme. They’ve since solved these problems, but existing decentralized networks that try to replicate the functionality of big platforms have not. When you search a trending hashtag on social media and find posts from around the world or see a viral post that has 125k likes, this is the service providing you with a global view across the network while hiding the complexity under the hood. By decentralizing aspects of social platforms, we’re adding cross-organizational networking that re-exposes the complexity. A protocol for conversations at scale needs to be developed around these challenges at every step.

Decentralization adds new functionality in other domains, but when it comes to scale, we’re aiming to replicate the global experience that social networking platforms currently offer. Existing decentralized social protocols default to local conversations because it’s a natural fit for a decentralized architecture, but our goal is to make global conversations possible while preserving the freedoms users gain from interacting through an open protocol.

Trust

Decentralized networks are complex. Providers need to manage spam and abuse without inadvertently creating biases which lose the trust of their users. This is even more important for the algorithms that drive our feeds. Social media has the power to shape cultural discourse and needs to exist within a system of checks and balances. Like scale and portability, we aim to build around trust from the start by exposing what’s going on under the hood and allowing users to adjust their experience.

Starting as centralized platforms, social networks can take steps to open up APIs and provide choices to users, and this can be a path towards restoring trust in the current service. The premise of Bluesky, however, is to work towards a transparent and verifiable system from the bottom up by building a network that is open by default. We’ll do this by giving users ways to audit the performance of services and the ability to switch if they are dissatisfied.

The conceptual framework we've adopted for meeting these objectives is the "self-authenticating protocol." In law, a “self-authenticating” document requires no extrinsic evidence of authenticity. In computer science, an “authenticated data structure” can have its operations independently verifiable. When resources in a network can attest to their own authenticity, then that data is inherently live – that is, canonical and transactable – no matter where it is located. This is a departure from the connection-centric model of the Web, where information is host-certified and therefore becomes dead when it is no longer hosted by its original service. Self-authenticating data moves authority to the user and therefore preserves the liveness of data across every hosting service.

The three components that enable self-authentication are cryptographic identifiers, content-addressed data, and verifiable computation. The first two are familiar concepts in distributed systems, and the third is an emerging area of research that is not yet widely applied, but that we think will have large ramifications.

Cryptographic identifiers associate users with public keys. Self-sovereign identity is based on having cryptographic identifiers for users. Control of an account is proved by a cryptographic signature from a user, rather than an entry in a database keeping track of logins.

Content-addressed data means content is referenced by its cryptographic hash — the unique digital “fingerprint” of a piece of data. Using public keys and content-addresses, we can sign content by the user's key to prove they created it. Authenticated data enables trust to reside in the data itself, not in where you found it, allowing apps to move away from client-server architectures. This creates “user-generated authority”.

Verifiable computation uses cryptographic proofs to allow observers to verify that a computation was performed correctly without having to run it themselves. This can be used to preserve privacy by concealing inputs, as in a zero-knowledge proof, or to compress state that would otherwise have to be kept around for verification. The full potential of these cryptographic primitives is still being explored. Cutting edge research is currently being applied to scaling blockchains, but we are also investigating novel applications in distributed social networks.

Now that we've explained self-authenticating protocols, let's look at how the components help us achieve our goals.

Portability is directly satisfied by self-authenticating protocols. Users who want to switch providers can transfer their dataset at their convenience, including to their own infrastructure. The UX for how to handle key management and username association in a system with cryptographic identifiers has come a long way in recent years, and we plan to build on emerging standards and best practices. Our philosophy is to give users a choice: between self-sovereign solutions where they have more control but also take on more risk, and custodial services where they gain convenience but give up some control.

Self-authenticating data provides a scalability advantage by enabling store-and-forward caches. Aggregators in a self-authenticating network can host data on behalf of smaller providers without reducing trust in the data's authenticity. With verifiable computation, these aggregators will even be able to produce computed views – metrics, follow graphs, search indexes, and more – while still preserving the trustworthiness of the data. This topological flexibility is key for creating global views of activity from many different origins.

Finally, self-authenticating data provides more mechanisms that can be used to establish trust. Self-authenticated data can retain metadata, like who published something and whether it was changed. Reputation and trust-graphs can be constructed on top of users, content, and services. The transparency provided by verifiable computation provides a new tool for establishing trust by showing precisely how the results were produced. We believe verifiable computation will present huge opportunities for sharing indexes and social algorithms without sacrificing trust, but the cryptographic primitives in this field are still being refined and will require active research before they work their way into any products.

In this post, we’ve started to lay out the high level objectives we’ve set and how we plan to meet them. In the coming weeks, we’ll be publishing more of the research we’ve done since the ecosystem review and open sourcing preliminary code. We’ve started writing code to validate ideas and iterate on something concrete, but everything is still fully experimental. You can expect a command line client to play with, but don’t expect to build your next big app on it yet, as anything can change at this stage.

We’re not describing what we’re building as a federated or p2p network, or as a blockchain network, because it doesn’t fall neatly in any of these categories. It could be described as a hybrid federated network with p2p characteristics, but it’s more descriptive to focus on the capabilities – self-authenticating identities and data – than on network topology. Our team has previously built leading decentralized web protocols and blockchain networks, and is working on synthesizing the best of what we’ve seen into something new. For some aspects, we’ll be able to use pieces that already exist, and for others, we’ll have to come up with solutions of our own. Stay tuned for updates, we’ll share more soon.

As the Bluesky lead, my first priority has been to build a great team. Today, I’m excited to announce our first hires and technical advisors.

The initial members of our team are:

• Daniel Holmgren, a protocol engineer with previous experience developing on IPFS at Fission. Daniel previously co-founded a Consensys-backed startup working on p2p data transfer for scientific data sets.
• Paul Frazee, a protocol engineer and full-stack web developer. Paul previously built Patchwork, the first application using the SSB distributed social protocol, and Beaker Browser, the first web browser for the Hypercore distributed web protocol.

Technical advisors to the team include:

• Martin Kleppmann, author of Designing Data-Intensive Applications and researcher at the University of Cambridge. Martin has been working with the team at Ink & Switch to publish cutting-edge research on distributed protocols.
• Whyrusleeping (Jeromy Johnson), first employee at Protocol Labs and lead engineer on IPFS and Filecoin, as well as other projects including Coinlist and Estuary.

With more people on board, we’re now able to start open sourcing our protocol development process. Our plan was to start working in public as soon as we had enough people to answer questions, engage with the community, and participate in public conversations. Watch for more to come in the following weeks.

—

I’m also still hiring, and would love to bring on another protocol engineer who thinks in code and likes prototyping. We now have deep and varied technical expertise across the organization, and are looking for a prolific developer to support and accelerate the work of experienced systems architects. Learn more and apply here: bsky.social/about/join.

To support the early stages of our engineering-focused org, we’re looking for the first business operator to help manage processes internally and be a voice for Bluesky externally. If you’re excited about doing whatever it takes to get an early stage organization off the ground and have past experience in operations, strategy, and/or partnerships, then we hope to hear from you. The ability to understand and explain technical topics is a must, and a technical background is a bonus, though not a requirement. Learn more and apply here: bsky.social/about/join.

Last updated: August 31, 2023

In addition to the list above, Aaron Goldman was a member of the Bluesky team from April 2022 to August 2022. This post was updated to maintain an accurate representation of our current team members.

TLDR: Bluesky was announced in 2019 but the legal entity itself was only recently set up. In the meantime, the bluesky community took shape and has taken on a life of its own. There now exists two separate organizations, the bluesky community and Bluesky PBLLC. We’ve been using lowercase “bluesky” to refer to the original open-ended project, and uppercase “Bluesky” to refer to the company with that namesake.

Three phases

Bluesky began with an idea, developed into a community, and solidified into a company, in three stages. The formation of Bluesky, PBLLC at the end of 2021 marked the beginning of the most recent stage, where we now have funding and an organization to pursue our mission.

Phase 1: The idea

The bluesky project began with a tweet by Jack Dorsey announcing Twitter’s intentions to fund the development of an open protocol for decentralized social media. Many people DM’ed the new bluesky Twitter account to learn more, including myself. Twitter brought about a dozen of us together in a Matrix chatroom, and that was the beginning of the initial discussions of what bluesky should be.

In an initial Q&A in that room, Jack wrote “The biggest and long term goal is to build a durable and open protocol for public conversation. That it not be owned by any one organization but contributed by as many as possible. And that it is born and evolved on the internet with the same principles.” This resonated with us. Twitter’s support for this was exciting, because of all the people who already use it as a platform for public conversation, but we also knew this needed to be independent from Twitter to succeed.

Twitter’s creation of that Matrix room was partly an experiment in self-organization, to see if the direction and leadership of bluesky would emerge from that community. Many people were generous with their time in contributing insight to the discussions, including Jeremie Miller (inventor of XMPP who is now on the Bluesky board), Matthew Hodgson (technical co-founder of Matrix), Ian Preston (co-founder of Peergos), and rabble (early Twitter engineer and co-founder of Planetary). However, around the same time the bluesky community chatroom was created, COVID-19 was beginning to take the world by storm. 2020 threw organizations and personal lives into chaos. Midway through the year, I proposed writing an ecosystem overview of existing decentralized social networks.

We created a bigger version of the bluesky chatroom that grew to around 60 people, and I started writing an overview of all the projects in the space. The ultimate shape of the bluesky project remained undetermined, but the bluesky community was starting to connect people to talk across projects and building up a collective knowledge base in the form of the ecosystem review.

Phase 2: The community

Sometime in 2020, Twitter put out a request for proposals to the community group. Several of us wrote technical proposals on how we thought a novel decentralized social protocol could work, either building on existing protocols or starting from scratch. In 2021, Twitter interviewed people for the role of bluesky lead, and ended up nominating me. I say nominating rather than hiring, because rather than starting to work for Twitter, I started spinning up an independent organization that would receive funding to make bluesky a reality.

I knew there was going to be a lot of press when I was publicly announced as bluesky lead, but I didn’t have anywhere to direct people yet, so I asked Golda Velez to help with opening up the bluesky community to anyone interested in joining. Her side project was a social events startup that could help cover the costs of hosting and moderating a public community until the Bluesky company got set up. On the day of the announcement, we launched a blueskyweb.org site that I put together, and a bluesky Discord* and blueskycommunity.net site that Golda put together. We discussed how to best channel the enthusiasm of newcomers in a productive direction, and decided to direct energy into core topics and existing projects. This ended up creating a lively forum for debate and discussion, becoming a unifier for once disparate conversations.

Phase 3: The company

In the last few weeks of 2021, we got the Bluesky PBLLC established and funded. We decided to keep the community as a separate organization, funded through grants from the Bluesky company, so it can function as an inclusive forum while the company pursues more focused research and development. At the Bluesky company we want to start being more public, having more conversations with companies besides Twitter, and engaging with other protocols, but first we need to finish hiring and articulate the technical vision for our proposed direction. In the meantime, the community continues to be a place for discussion and debate, where we participate but do not drive conversations.

* Update: In the spring of 2022, this Discord server was renamed to dSocial Commons. It is not affiliated with Bluesky in any official capacity.

In 2019, Twitter announced bluesky, a project it would fund to create an open and decentralized standard for social media. Since then, the bluesky community has been working together to better understand the existing decentralized web ecosystem, and outline the core tenets of what an open protocol for social media should include and the technologies on which it should be built.

Today, we are excited to announce the formation of the Bluesky PBLLC, a Public Benefit LLC that will implement that vision as an independent organization. Our mission is to develop and drive large-scale adoption of technologies for open and decentralized public conversation. We were formed in late 2021 with the initial funding provided by Twitter. Our board members include Jack Dorsey, a founder of Twitter, Jeremie Miller, the inventor of Jabber/XMPP, and Jay Graber, CEO of the Bluesky company.

We envision an open social media ecosystem where developers have more opportunity to build and innovate, and users have more choice and control over which services they use and their experience on social media as a whole. The development and adoption of decentralized protocols is a path we see towards establishing a strong technical foundation for permissionless innovation and user choice. Decentralization is a structural change that in itself is insufficient for creating a healthy social media ecosystem. However, by creating an environment where developers can freely build, communities can self-govern, and users can easily switch services, decentralization can catalyze the innovation necessary to improve the public conversation.

The many existing decentralized social networks that currently make up the ecosystem can be categorized into federated and p2p architectures. Our approach will be to combine the best of both worlds by integrating the portability of self-certifying protocols with the user-friendliness of delegated hosting, so users don’t have to run their own infrastructure and developers can build performant apps. Moderation is an important part of any online social forum, which is why we will proactively build tooling for reputation and moderation systems that are transparent, opt-in, and multi-layered, as well as create frameworks for others to build such tooling. We’re building on existing protocols and technologies but are not committed to any stack in its entirety. We see use cases for blockchains, but Bluesky is not a blockchain, and we believe the adoption of social web protocols should be independent of any blockchain.

Our current focus is on building and releasing a prototype that illustrates our approach. Stay tuned for news about our new team members soon. To participate in the community and follow our progress, join the bluesky community, or follow our Twitter account for updates.