I’ve Been On Bluesky Six Months. Here Are My Thoughts.

If everyone hates each other enough to just start mass blocking people for stupid reasons, then what the hell was the damn point?

Although I signed up on Bluesky in 2023, I didn’t actually start using it until around October of 2024, but I’ve been on it long enough, so I thought I’d give my thoughts on it. Like many, I came to Bluesky to escape the trolling and toxicity of Twitter, but the short of it is, while it’s definitely a fresh air away from it, it’s not an answer for it because I ran into something worse. Community-led moderation:

Aggressive Automated Block List Bots Ran By Abusers

I think I speak for a lot of people in that Twitter left a lot of people socially scarred from bots. Russian bot farms, trolls, porn bots, and all kinds of robots left people disillusioned of what was a real person or fake and what was real news, and just fake news. But the real spiral of Twitter was it was pretty much open for anyone to harass you and blocking one, just meant another will eventually come again. This caused people to use block lists but they were manual and they weren’t as easily accessible because they weren’t on the platform itself.

However, Bluesky is a different beast. Not only does it have block listing baked into the platform, but they’re also automated by bots anyone in the world can create and are controlled by the “community”. That is, a community of you don’t know who the fuck anybody is nor their intention of being on Bluesky, so the blocklists are run by a “trust me bro” group of people who could be bad actors to abuse the block lists and this has already taken root. The entire Bluesky platform has access to and blindly subscribes to these lists thinking they’re just blocking bots, scammers or whatever, but they’re actually blocking completely legit users who these block list abusers have a chip on their shoulder over. And since everyone can see what everyone is subscribed to, some of these block list abusers have even blocked users who subscribe to specific feeds. I saw one person in a feed saying one of the abusers put all the users on Blacksky on one of their mass blocklists.

As far as I know, in my 15 years on Twitter, I’ve never been on a block list, however, in only just a matter of weeks, I found myself blocked by over 70,000 users on Bluesky because I was added to several block lists for some of the following claims. This is insanity:

• Creating AI images, using an AI hashtag or defending the use of AI
• Being a bot or scammer
• Using an AI image as a banner (seriously?)
• Saying something negative about Taylor Swift
• Blaming the left for liberal failures
• Criticizing Israel
• Both-siding (my favorite)

Of course, most of these are a load of bs because they were things I never did, such as being a bot, which I’m obviously not, never even made a post about crypto yet I’m on a crypto ban list, nor am I a scammer and these are also general topics on Bluesky, so anyone can find themselves on these blocklists that are set to detect keywords. I found myself added to an over 60k user blocklist because I blocked one of the abusers. Someone informed me that a user was abusing the blocklists, so I blocked the developer of those block lists, and found myself immediately automatically added to their massive block list for blocking him anyway.

Don’t get me wrong, I don’t care if people block me. My grievance is that one sole rando with an autobot has the power to affect how the whole platform sees my account and end it. No one person should have the ability to have me blocked indefinitely from tens of thousands of people, just because one knuckledragger didn’t like what I said or just because they wanted to be Edgelord of the Day. It’s social media. If you’re not going to be social, then gtfo.

An Echo Chamber: Mob Mentality

Bluesky is not the platform for open dialogue. It only really works best for people who want to create their own “Me Me Me” fan club and surround themselves with people who stroke their ego all day. It uses nuclear block, meaning if someone in a thread blocks someone else in the thread, then everyone below that portion of the hierarchy, won’t see the post either. As for the other things, since when should a conversation you’re having with one person on the platform, land you a on a tens of thousands of users block lists? The developers who are abusing the block lists definitely have all the power to send your account to Narnia and render it useless because next to no one will ever see your posts again.

Unless Bluesky addresses the abuse of blocklists, I suggest not getting caught up talking about controversial subjects, or you will find yourself aggressively blocked by tens of thousands of users with the block list bots over inane topics within months, if not weeks of using the platform. Sure you’re free to block anyone you want, but block lists were intended to stop harassment and bots, and not intended to just block someone because they said that Taylor Swift did more output, only to make the same profit as Madonna’s 90’s tour.

It’s like the platform is being charged by children. According to Clearsky, half the platform is blocking at least one person, and there’s barely a MAGA presence on Bluesky, so if everyone still hates each other enough for non-Trump issues, to just start blocking each other for stupid reasons, then what the hell is the damn point? The platform should be limited to people just blocking individual users manually and a spam detection system because obviously users themselves are just abusing the block lists.

Toxic Silo Community

In short, there’s just no place on Bluesky for centrists like myself. Twitter was hard right-leaning, but Bluesky is no better as a hard left-leaning platform. Even without the blocklist problem, I can’t really say I’ve liked the community ever since the wave of users started flooding in from Twitter because they dragged everything that was wrong with Twitter to Bluesky and polluted it. I liked it better when only the hobbyists, amateurs and professionals were there, but those days are long gone and they’re never coming back.

When I was lightly using Bluesky in 2023, there wasn’t any porn. It was a “Mr. Rogers” type platform with mostly informative posts from actual scientists, academics, artists and other professionals, and that’s still there (take that Oxford comma). However, since the exodus from Twitter to Bluesky, that has kind of been drowned out and now the smut, porn, hypersexuals and politics have taken over, but with a liberal spin on it. To say it lightly, Bluesky has turned into the same cesspool as Twitter, only it’s the liberal form of it, rather than conservative. Any disagreement, even if it’s an honest and respectful disagreement with someone on any hot topic, such as race, politics, LGBT issues, porn, AI, etc. you will promptly get jumped on by other people and then possibly also added to a mass block list. One time I complained about the plethora of new users putting nudes and porn up without marking their posts and accounts as NSFW, so they can be moderated out for people who don’t want to see them, and I was quickly met with backlash that “sex workers” have the right to “advertise” on the platform. Only mostly it isn’t sex workers but regular people just throwing up nudes of themselves, both women and gay men, just seeking attention. I think I reached my limit break with all of it the other day when I was at the store scrolling through the Blacksky feed and my screen just happened to land on a pic someone posted with a naked man’s legs wide open and another post of a woman describing her period. Feeling grossed out, I quickly scrolled the pic off my screen. The Blacksky feed used to offer some meaningful dialogue among Black users, but recently, the majority of the Blacksky feed has nothing to offer, and has devolved into childish banter and porn. There is no free and open dialogue on Bluesky. You either rock with everyone on it and parrot what they’re parroting, or you get shouted down and black-balled by supposedly grown adults who act more like teenagers.

There are just too many bitter and angry people looking for an argument and attention on Bluesky. As a result, I’ve decided that the general Bluesky server just is not for me because it’s mostly just more of the brainrot which sparked my reason for leaving Twitter in the first place. It’s the same conversations, over and over and over again, with no end. How many times can you keep talking about Biden and Trump? Sure you can curate what you see, but you can’t curate the core of the problem. The people. The community is just too sensitive to even bother conversating with anyone, along with the blocklists. It’s just too much than I care to spend time on. A lot of the population coagulates on the same top accounts that were on Twitter anyway, so Bluesky is more of a “sister” platform of Twitter, than having its own identity, save the ability to host your own account (for those savvy enough to figure it out).

So, instead, I’m experimenting with my own Bluesky PDS server to host my personal Bluesky instance and now I’m in the process of figuring out how to move accounts between my server and the official Bluesky server. Once I figure that part out, I can migrate my account off Bluesky and be done with the platform altogether. I am not going to waste my time dealing with ratchet block list developers. I will just use my self-hosted Bluesky account to serve as a bridge between this blog and the Bluesky AT Protocol, but I will no longer be microblogging exclusively on Bluesky, and will likely dedicate it to Mastodon. Mastodon doesn’t have mass block lists as the system is fully decentralized, so users can only block individual accounts, the way it should be. 🦋