[HN Gopher] Bluesky 2025 Transparency Report
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Bluesky 2025 Transparency Report
Author : emschwartz
Score : 69 points
Date : 2026-01-29 23:48 UTC (23 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (bsky.social)
(TXT) w3m dump (bsky.social)
| midius wrote:
| > As the largest host of accounts and default port of entry for
| people joining Bluesky, we maintained 24/7 moderation operations
| throughout 2025, with specialized teams focused on critical areas
| like child safety.
|
| so it's _not_ that hard.
| jajuuka wrote:
| I mean it's easy to say that. Roblox says that too. Bluesky is
| probably much easier though since it's not as big.
| vladms wrote:
| Good they moderate. Most interesting is that they report a 60%
| increase user increase, up to 41M users. Considering how bad I
| heard "the other network" is now I wonder why so few.
|
| I have a look at Bluesky from time to time and there is (for me
| ofc) as much info/interesting stuff as I was getting from the
| other one before the acquisition.
| cryptoegorophy wrote:
| How many are daily active users? I can't find that info.
| sejje wrote:
| How many are bots?
| kattagarian wrote:
| You can find more details here: https://bsky.jazco.dev/stats
| wiredone wrote:
| there actually isn't much good content on the platform in my
| experience.
|
| it's just people raging about trump and whatever brand they're
| looking to try and cancel next.
|
| it's so far from the greatness of the original twitter. no tech
| community or content.
| direwolf20 wrote:
| while trump should be raged about -- in productive ways,
| ideally -- it's not good content. nobody is signing up to see
| trump rage over and over.
| Imustaskforhelp wrote:
| I have never been on twitter so I don't really know but I can
| agree that we see tech community in twitter but the same
| isn't really there in bluesky.
|
| Although I still have a web/programming which I follow and
| have found some people interesting from Hackernews and others
| too in bluesky (emsh,simonw)
|
| What is the HN consensus around lemmy? I really like lemmy
| and think that it might be better for tech stuff (almost
| similar to HN/reddit you can say and federated)
|
| I used to follow lemmy c/technology but I do feel like HN is
| pretty unique in its own manner.
|
| Regarding twitter alternative itself. Maybe mastodon too can
| be an alternative.
|
| Another minor nitpick about bluesky is that its 200
| characters limits actually really removes the tech community
| from too deep discussions imo. Although I guess twitter had
| that limit for long time too until it got removed but now I
| do see sometimes some tweets which are really long (sometimes
| even complete blog?)
|
| It actually really (pissed?) me off so much that I ended up
| making a tampermonkey script which can actually write a long
| message automatically and split a message into 200 messages
| chunk and post them in a thread of sorts you can say although
| its very hacky and messy and it starts to glitch around 10
| threads from what I remember.
| TimorousBestie wrote:
| It's interesting that we have such different experiences of
| Bluesky. There's a thriving math community there, for
| example. Lots of independent journalists operating in my
| local area. And yes, I even chat about tech there--there's a
| decent 3D printing feed, and a handful of interesting
| photography feeds.
|
| I dunno. It probably depends on what you're looking for.
| bakugo wrote:
| A lot of people joined in late 2024, resulting in a peak of
| around 2.7M daily users, but most of those users ended up
| leaving soon after, likely because the site was just one big
| echo chamber of far left American politics around that time.
|
| It doesn't seem to be as bad anymore, a quick glance at the
| public feed suggests that the percentage of political posts has
| gone down, but considering how many times the word "toxic"
| appears in this linked blogpost, I'm guessing they're still
| banning anyone who expresses the "wrong" opinions, so the
| userbase is unlikely to grow much further in the future. It
| seems to have plateaued at around 1.2M daily likers.
|
| Source for the stats: https://bsky.jazco.dev/stats
| swed420 wrote:
| > likely because the site was just one big echo chamber of
| far left American politics around that time.
|
| The US does not have a "far left" in any significant numbers,
| and never has. At least not in a self-aware sense.
|
| Maybe you meant to say liberal, to which I'd agree.
|
| That's not to say there isn't a "left" or "far left" on
| Bluesky, but there's no way it's a majority.
|
| I agree echo chambers are a problem there, which is why I
| only posted there briefly before leaving. One feature that
| seemed to exacerbate the formation of echo chambers was users
| sharing and blindly trusting mass block lists to silence
| things they didn't want to hear (leftists and liberals
| alike).
| frumplestlatz wrote:
| > The US does not have a "far left" in any significant
| numbers, and never has.
|
| Bluesky does, however. Clearly they've made that their
| target market, but that's also why growing beyond that base
| seems to be difficult for them,
| kgwxd wrote:
| Not welcoming assholes into your space isn't "far left" or
| an "echo chamber", it's just basic spam filtering.
| frumplestlatz wrote:
| When everyone they disagree with on anything substantive
| is an asshole, while accepting the same or worse behavior
| and tone if it aligns with their views, it's absolutely
| _not_ "basic spam filtering".
| kgwxd wrote:
| "disagree", another one of those words.
| swed420 wrote:
| You've missed the original point.
|
| From the left's perspective, the liberals deserve muting
| and are spam, and same from the other way around. It's
| siloed echo chambers everywhere.
|
| Part of it is unrealistic expectations of users thinking
| they're right about their world views. But part of it is
| platforms making features that amplify the former.
| bakugo wrote:
| Labeling everyone you don't agree with as an "asshole" is
| the sort of thing that usually leads to echo chambers
| forming.
| superxpro12 wrote:
| Meanwhile my facebook feed is nothing but clickbait
| engagement with local nazis. It's such a hard right echo
| chamber now, it makes me sick. Clear evidence of multiple
| international bot accounts flooding groups with propaganda
| every 30 minutes. It's a flood.
|
| There's really a problem that needs to be solved here. I
| really think anonymous or phony posting needs to stop. It's
| not helpful here. All it does is amplify false talking
| points with a "Fake it til you make it", "the loudest voice
| wins" methodology.
|
| But unfortunately, engagement is financially incentivized
| now. So the big corps reap $$$$$ while the public burns
| itself down.
| swed420 wrote:
| Agreed.
|
| There is hope, but it requires enough people to care and
| act accordingly:
|
| https://www.noemamag.com/the-last-days-of-social-media/
| tokyobreakfast wrote:
| > my facebook feed is nothing but clickbait engagement
| with local nazis
|
| Can you explain what exactly you mean by "local nazis"?
| Are you getting ads for Nazi barber shops? Sieg Heil
| Heating & Cooling? Hitler Juice Bar and Bubble Tea?
|
| If this was such a huge problem I'm sure we would have
| heard of it before.
| Levitz wrote:
| >The US does not have a "far left" in any significant
| numbers, and never has. At least not in a self-aware sense.
|
| Are they just disproportionately powerful then? Because the
| US does definitely have consistent far left trends and
| movements that overtake the mainstream. The OK hand gesture
| hysteria is maybe an evident example, but land
| acknowledgments? DEI statements? Fatphobia? Defund the
| police? All of these originate from far left positions.
| frumplestlatz wrote:
| > Good they moderate.
|
| I can moderate my own feed -- the majority of people don't
| need, want, or enjoy an overtly paternalistic hugbox, and
| _especially_ if moderation tends to be unidirectionally skewed
| in one political direction. It 's not surprising that growth is
| slow.
| SketchySeaBeast wrote:
| On one side, sure, there's "overly paternalistic" moderation,
| but, on the other, there's AI powered revenge porn running
| rampant, so I'd argue there should be at least some
| moderation.
| egorfine wrote:
| > Good they moderate.
|
| I'm not sure about that. I'd rather decide for myself what I
| want to read and what I do not. I'd love to not delegate this
| important decision to corporate overlords.
| wiredone wrote:
| "toxicity and inflammatory" does a lot of heavy lifting for
| Blueskys moderation team.
|
| i find it's pretty toxic, in a militant way... that doesn't get
| moderated of course.
|
| That's "free expression" when it's about topics blueskyers all
| agree on.
|
| _waits to be called a nazi_
| Xiol wrote:
| What topics cause you the most problems?
| spiderfarmer wrote:
| The kind of topics that were popular in Germany circa 1939.
| frumplestlatz wrote:
| Case in point. "Everyone to the right of Marx is a Nazi"
| seems to be the rallying cry of their moderation strategy
| _and_ user base.
|
| Which is fine -- build what you want to be a part of -- but
| don't pretend it's the neutral position.
| pfraze wrote:
| What about the moderation strategy indicates that?
| frumplestlatz wrote:
| Try participating in discussions with a politically
| disapproved position and see how fast you're shadow-
| banned.
|
| And no, I'm not talking about "1939 Germany" views.
| pfraze wrote:
| Did that happen to you, or to anybody you can point to?
| slater wrote:
| I think we're just, once again, speed-running the "which
| opinions, mfer" goose meme.
| THX1137 wrote:
| Really? Anecdotal as well, but I see tonnes of liberals
| and similar free market oriented people all over that
| website... I wonder if whether our preferences are giving
| us different impressions of the user base?
| repeekad wrote:
| The primary differentiator for me is that bsky does not
| have a central algorithm, you only see content from
| people you follow or explicitly go looking for. Yes the
| "top today" overall feed is very left biased, but the
| default is an empty feed that you have to populate
| yourself.
|
| You can't complain about content on bluesky because
| unlike every other platform you must choose which feeds
| you use.
| lukev wrote:
| This accusation would have a little more zing, if the person
| who owns the other place wasn't posting about white replacement
| almost every day.
|
| Pretty shitty that ones choice of social media is so
| politicized but if you _must_ pick a side... I will pick the
| non-nazi side, thank you very much!
| SLWW wrote:
| Just a suggestion lukev, maybe you've been isolated for too
| long if you think a userbase of a site reflects the same
| opinions and thoughts of the owner.
|
| I know it's cool to be mentally ill in [current year] and
| people who share your sentiments are totally righteous,
| without blemish or stain, but the rest of us who don't watch
| FOX or CNN all day live on a different planet then you.
|
| BlueSky is full of the most degenerate, insane, hateful (not
| that it matters all that much) people I think I've ever found
| on a social media platform. What is extremist on X is the
| norm on BS, just in the opposite direction.
|
| This isn't even to defend Elon's platform, I only use it for
| memes, but you all really need to relax with the rhetoric and
| all this "othering" going on. It's the sickness of the soul
| on full display.
| ProfessorZoom wrote:
| still hard to believe that this was supposed to be a
| decentralized social media app, and now it's like one giant
| subreddit
| RNanoware wrote:
| I haven't been particularly active on any social media for a
| while. It wasn't an intentional decision on my part as much as
| finding my social community using those tools less and less.
|
| But I remember the early days of MySpace and Facebook with a
| certain nostalgia, and I'm pained to see the current state of all
| these tools. Such a thorough report as this gives me a little
| hope that perhaps an acceptable middle ground can be found for
| Internet communities at large scales.
|
| I don't think I'll be hopping back in any time soon, but perhaps
| the research and positive advancements in social media aren't
| over yet.
| uwemaurer wrote:
| Here are some independent stats: https://bluefacts.app/bluesky-
| user-growth
| pfraze wrote:
| FWIW these are based entirely on the firehose, which means it
| doesn't count lurkers. Our logged in DAU tends to be double the
| DAU of record-creators
| biggestfan wrote:
| So ~3 million DAU? Would you consider publishing your own
| statistics?
| dsr_ wrote:
| So the tracking pixels say almost everyone with a GMail
| address opened your email!
| slater wrote:
| Are they lagging (and thus their latest data points to zero) or
| are we led to believe that all stats are down since the
| beginning of this week...?
| gary_0 wrote:
| I absolutely do not understand moving "report spam" under "report
| misleading". The UX for this is terrible. There are lots of bots
| posting SEO junk, at a rate and scale that definitely wastes
| resources, and now bsky has interfered with one of the signals it
| should be using to combat the problem.
| direwolf20 wrote:
| Maybe they're paying bsky. Occam's razor.
| pfraze wrote:
| Occam's razor takes you to a bribery conspiracy?
| hengheng wrote:
| Have you consumed any media in the last decades.
| kingstnap wrote:
| Money inclusive or incompetence.
| direwolf20 wrote:
| They publish this because the EU requires it, not out of the
| goodness of their hearts.
| bdcp wrote:
| So EU is the MVP
| egorfine wrote:
| They also perform age checks because various local laws require
| it, not because they are evil.
|
| They also perform age checks because they are evil and
| complicit with obviously detrimental local laws, not because
| they want to protect the children.
| psionides wrote:
| I don't think they fall under DMA at this size yet?
| comex wrote:
| In 2024, Bluesky wrote about their "Stackable Approach to
| Moderation":
|
| https://bsky.social/about/blog/03-12-2024-stackable-moderati...
|
| Now in 2026, their transparency report says nothing about
| stackable moderation or moderation services. I guess nobody is
| using them, at least not in significant enough volumes that it
| would have a meaningful effect on the at least not enough for
| them to have a meaningful effect on the Trust & Safety team's
| job.
|
| Likewise, they tout "thousands of Personal Data Servers operated
| by people across the federated AT Protocol network", but that's
| out of "41.41M users".
|
| It's fine, I guess. It's just not meaningfully decentralized.
| TimorousBestie wrote:
| > I guess nobody is using them, at least not in significant
| enough volumes that it would have a meaningful effect on the at
| least not enough for them to have a meaningful effect on the
| Trust & Safety team's job.
|
| It's spread out over subgroups and niches. I imagine the
| biggest independent moderation service is blacksky's, and
| they're not exactly best friends with bluesky.
|
| I use about five different moderation services, and a handful
| of independent blocklists.
|
| > It's fine, I guess. It's just not meaningfully decentralized.
|
| It's better than the situation on X.
| Diti wrote:
| Their ban of "non-consensual sexual imagery" made several
| acquaintances of mine - furry art illustrators - move to harmful
| communities on questionable Mastodon servers.
|
| I'm growing tired of those bans on legal content that isn't
| inherently harmful (we are talking about fictional humanized
| animals here) but considered "icky" by platforms and payment
| processors.
|
| So I don't care if the AT protocol is technologically superior to
| ActivityPub (?) - the Mastodon community has a healthier
| moderation and mindset than Bluesky, in my opinion.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > Their ban of "non-consensual sexual imagery" made several
| acquaintances of mine - furry art illustrators - move to
| harmful communities on questionable Mastodon servers.
|
| Furry art, including quite explicit furry art, is very common
| on bluesky and doesn't seem be especially restricted by policy.
| I mean, unless they also happen to be depicting nonconsensual
| sexual interactions, an orthogonal concern to the furry aspect.
|
| > I'm growing tired of those bans on legal content that isn't
| inherently harmful (we are talking about fictional humanized
| animals here) but considered "icky" by platforms and payment
| processors.
|
| Well, you are free to avail yourself of the forums that lack
| those policies. Now, I know you've complained that they are
| "harmful", but... Maybe there is a reason that other forums
| choose to put bans in place.
| gary_0 wrote:
| > quite explicit furry art, is very common on bluesky
|
| Now there's an understatement. It's bloody impossible to get
| rid of. People here are sneering at all the political content
| but they're ignoring the curvaceous elephant in the room. I
| think maybe bsky has improved things now, but a while back
| their adult content filters were _not_ up to the task. When I
| first made an account I almost gave up on it because until I
| got all the right filter words set up it was nothing but
| weird porn whac-a-mole (actually that 's probably a poor
| choice of words...)
| riffraff wrote:
| FWIW, you don't need to join questionable communities to have
| your content on mastodon, e.g. Wordpress blogs can meaningfully
| participate on activitypub (people con repost, like, reply) so
| that may be an alternative for your friends, without the need
| to host a complex app, so long as they can get any Wordpress
| hosting. Discovery suffers tho.
| Diti wrote:
| Oh, thanks for the suggestion! I'll tell them that's an
| option - provided the hosting provider accepts the content
| too.
| dmos62 wrote:
| You're complaining about the banning of illustrations featuring
| furries being raped? That's what non-consentual means here? I
| must be misreading this.
| dom96 wrote:
| > By the end of 2025, we had verified 4,327 accounts total: 3,567
| verified directly by Bluesky and 777 verified by our network of
| 21 Trusted Verifiers.
|
| It would be nice to see some more transparency around the
| decisions of whether an account gets verified or not. So far it's
| feeling like a "cool club" with little rhyme or reason with
| regards to certain verification decisions.
|
| Related to that is also the need to add more trusted verifiers.
| Are there any plans to allow third parties to provide
| verification services or is it always only going to be
| journalistic and educational institutions?
| tokyobreakfast wrote:
| > So far it's feeling like a "cool club" with little rhyme or
| reason with regards to certain verification decisions.
|
| That's how Twitter started, and when the policy changed, the
| "cool club" members threw public tantrums (some of which still
| seethe to this day).
|
| It's all very high-school cafeteria clique to me.
| SketchySeaBeast wrote:
| Regardless, it was weird to try to convert that into a "I
| paid" check-mark.
| TimorousBestie wrote:
| > Are there any plans to allow third parties to provide
| verification services or is it always only going to be
| journalistic and educational institutions?
|
| Anyone can put together a moderation service that labels
| accounts that they've vetted or blacklisted. It wouldn't be
| that taxing to host one, but the labor to maintain it is a
| different story.
| dom96 wrote:
| Yes, anyone can. But unless Bluesky treats it as a trusted
| verifier then it doesn't have much practical use.
| TimorousBestie wrote:
| I guess I don't appreciate the distinction between
| verification and an account labeler.
| extraduder_ire wrote:
| If you use a 3rd party client like witchsky.app, you can
| trust or distrust any account you want to be a labeller and
| verify accounts yourself if desired.
|
| Worth keeping in mind, the original plan was to entirely
| rely on domain names being used as handles for
| verification. All ~500 .gov handled accounts on there are
| almost certainly who they claim to be, unless they are able
| to set DNS records on those domains.
| imagetic wrote:
| I disabled reposts and quoted posts to knock the noise down to 0.
| Since then I've enjoyed my time on Bluesky. In many ways it feels
| like old Twitter with simple filtering and I think that's what
| people wanted?!?
|
| But Twitter felt cringe to me long before it was consumed by Musk
| and politics. Messing with the feed has backfired all of the big
| platforms. First Facebook then Twitter and most recently
| Instagram.
|
| They all became a closed loop of content that is force fed.
| Injecting an ad in the a feed we control wasn't ever enough.
| egorfine wrote:
| It's truly sad to see social networks being complicit in doxxing
| their users under the guise of "think of the children" by
| requiring age checks.
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(page generated 2026-01-30 23:00 UTC)