🦋 Bluesky Social

We’ve dug into the nerdy details of how Mastodon, Threads, and Bluesky compare, but given this recent momentum it’s important to clear up some questions for new Bluesky users, and what this new approach to the social web really means for how you connect with people online.

Note that Bluesky is still in an early stage, and many big changes are anticipated from the project. Answers here are accurate as of the time of writing, and will indicate the company’s future plans where possible.

• Is Bluesky just another Twitter?
• How is Bluesky for privacy?
• How do I find people to follow?
• Is Bluesky in the fediverse?
• Is the Bluesky network decentralized?
• How does Bluesky make money?
• How does moderation work?

Over the past few months, traffic to the site formerly known as Twitter has taken a nosedive as competitors like Bluesky and Threads continue to bring in more and more users.

According to the traffic-estimating service Similarweb, visits to the Elon Musk-owned social network now known as X have plummeted over the past three months.

Bluesky has seen massive growth in the weeks following the US election. As of Tuesday, there are 24 million users on the social media platform. With great engagement comes great responsibility, which means Bluesky CEO Jay Graber has to do a lot to keep her promise to not “enshittify” the platform with ads while still funding its explosive growth.

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Enshittification, as its known, generally comes as social media platforms expand and need to squeeze money out of users in order to please investors and keep the lights on. Since Bluesky doesn’t plan to run ads, WIRED senior writer Kate Knibbs asked, how does Bluesky plan to make money? “Subscriptions are the first step,” Graber said, referring to a plan to have users pay a regular fee for the ability to upload higher-quality video, for example, or access certain customization features.

Bluesky said it’s working to comply with European Union rules after the bloc accused the fast-growing social media platform of flouting its digital regulations.

The company is consulting with its lawyer to follow the EU’s information disclosure rules, a Bluesky spokesperson wrote Tuesday in an email.

Bluesky, which was started in 2019 as a decentralized version of Twitter, has exploded in popularity in the wake of Donald Trump’s victory, as many X users have sought alternatives to the Elon Musk-owned platform.

The EU’s executive arm on Monday said Bluesky didn’t provide information it was required to share under the bloc’s Digital Services Act, which governs content on social media sites.

“All platforms in the EU have to have a dedicated page on their websites where it says how many user numbers they have in the EU and where they are legally established,” Thomas Regnier, the commission’s spokesperson on digital matters, told reporters. “This is not the case with Bluesky, so this is not followed.”

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Chinese state media is reportedly troubled by the latest exodus of X users flocking to Bluesky. State outlets, which put considerable resources into amassing millions of followers on Elon Musk’s social media platform — including by buying ads, deploying bots, and hiring influencers — have recently seen their growth plateau.

The growing popularity of Bluesky, which has a largely liberal base and harder-to-manipulate algorithm, has sparked “worried chatter within Chinese state media circles,” a former Xinhua and China Daily employee wrote in his newsletter. He predicted the accounts will migrate to Bluesky, though it may take time. For now, the sector’s focus has shifted back to domestic, Mandarin-language channels and platforms like Bilibili, WeChat, and Douyin, the Chinese version of TikTok.

A machine learning librarian at Hugging Face just released a dataset composed of one million Bluesky posts, complete with when they were posted and who posted them, intended for machine learning research.

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The data isn’t anonymous. In the dataset, each post is listed alongside the users’ decentralized identifier, or DID; van Strien also made a search tool for finding users based on their DID and published it on Hugging Face. A quick skim through the first few hundred of the million posts shows people doing normal types of Bluesky posting—arguing about politics, talking about concerts, saying stuff like “The cat is gay” and “When’s the last time yall had Boston baked beans?”—but the dataset has also swept up a lot of adult content, too.

It’s also noteworthy that it’s a “snapshot” of time on Bluesky, meaning it could, and probably does, include since-deleted posts.

This dataset could be used for “training and testing language models on social media content, analyzing social media posting patterns, studying conversation structures and reply networks, research on social media content moderation, [and] natural language processing tasks using social media data,” the project page says. “Out of scope use” includes “building automated posting systems for Bluesky, creating fake or impersonated content, extracting personal information about users, [and] any purpose that violates Bluesky's Terms of Service.”

The dataset is already popular: as of writing, it’s one of the top trending Hugging Face projects.

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Reddit link

RDX for Reddit link

Troddit link

Blocklist in question

skywatch.blue is one of the oldest and most trust-worthy labelers in on Bluesky, and the criteria for their MAGA block list are extremely specific.

When you block right-wing trolls, not only are you protecting yourself, you are protecting your followers. This is because on Bluesky, blocks hide all interactions between two accounts for everyone.