Bluesky 2025 Transparency Report

[comex]

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]

> 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.

[wiredone]

“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

[lukev]

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!

[ProfessorZoom]

still hard to believe that this was supposed to be a decentralized social media app, and now it's like one giant subreddit

[Xiol]

What topics cause you the most problems?

[gary_0]

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]

Maybe they're paying bsky. Occam's razor.

[Diti]

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]

> 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.

[riffraff]

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.

[dmos62]

You're complaining about the banning of illustrations featuring furries being raped? That's what non-consentual means here? I must be misreading this.

[midius]

> 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]

I mean it's easy to say that. Roblox says that too. Bluesky is probably much easier though since it's not as big.

[imagetic]

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.

[uwemaurer]

Here are some independent stats: https://bluefacts.app/bluesky-user-growth

[pfraze]

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

[slater]

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...?

[RNanoware]

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.

[dom96]

> 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]

> 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.

[TimorousBestie]

> 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.

[vladms]

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.

[wiredone]

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.

[bakugo]

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

[frumplestlatz]

> 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.

[cryptoegorophy]

How many are daily active users? I can’t find that info.

[egorfine]

> 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.

[direwolf20]

They publish this because the EU requires it, not out of the goodness of their hearts.

[egorfine]

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]

I don't think they fall under DMA at this size yet?

[bdcp]

So EU is the MVP

[egorfine]

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.

[extraduder_ire]

Complicit in the sense of complying with the law. What would you prefer they do?

If it makes you feel any better, it's more trivially bypassed than any website age-gate I've ever seen. (that's more complicated than a checkbox)