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Bluesky has been around for over a year now, with a massive influx of users in late 2024. But one notable feature that’s missing is the ability to have a private account. As such, everyone’s account is publicly accessible by anyone on Bluesky.
Many like to tout Bluesky as being a safer, less toxic platform than one like X (formerly Twitter). But as more people create accounts, that includes the trolls. So, how do you protect yourself from trolling, harassment, and other toxic behavior without the ability to lock your account?
Safeguards Already in Place
Thankfully, there are a few safeguards in place that aim to keep harassment at bay on the entire platform. Bluesky is committed to keeping the platform civil and friendly, so they try to stamp out toxicity at the root with guidelines and rules as a baseline.
Bluesky has very comprehensive community guidelines, including all the usual rules relating to the law, as well as rules against harassment, abusive behavior, hate speech, impersonation, and excessively disturbing content. Violating these guidelines can result in a permanent ban from the platform.
The community guidelines are more or less similar to those on other platforms. Still, it specifies that it strives to cultivate a welcoming environment while also enshrining user choice and individual preference. While for some, the guidelines may feel like they’re subject to the biases of moderators, the rules are pretty straightforward and fair in the context of a platform meant to balance individual wants and needs while maintaining a friendly environment.
Ban Evasion Rules
Bluesky has rules against ban evasion, and while it can be hard to detect ban evasion, the platform hopes to enhance its ban evasion detection in the future. It’s against the Bluesky community guidelines to ban evade by creating new accounts or repurposing existing accounts to replace a banned one.
Alongside enhancing its ban evasion detection, Bluesky is trying to make the process of making a new account have more friction. Making the process of signing up more laborious could theoretically disincentivize people from making new accounts after a ban. It’s not a foolproof method, but it could have some utility.
Toxicity Detection
The platform has rolled out experiments in toxicity detection, with Bluesky citing in its September trust and safety update that 50% of reports on the site are about toxic behavior. Using data they’ve collected, Bluesky is attempting to detect rude replies and sending them to moderators automatically, reducing their visibility along with labeling the posts as rude. Additionally, Bluesky states that repeated rude labels applied to posts will result in account labels and eventual suspensions.
There are a lot of options for weeding out rude and threatening posts from your feed in the moderation settings. You can toggle it to warn or hide posts that are labeled as rude or threatening if you want to keep your feed as civil as possible.
Individual things you can do to prevent harassment
Even with guidelines in place, it’s hard to get rid of toxicity and harassment altogether. So if you want to prevent it before it happens, here are some things you can do to protect yourself in lieu of having a private account.
Anonymity
Suppose you feel that having an account with your real identity tied to it could lead to harassment or dog-piling based on your previous experiences on other platforms. In that case, you might want to consider keeping your account fairly anonymous. If you don’t have your name tied to the account, don’t post photos of your face, and don’t disclose things about yourself, like your occupation, location, or anything about your personal identity, you can save yourself a lot of the grief of targeted harassment.
Obviously it’s not fun to have to hide aspects about yourself on social media, but protecting yourself and your identity is one of the best ways to avoid harassment. If trolls have nothing to harass you over, there’s not a lot for them to work with.
Custom Feeds
One of the standout features of Bluesky is its custom feeds, and you can utilize custom feeds to avoid engaging with bad actors or seeing their posts in your feed. Using custom feeds ensures that you control whose content you see, and if you place yourself in a niche community, it’s not as likely that random trolls will be able to seek you out and find you.
You do always run the risk of bad actors infiltrating your community, but thankfully, there are moderation tools you can use to deal with that.
Moderation Tools
Bluesky has two levels of moderation, one on the app level and one on the community level. The moderators for the app apply labels to posts based on the community guidelines, moderating content only by their own standards. Users can then modify the level of visibility for different kinds of content moderated by Bluesky. In the Moderation section of Bluesky’s settings, users can toggle between “warn,” “hide,” or “off” for many different types of content, like sexually suggestive content, extremism, intolerance, scams, and more.
On the other level, users are able to create their own labels, so community moderators can label and therefore moderate the visibility of content themselves. Users can subscribe to specific moderation services that do the work for you to hide or warn about specific content not moderated by Bluesky itself. You can also subscribe to moderation lists that block specific accounts based on their activity on the site. Examples could be accounts that post AI art, people with specific political beliefs, or known trolls.
Hosting Your Own Personal Data Server
One of the main points of Bluesky is its decentralized model, in which users can set up different servers to have their own specific, decentralized communities using Bluesky’s protocol. Setting up a Personal Data Server (PDS) allows you to self-host a server where you can control who is part of the server, what content can be posted, and how data is used. Different servers can still interact with the broader Bluesky community and other servers, so you’re not fully sequestered, but you have more control over the way your server is run. The default server for Bluesky is bsky.social, which most people on Bluesky use, but it’s not the only way to use the site.
Setting up your own PDS just requires a device to host the server on, which can just be your own computer. The process of setting it up does take a bit of tech savviness, but there are detailed instructions on how to set one up if you want.
While ideally Bluesky would have private accounts, it’s unclear if that functionality is in the works for the distant future. However, Bluesky’s intention of being a decentralized, customizable, and friendly environment allows for other ways of protecting yourself. While you may not be able to enjoy absolute and complete privacy on Bluesky, you can at least use the tools available to keep yourself safe from harassment.
