With X‘s tailspin into an unusable platform, I have really taken to Bluesky, where I am finding the most welcoming community I’ve encountered online in many years. It is definitely worth committing to build a presence there. I covered navigating Bluesky’s #kidlit community in my previous post, and wanted to follow up by highlighting a great tool that helps make my Bluesky experience better – mute lists. My first few days on Bluesky were a shotgun blast of oddball posts and NSFW images until I found feeds that suited my interests, followed more users, and discovered how to remove content that I has no interest in seeing.
Users are creating lists that you can subscribe to which will mute offensive accounts. Bluesky explains that “muting prevents you from seeing any notifications or top-level posts from an account. If they reply to a thread, you’ll see a section that says “Post from an account you muted” with an option to show the post. The account will not know that they have been muted.” These lists are curated by the individuals that created them, so there is an element of trust involved that the lists are maintained and vetted to follow through on their promise. With over 2 million users, there is definitely a lot to keep up with, but subscribing to these mute lists has made my Bluesky experience a more friendly one.
When you visit a list and click “subscribe,” you are now given the option to either mute all accounts on the list, or block them completely – you can also block each offensive account you may encounter individually, and report posts by clicking on the three-dot menu. If you wish, you can report an entire account by visiting a user profile and clicking the three-dot menu there, or add users to a mute list of your own and subscribe to that. To set up a mute list, go to “Moderation” and then hit “Moderation Lists.” There you can add “+New.” To populate it, go to a user’s profile, click the three-dot menu, and click “Add to lists.”
Below are some of the mute lists that I’ve subscribed to. There is overlap on many of the accounts each list blocks, but that does not create an issue. I’ll revisit this post and add more to this list as time goes on, I am sure. If you know of any useful mute lists beyond what I have listed below, please let me know.
(click on the image to go to each list)
