With X‘s tailspin into an unusable platform—where you are aggressively served content that is unwanted, offensive, and a waste of your time while your own content is suppressed—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 great moderation tools that help make my Bluesky experience better—the block function and 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.
NUCLEAR BLOCK
When you block someone on Bluesky, it doesn’t just keep them from seeing you and vice versa. It removes any interactions they have had with you. It’s a powerful moderation tool that really helps protect users from harassment. Blocking a user prevents all interaction and hides the user from the client experience. Blocked accounts will not be able to like, reply, mention, or follow you. Their posts, replies, and profile in search will also be hidden from you. The function has been affectionately nicknamed “The Nuclear Block” for its effectiveness in stopping trolls/harassment.
Reporting an account that is out of line can also be incredibly effective. Oftentimes when users will share that they have encountered a harassing or spam account, the account is removed before I even get a chance to report it.
MUTE WORDS AND TAGS
Muting individual words or phrases can also help keep unwanted posts from spamming your feed—going to your moderation settings and adding words like “bitcoin” or “nft” to your muted words helps the bot/spam posts disappear from your feed.
AI IMAGE LABELER
You can similarly filter AI-generated images out of your feed by using Bluesky’s AI Imagery Labeler.
You can either hide, label with a badge or be warned about AI imagery in your feed, and report AI images if you see them.
GUIDELINES FOR THE AI IMAGE LABELER.
MUTE LISTS
Users can also create lists 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. Some users create mute lists based on personal vendettas, so you have to be careful. With over 10 million users, there is definitely a lot to keep up with, but subscribing to these mute lists last year 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 mute lists that I’ve subscribed to. There may be 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)
