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.
> 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.
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.
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.
> 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.
> quite explicit furry art, is very common on bluesky
Now there's an understatement. It's bloody impossible to get rid of. People here are sneering at all the political content but they're ignoring the curvaceous elephant in the room. I think maybe bsky has improved things now, but a while back their adult content filters were not up to the task. When I first made an account I almost gave up on it because until I got all the right filter words set up it was nothing but weird porn whac-a-mole (actually that's probably a poor choice of words...)
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.
Yes, that’s what non-consensual could mean here (it also encompasses consensual non-consent, to be accurate). This kind of content (illustrated & fictional) isn’t illegal in most jurisdictions, as far as I know.
Small aside, consent also depends on the jurisdiction – in mine, it must be verbal, so it means that if I were to draw a situation which involves a character being forced to do something but showing their consent non-verbally, it would still be non-consensual, and thus, forbidden by Bluesky’s terms of service if the PDS was hosted in my jurisdiction.
Anyway, my point is that all those illustrations should be properly labeled, but not necessarily forbidden by Bluesky’s ToS. As I understand it, fictional non-con content being banned by Bluesky means that even hosting it on one’s PDS is a no-go.
I guarantee you're reading it correctly, we're talking about Bluesky. And any community that furry rape fetishists are participating in is going to have to be "questionable." If it wasn't before they got there, it is now.
> 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.
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.
It looks like an actual weird drop. Sort of mirroring a weird jump at the end of December. Here's another view that somebody else does: https://bsky.jazco.dev/stats
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.
Readit News
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.
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.
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
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!
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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.
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.
Now there's an understatement. It's bloody impossible to get rid of. People here are sneering at all the political content but they're ignoring the curvaceous elephant in the room. I think maybe bsky has improved things now, but a while back their adult content filters were not up to the task. When I first made an account I almost gave up on it because until I got all the right filter words set up it was nothing but weird porn whac-a-mole (actually that's probably a poor choice of words...)
Small aside, consent also depends on the jurisdiction – in mine, it must be verbal, so it means that if I were to draw a situation which involves a character being forced to do something but showing their consent non-verbally, it would still be non-consensual, and thus, forbidden by Bluesky’s terms of service if the PDS was hosted in my jurisdiction.
Anyway, my point is that all those illustrations should be properly labeled, but not necessarily forbidden by Bluesky’s ToS. As I understand it, fictional non-con content being banned by Bluesky means that even hosting it on one’s PDS is a no-go.
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so it's _not_ that hard.
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.
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.