Bluesky recently suspended the account of author and liberal influencer Sarah Kendzior, leading to confusion on the left-leaning social media platform about what she did. According to Bluesky, Kendzior was suspended for, “expressing a desire to shoot the author of an article,” a pretty shocking allegation. Until you learn the context, sparking its own debate about where platforms should draw the line when it comes to moderation.
“The post, made 11/10, stated: ‘I want to shoot the author of this article just to watch him die,’” a spokesperson for Bluesky explained to Gizmodo in an email Wednesday morning.
“The account owner was immediately notified of the reason for the content takedown and engaged back and forth with our moderation team. Our community guidelines prohibit content that threatens or wishes harm to others,” the spokesperson continued.
Bluesky’s safety team also shared a similar statement online Wednesday, not long after Gizmodo received its statement via email. But Kendzior, who’s based in St. Louis and has written political books like The View From Flyover Country (2018) and Hiding in Plain Sight (2020), told Gizmodo there’s more to the story.
“I posted that line as a quote tweet above a terrible article about Johnny Cash,” Kendzior said. “My post references the famous lyric from his song Folsom Prison Blues: ‘I shot a man in Reno just to watch him die.’”
Kendzior was quote-posting a reference to the Wall Street Journal’s article from Oct. 9 about Johnny Cash, which was widely mocked for being out of touch. Titled, “It’s Finally Time to Give Johnny Cash His Due,” social media users poked fun at the idea that Cash, one of the most well-respected musical artists of the 20th century, had not received proper recognition.
Kendzior pointed out that Bluesky made no mention of the Johnny Cash lyrics: “Notably, they did not send you a screenshot of my full quote-tweet, but only that one line, isolated from the Johnny Cash context.” The author says that when she received an email about the suspension, she wasn’t sure if she was dealing with “an actual employee or some sort of prank. But my entire account is gone, so it is real.”
Kendzior told Gizmodo that she thinks her post was actually sent around Oct. 9, over a month ago, but can’t check the exact date because her posts on Bluesky have been deleted. Bluesky initially told Gizmodo the tweet was sent Nov. 10, but later issued a correction in a post that Kendzior’s post was actually sent Oct. 10.
Kendzior, who regularly writes about politics at Substack, doesn’t believe that the Johnny Cash lyric was the real reason for her suspension on Monday, but didn’t elaborate on what she believed the actual reason might be.
“The reason I do not think my suspension is about a reference to a Johnny Cash lyric—beyond the obvious fact that getting suspended for defending the honor of Johnny Cash is ridiculous, and beyond the fact that the post is over a month old and caused no outcry—is because they could have removed that one post instead of deleting my entire account,” Kendzior said.
“I disagree strongly that my post deserves removal. But deleting an entire account is a tremendous violation of my free speech and does harm to everyone who cites or engages with my work and who now deal with dead links,” she continued.
Bluesky users seemed divided on whether the post from Kendzior warranted a suspension, with many users pointing out that it didn’t seem fair, given the fact that she was responding to an article about Johnny Cash. But others thought it was a reasonable decision under the theory that a death threat is a death threat and moderators shouldn’t have to decide who is joking and who isn’t.
Paul Frazee, a software engineer at Bluesky, posted about the idea that people could abuse a system where moderators are forced to determine what’s an actual threat versus a joke.
“The company has a pretty no-nonsense policy about death threats, and it really doesn’t take jokes or references as sufficient padding to excuse them,” Frazee wrote on Bluesky Wednesday. “It’s one of those things that just comes from this being a big public space. Everybody will claim they’re ‘just kidding.’”
This isn’t the first time that Bluesky has gotten heat for its moderation decisions. The platform has received criticism for being too heavy-handed in banning Palestinians on the platform who are trying to fundraise or simply increase awareness of their plight as Israel’s war on Gaza has driven them to desperate measures.
There was also outcry recently when a user named Link was permanently suspended after posting images of Charlie Kirk that were interpreted as a threat of violence. Link, who says he does nonprofit work in Washington D.C., told Gizmodo he’s confused about the suspension and said one of two reasons Bluesky gave included a factual error. Link’s suspension appears to be permanent, whereas Kendzior’s may last just three days.
Gizmodo reached out to Bluesky about Link’s case, but didn’t get an explanation by press time. We did at least get an acknowledgement of our emails. That hasn’t always been the case, and perhaps suggests Bluesky is pivoting away from its old communications strategy, where emails were often met with silence.
Aaron Rodericks, the head of Trust and Safety at Bluesky, suggested it was indeed a conscious change in strategy, writing Wednesday: “Here’s a shift towards being more transparent,” while quoting a post about why Kendzior was suspended.
Again, that post didn’t include the context that Kendzior was making a reference to a classic Johnny Cash song. But there might be a switch in the broader strategy for Bluesky as it navigates the growing pains of a larger userbase. Bluesky currently has over 40 million users, up from 30 million in January. And while social media moderation is notoriously difficult, and often nuanced, nobody is happy unless the rules and the enforcement of those rules are clear.
Bluesky is the social media platform that most resembles Twitter before it was taken over by Elon Musk, but it’s its own thing, and it has its own problems. One of those problems is a horrible “Discover” tab, something that might be greatly improved by adding the “dislike” feature currently headed for a beta release.
In the blog post from Friday that included the announcement of dislike, Bluesky wrote about how it has always provided users with “tools that give people more control over how they interact on Bluesky.” This is an almost comedic understatement. The culture of Bluesky is built around intentionally siloing yourself in, and only seeing things you like.
So, for instance, when the White House joined the Democratic-leaning Bluesky, thousands of users immediately availed themselves of the site’s unusually powerful blocking feature, resulting in a greatly diminished network effect, and as a consequence, very low engagement counts for the Trump Administration. The repost count on a White House Bluesky post rarely exceeds 70, and the vast majority of users on the site simply don’t notice the account still exists.
But blocking early and often is the norm for Bluesky users encountering anything they don’t like, for any reason. Even if you wish someone well, you might block them simply because their posting style irks you slightly.
In other words, Bluesky is a highly effective and shameless echo chamber. But it’s not clear that blocking someone has any effect whatsoever on whether more content similar to what you just blocked will be served to you later.
Enter dislike, which will be a “new feedback signal” that’s supposed to “improve personalization in Discover and other feeds,” according to Bluesky’s blog post. Adding a “dislike” to every block has the potential to bolster the have-it-your-way attributes of the app and its culture—particularly where the Discover feed is concerned.
The Discover feed on Bluesky feels like a cesspool because, while everyone’s is a little different, it’s mostly the top of the Bluesky bell curve. If you use the app at all, there is probably at least some extent to which you enjoy clowning on Elon Musk, outrage about AI, saccharine posts about pets, empowering selfies, clowning on transphobes, random nice photos, and what have you. But the returns rapidly diminish in a feed that firehoses you with these things, and that’s the experience on the Bluesky Discover tab. An avalanche of meh posts.
“Dislikes help the system understand what kinds of posts you’d prefer to see less of,” Bluesky’s blog post claims. If this turns out to be true, the Discover tab could finally fill a gap: in order to keep things fresh, there needs to be a decent place on Bluesky to encounter new kinds of content other than in reply threads. The chronological Following tab does, after all, get monotonous after a while (It basically inundates you with the posts of users you genuinely like, but who post a ton).
If dislike is a robust and effective function with the power to zap entire categories of things out of existence for the user, it could herald a whole new Bluesky: one in which the Discover tab is useful and maybe even dangerously addictive. But if dislike doesn’t go for the jugular, that’s fine. There’s always old, reliable block.
Bluesky is adding a dislike button as a way to signal the kind of posts you don’t want to see in your Discover feed. The experiment is part of several new ideas Bluesky is exploring to a improve conversations on its platform.
The new experiments Bluesky is running are primarily built around the notion of “social proximity.” The company says it’s aiming to build a system that maps your place in a “social neighborhood” of “people you already interact with or would likely enjoy knowing.” By prioritizing replies and posts from the people in your general “neighborhood,” the company believes it can make conversations “feel more relevant, familiar, and less prone to misunderstandings.” Following that logic, the beta test of the dislike button (which sounds private, rather than public-facing) will “help the system understand what kinds of posts you’d prefer to see less of,” but could also affect reply rankings in your threads and in the threads of other people in your social neighborhood.
The social platform already offers a way to limit replies to only people who follow you, as Bluesky CTO Paul Frazee noted in a recent post, but the company doesn’t “want to make that the only option.” Bluesky is also experimenting with adjusting how the Reply button works by making you see the whole thread first when you tap the button, rather than dumping straight into a new blank post. Combined with a new model for detecting bad replies, the company thinks it’ll improve the general social climate.
Charitably, these tweaks sound like another way Bluesky is trying to give users more control over what they see on the platform, in the same way it does with things like notifications. Less charitably, you could read the “social neighborhood” concept as a way to entrench users in their “filter bubble” rather than address larger moderation issues.
Recently, Bluesky has been criticized by users for failing to remove the accounts of people who allegedly violate the company’s community guidelines. Ensconced in a social neighborhood, those critics wouldn’t necessarily see offensive posts, nor would a poster see their critics. That might lead to less conflict overall, but it could also impact more productive forms of disagreement in the process.
Social network Bluesky, which on Friday announced a new milestone of 40 million users, will soon start testing “dislikes” as a way to improve personalization on its main Discover feed and others.
The news was shared alongside a host of other conversation control updates and changes, which include smaller tweaks to replies, improved detection of toxic comments, and other ways to prioritize more relevant conversations to the individual user.
With the “dislikes” beta rolling out soon, Bluesky will take into account the new signal to improve user personalization. As users “dislike” posts, the system will learn what sort of content they want to see less of. This will help to inform more than just how content is ranked in feeds, but also reply rankings.
The company explained the changes are designed to make Bluesky a place for more “fun, genuine, and respectful exchanges” — an edict that follows a month of unrest on the platform as some users again criticized the platform over its moderation decisions. While Bluesky is designed as a decentralized network where users run their own moderation, some subset of Bluesky users want the platform itself to ban bad actors and controversial figures instead of leaving it up to the users to block them.
Bluesky, however, wants to focus more on the tools it provides users to control their own experience.
Today, this includes things like moderation lists that let users quickly block a group of people they don’t want to interact with, content filter controls, muted words, and the ability to subscribe to other moderation service providers. Bluesky also lets users detach quote posts to limit unwanted attention, which has long influenced the toxic culture of “dunking” on X (formerly Twitter).
In addition to dislikes, the company says it’s testing a mix of ranking updates, design changes, and other feedback tools to improve the conversations on its network.
This includes a new system that will map out the “social neighborhoods” on Bluesky, meaning the connections between people who often interact and reply to one another. Bluesky says it’s prioritizing replies from people “closer to your neighborhood,” to make conversations you’re shown in your feed more relevant and familiar. The new “dislikes” may have some influence here, as well, Bluesky says.
This, in particular, is an area where competitor Threads, from Meta, has been challenged at times.
As newsletter writer Max Read noted last year, Threads tended to land its users in a confusing feed where conversations they weren’t connected to would appear, sometimes in mid-story. Read remarked that “it’s often impossible to figure out who is replying to whom and where and why you’re seeing certain posts. They appear from nowhere and lead to nowhere,” he wrote at the time.
Bluesky’s plan to map out social neighborhoods could address this issue as it scales.
The company also said its latest model does a better job at detecting replies that are “toxic, spammy, off-topic, or posted in bad faith,” and downranks these in threads, search results, and notifications.
Another change to the Reply button will now take users to the full thread instead of straight into the compose screen, which may encourage users to read the thread before responding.
This, says Bluesky, is a simple way to “reduce content collapse and redundant replies” — another criticism that tends to be levied at Twitter/X.
Plus, the company is tweaking the reply settings feature to make it more visible to users that they can control who is allowed to respond to their posts.
Have you seen a tweet from President Donald Trump saying he’ll refuse to invite whoever wins the World Series to the White House? Trump appears to say that it’s because he believes the game is rigged, either by the mafia or the Democrats. But the tweet isn’t real. The post has gone viral across just about every major social media platform, but it’s completely fake.
The post is made to look like it’s coming from President Trump’s official Truth Social account, the platform he owns and the first place where he posts all his most unhinged messages.
“NO MATTER WHO WINS I WILL REFUSE TO INVITE EITHER BASEBALL TEAM TO MY BALL ROOM AS THEY ARE BOTH RUN BY HIGHLY INEPT OFFICIALS FROM CALIFORNIA AND ONTARIO CANADA,” the fake tweet reads.
“I DON’T HOST LOSERS. WE ARE ACTIVELY INVESTIGATING MLB. THIS WORLD SERIES IS RIGGED, PROBABLY BY THE DEMS & THE MAFIA,” the fake tweet continues.
The screenshot spread far and wide over the weekend, showing up on Threads, X, Bluesky, Instagram, and Facebook. But Trump never wrote this one.
Fake tweet made to look like it’s from President Donald Trump about the World Series. Screenshot: Facebook
The reaction to the viral post was about what you’d expect, especially among fans of the Toronto Blue Jays, the team that’s currently playing the Los Angeles Dodgers for the World Series championship. The series is tied 1-1 and Game 3 will be played tonight.
Many Canadians made fun of the fake Trump tweet, since they didn’t think a Canadian team would even be invited to the White House in the first place. Trump slapped an additional 10% tariff on Canada over the weekend because he got mad about an ad that highlighted Ronald Reagan’s opposition to tariffs. US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent called the ad a “psy-op” by the Canadian government on Sunday. Trump has claimed the ad is fake, even falsely insisting it’s AI. But it’s real.
Things are different for the American team, which could very well get an invitation to the White House if they win. The Dodgers won the World Series last year and did indeed show up in April to snap pictures. Trump also received a “47” jersey from the team, since he’s kind of the 47th president. We say “kind of” because he’s only 47th if you don’t count by the number of people to hold the office, but by the number of consecutive terms that make up a single era. And even then, it’s not quite right since Grover Cleveland served two non-consecutive terms as well.
There are many red flags in the fake post from Trump, but the reference to the ballroom might be one of the most glaring. The president has demolished the East Wing of the White House, and he’s building a ballroom with “donations” from private companies and individuals who have given him millions. But even on the most ambitious timeline, the ballroom won’t be completed by the time a White House visit by the 2025 World Series champions might take place. Trump hasn’t announced a completion date for his ridiculous monstrosity, but the administration has said it will be done before his second term is up in Jan. 2029.
Another fake post that’s gotten less traction, but is still popping up here and there on social media, specifically calls out the Blue Jays.
“WE WILL BE INVESTIGATING THE UN AMERICAN BLUE JAYS WHO ARE ATTEMPTING TO STEAL OUR BELOVED WORLD SERIES,” the fake tweet reads. “THEY WILL DEFINITELY NOT BE INVITED TO THE WHITE HOUSE.”
Interestingly, author Stephen King seemed to fall for the first tweet in this article, poking fun at him on X, but the Community Notes that have attempted to fact-check King are referring to the second tweet about the Blue Jays. That’s how many fake Trump tweets seem to be doing the rounds these days. Nobody can keep any of this stuff straight.
The reason these fake tweets go viral is that it’s simply impossible to tell which screeds from President Trump are authentic. Trump has always been off his rocker, but he’s gotten increasingly unhinged during his second term, posting some of the weirdest things that a president has ever expressed in public.
As just one recent example, Trump posted an AI video of himself last month talking about “medbeds,” a bizarre conspiracy theory that claims there are real beds being hidden from the public that can heal all diseases. The video even includes a fake Trump touting these miracle cures and insisting they were going to be available soon to “restore every citizen to full health.”
In a world where the president is posting about medbeds—to say nothing of the Department of Homeland Security posting Nazi propaganda—it can be extremely difficult to tell what’s real. And that’s not going to change as long as the Trump regime remains in power. In fact, it’s likely to get much, much worse.
Bluesky is a social media platform loved by liberals, leftists, progressives, woke people, or whatever you want to call dislikers of Donald Trump. When a bunch of Donald Trump-associated accounts started using Bluesky ahead of this weekend in order to provoke a food fight, some were outraged or trolled back, but Bluesky’s robust blocking feature and cultural norms around ignoring right-wing trolls and harassers made their presence mostly a non-issue.
On Friday afternoon, the Trump 2.0 White House account, @whitehouse-47.bsky.social, announced its momentous arrival by posting a vaguely triumphalist montage of clips that referenced a lot of inside jokes for Republicans that probably don’t even register for outsiders, like one about Joe Biden’s autopen.
To clarify that this was not meant to earnestly signal the opening of a channel for information exchange between citizens and the head of the U.S. federal government, the text of the post was a sarcastically cheerful provocation: “What’s up, Bluesky? We thought you might’ve missed some of our greatest hits, so we put this together for you. Can’t wait to spend more quality time together! ❤️🇺🇸”
Mostly, however, the account got blocked. According to the Bluesky block tracking site Clearsky, @whitehouse-47.bsky.social is already the second most blocked account on Bluesky, just below Vice President J.D. Vance, who joined the site over the summer and has since secured a durable position atop the ranking.
The White House’s bid for attention was accompanied by similar introductory posts from the departments of State, Health and Human Services, Homeland Security, Commerce, the so-called “Department of War,” and many other cabinet departments and executive branch offices. Their posts and videos mostly just greet the users of Bluesky and hint at future dialogue in the same sarcastic tone at the initial White House post.
These accounts all show tens of thousands of blocks in the past 24 hours as of this writing—more blockers than followers in most cases. Some, like the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, earned themselves follower counts under 1,000. Most have spent the weekend posting platitudes, and receiving double-digit repost counts as users avoid taking the bait.
If the White House communications people who likely orchestrated all this were hoping to be able to generate epic lib meltdown content, it’s doubtful the mostly muted reaction was worth their effort. That’s because blocking on Bluesky is public, conspicuous, and designed to be total. Embeds will break. Reply chains will crumble. Further clashes, friction, and cognitive dissonance will drop off abruptly. The blocker and blockee will basically vanish from one another’s universes.
Bluesky blocking culture also includes the use of block lists, one-stop-shopping for blocking all accounts in some category or group with a single tap. There is even, somewhat more controversially, at least one block list of all users who interacted with the White House account rather then simply blocking it. The many, many blocked nodes in the network weaken the network effect of posting on a platform, which in turn appears to have resulted in low engagement for a bunch of accounts associated with the most powerful person in the world.
Bluesky critics like Mark Cuban call Bluesky an echo chamber, and it’s hard to argue that they’re entirely wrong. But all the Trump White House set out to do this weekend in that echo chamber was make a screeching noise, and since users are equipped with very effective earplugs, it wasn’t even all that annoying.
The Trump administration is taking its social media attacks on Democratic opponents to an unlikely platform, with the White House and numerous other government agencies joining Bluesky on Friday.
In its first post, the new White House account uploaded a highlight reel of Trump footage and memes, along with the message, “What’s up, Bluesky? We thought you might’ve missed some of our greatest hits, so we put this together for you.”
Other government agencies, including the Department of Homeland Security, the Department of Commerce, the Department of Transportation, the Department of the Interior, the Department of Health and Human Services, the Department of State, the Department of War, and the Department of Transportation all appeared to follow the White House by creating new Bluesky accounts, and all of them quickly posted messages attacking Democrats over the ongoing government shutdown.
“We heard this is a great place to have an open and honest dialogue, so we’re here to talk about how the Democrat shutdown is undermining our country on the world stage,” wrote the Department of State. (Legal experts have suggested that similar statements from government agencies likely violate the Hatch Act.)
The messages were generally written in a cheerful, trolling tone, suggesting that the administration’s social media teams were anticipating and even hoping for a negative response on a social network that’s widely known as a left-leaning alternative to Elon Musk’s X. And Bluesky users delivered, with many responses to the initial White House post bringing up Trump’s relationship with infamous sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.
“The reason they’re coming after this place is because they can’t control the people on it and it drives them nuts,” wrote The Onion CEO Ben Collins.
At the same time, many popular Bluesky accounts urged their followers to simply “block and move on,” with comedian Paul F Tomkins declaring that it’s “Weirdly fun to block the White House.”
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Less than 48 hours after joining, the White House has already become one of the most blocked accounts on Bluesky. According to ClearSky, which tracks Bluesky blocking stats, the White House account is blocked by around 91,000 accounts, while being followed by only 10,000. The only account that’s been blocked by more Bluesky users belongs to Vice President JD Vance, who joined back in June.
While the various new government accounts hadn’t quite reached those heights by Sunday morning, they accounted for all of the top 5 most blocked accounts in the last 24 hours. And other right-wing accounts seemed to be boasting about following the Trump administration to Bluesky and getting widely blocked.
For the past few days, my Bluesky feed has been increasingly filled with mysterious posts about waffles.
The back-and-forth seems to have started with a tongue-in-cheek post by Jerry Chen lampooning a form of social media sanctimoniousness that’s become all too recognizable on Bluesky: “(bluesky user bursts into Waffle House) OH SO YOU HATE PANCAKES??”
Bluesky CEO Jay Graber quoted this approvingly, adding, “Too real. We’re going to try to fix this. Social media doesn’t have to be this way.” Another user then asked, “have y’all banned Jesse Singal yet or” to which Graber simply replied, “WAFFLES!”
In a follow-up post, Graber wrote, “Harassing the mods into banning someone has never worked. And harassing people in general has never changed their mind.” She also alluded to the controversy by posting a nudge-nudge wink-wink photo of waffles, as did Singal.
Users continued to criticize her, with Graber firing back — when one compared the criticism to a customer threatening to cancel their service, she asked, “Are you paying us? Where?” When another suggested that she should apologize, Graber said, “You could try a poster’s strike. I hear that works.”
It might be tempting to dismiss this whole thing as another example of leftist infighting, especially since the Bluesky Discourse has already moved on to the question of whether “clanker” is a slur.
But the controversy also underlines ongoing tensions between the company and some of its most vocal users. It’s a tension that could be seen last month in skeptical responses to the company’s updated community guidelines, and in recurring complaints that Bluesky has been too quick to ban Palestinian and trans users, while offering leniency to big accounts like Singal’s.
It may be simplistic to reduce this tension to a single cause, but I suspect much of it comes from differing visions about what makes Bluesky special: If you think it’s Bluesky’s community, especially that early community of marginalized users, then it can feel like a betrayal when Bluesky executives seem unwilling to stand up for those users.
One user who posts under the name Katie Tightpussy speculated that Bluesky leadership has come to loathe “having a large social media app that they never wanted” and suggested that they spin it off so they can return “to Protocol Land where they never have to think about the opinions of plebeians ever again.”
Amidst the current controversy, she posted about “decentralization acceleration” and wrote, “We’re system architects at core. We built a decentralized network so you could run your own moderation,” then suggested that the company’s “upcoming healthy discourse project is taking some swings at the interaction model that drives these dynamics on Bluesky.”
Graber may even have foreseen some version of this conflict when Bluesky was starting out with vision of a decentralized system that allows users to migrate elsewhere if they’re unhappy with company leadership. As she reportedly wrote in Bluesky’s founding documents, “The company is a future adversary.”
Below, we’ve compiled the answers to some of the most common questions users have about Bluesky. And if you’ve made the switch, you can follow TechCrunch here as well as our team with our Starter Pack.
What is Bluesky?
Bluesky is a decentralized social app conceptualized by former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey and developed in parallel with Twitter. The social network has a Twitter-like user interface with algorithmic choice, a federated design and community-specific moderation.
Bluesky is using an open source framework built in-house, the AT Protocol, meaning people outside of the company have transparency into how it is built and what is being developed.
Dorsey introduced the Bluesky project back in 2019 while he was still Twitter CEO. At the time, he said Twitter would be funding a “small independent team of up to five open source architects, engineers, and designers,” charged with building a decentralized standard for social media, with the original goal that Twitter would adopt this standard itself. But that was before Elon Musk bought the platform, so Bluesky is completely divorced from X.
Upon signing up, users can create a handle which is then represented as @username.bsky.social as well as a display name that appears more prominent in bold text. If you’re so inclined, you can turn a domain name that you own into your username — so, for example, I’m known on Bluesky as @amanda.omg.lol.
The app itself functions much like X, where you can click a plus button to create a post of 256 characters, which can also include photos. Posts themselves can be replied to, retweeted, liked and, from a three-dot menu, reported, shared via the iOS Share Sheet to other apps, or copied as text.
You can search for and follow other individuals, then view their updates in your “Home” timeline. Previously, the Bluesky app would feature popular posts in a “What’s Hot” feed. That feed has since been replaced with an algorithmic and personalized “Discover” feed featuring more than just trending content.
For new users, Bluesky introduced a “Starter Pack” feature, which creates a curated list of people and custom feeds to follow in order to find interesting content right out of the gate. You can find TechCrunch’s Starter Pack right here.
User profiles contain the same sort of features you’d expect: a profile pic, background, bio, metrics and how many people they’re following. Profile feeds are divided into two sections, like X: posts and posts & replies. In January 2025, Bluesky also added a new video tab to user profiles.
There is also a “Discover” tab in the bottom center of the app’s navigation, which offers more “who to follow” suggestions and a running feed of recently posted Bluesky updates. In January 2025, Bluesky also introduced a vertical video feed to compete with TikTok.
Bluesky is also home to news organizations like Bloomberg, The Washington Post, and of course, TechCrunch! Since August 2024, Bluesky is also now allowing heads of state to sign up and join the platform for the first time.
In 2025, some prominent U.S. political figures set up accounts on the platform, like Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. By May of that year, Bluesky began verifying “notable” users with blue checkmarks, similar to how the blue check used to operate on Twitter.
In October 2024, Elon Musk announced that X’s block feature would work differently than it has in the past. The new block functionality allows users you have blocked to view your posts and your profile, but not the ability to interact with your posts. Some users believe this update to be a safety concern, leading to an influx in Bluesky sign-ups as its block feature is more traditional.
While Bluesky was initially kicked off as a project convened by Jack Dorsey in 2019 when he was CEO of Twitter, the social app has been an independent company since its inception in 2021.
Is Bluesky free?
Yes, and it is now open to the public.
How does Bluesky make money?
Bluesky’s goal is to find another means to sustain its network outside of advertising with paid services, so it can remain free to end users. On July 5, 2023, Bluesky announced additional seed round funding and a paid service that provides custom domains for end users who want to have a unique domain as their handle on the service. Bluesky has also emphasized that it does not want to “require selling user data for ads” in order to monetize its platform.
In November 2024, Bluesky announced it raised a $15 million Series A round and is developing a subscription service for premium features. Bluesky, however, noted its subscription model will not follow in the footsteps of X’s “pay to win” premium offerings. Users have spotted mockups teasing the subscription feature, dubbed Bluesky+, which could include features like higher quality video uploads and profile customizations.
In December 2024, Peter Wang announced a $1 million fund, dubbed Skyseed, that will offer grants to those building on Bluesky’s open source AT Protocol.
Is Bluesky decentralized?
Yes. Bluesky’s team is developing the decentralized AT Protocol, which Bluesky was built atop. In its beta phase, users can only join the bsky.social network, but Bluesky plans to be federated, meaning that endless individually operated communities can exist within the open source network. So, if a developer outside of Bluesky built their own new social app using the AT Protocol, Bluesky users could jump over to the new app and port over their existing followers, handle and data.
“You’ll always have the freedom to choose (and to exit) instead of being held to the whims of private companies or black box algorithms. And wherever you go, your friends and relationships will be there too,” a Bluesky blog post explained.
What is the AT Protocol?
Bluesky’s AT Protocol is a decentralized network that developers can use to build social apps. The social app Bluesky is built on the AT Protocol, which was created by the company Bluesky (yes, the naming conventions here are a bit confusing).
The ATProto community is working to rebuild much of what used to be Web 2.0, an earlier version of the social web that included social media websites, blogs, wikis, video- and photo-sharing sites, and other collaborative and hosted services. This time around, the apps are being built on open technology, not siloed into centralized services that tend to be operated by tech giants.
This open architecture gives users and developers as much power as the creators of the protocol.
Centralized tech platforms like Instagram, X, LinkedIn, and Reddit can also cultivate these kinds of developer communities by offering developers access to their APIs. However, that API access can be revoked at the discretion of those companies, leaving its developer community helpless and its users dissatisfied. This happened at Reddit in 2023. It was a total mess.
What third-party apps are built on the AT Protocol?
Many developers are building consumer-facing apps on Bluesky or its underlying AT Protocol. These apps are built on open technology, as opposed to being siloed within big tech’s centralized, opaque ownership.
Some social apps include Flashes, a photo viewing client; Spark, a TikTok-like app; and Skylight Social, which is backed by Mark Cuban.
Check out our more comprehensive list at various apps built within this ecosystem, including cross-posting apps, music apps, feed builders, and livestreamers.
Is Bluesky secure?
In October 2023, Bluesky added email verification as part of a larger effort to improve account security and authentication on the network. The addition is an important step forward in terms of making Bluesky more competitive with larger networks like X, which have more robust security controls. In December 2023, Bluesky allowed users to opt out of a change that would expose their posts to the public web following backlash from users.
Is Bluesky customizable?
Yes. In May 2023, Bluesky released custom algorithms, which it calls “custom feeds.” Custom feeds allow users to subscribe to multiple different algorithms that showcase different kinds of posts a user may want to see. You can pin custom feeds that will show up at the top of your timeline as different tabs to pick from. The feeds you pin, or save, are located under the “My Feeds” menu in the app’s sidebar.
In March 2024, the company announced “AT Protocol Grants,” a new program that will dole out small grants to developers in order to foster growth and customization. One of the recipients, SkyFeed, is a custom tool that lets anyone build their own feeds using a graphical user interface.
Is Bluesky on iOS and Android?
Yes. Bluesky has rolled out to Android users after it was initially launched to iOS users. Users can access Bluesky on the web here.
How does Bluesky tackle misinformation?
After an October 2023 update, the app will now warn users of misleading links by flagging them. If links shared in users’ posts don’t match their text, the app will offer a “possibly misleading” warning to the user to alert them that the link may be directing them somewhere they don’t want to go.
Image Credits: Bluesky on GitHubImage Credits:Bluesky on Github
In December 2024, the Bluesky Safety team posted that the company updated its impersonation policy to be “more aggressive,” adding that “impersonation and handle-squatting accounts will be removed.” The company said it is also exploring alternatives to its current domain handle verification process.
Bluesky also added blue check verification in May 2025, which makes it easier for users to verify that notable figures are who they say they are; unlike X, Bluesky does not allow users to buy this designation.
Has Bluesky had any controversies?
Bluesky has been embattled with moderation issues since its first launch. The app has been accused of failing to protect its marginalized users and failing to moderate racist content. Following a controversy about the app allowing racial slurs in account handles, frustrated users initiated a “posting strike,” where they refused to engage with the platform until it established guardrails to flag slurs and other offensive terms in usernames.
In December 2024, Bluesky also faced criticism when writer and podcast host Jesse Singal joined the platform. Singal has been cataloged by GLAAD’s Accountability Project for his writings on transgender issues and other matters. Bluesky users have reported Singal’s account en masse, leading the company to ban him, reinstate him, and then label his account intolerant by its moderation service.
As Bluesky has gotten more popular, critics have complained that the culture is disproportionatelyleft-leaning, which could potentially be a result of Bluesky’s growth as an alternative to X, which has become increasingly right-wing.
These are broad generalizations that will vary from user to user — Mark Cuban, for example, complained that people would not talk to him in good faith about business or AI — but the architecture of Bluesky allows for users to customize a more personalized experience.
What moderation features does Bluesky have?
In December 2023, Bluesky rolled out “more advanced automated tooling” designed to flag content that violates its Community Guidelines that will then be reviewed by the app’s moderation team. Bluesky has moderation features similar to ones on X, including user lists and moderation lists, and a feature that lets users limit who can reply to posts. However, some Bluesky users are still advocating for the ability to set their accounts to private.
In March 2024, the company launched Ozone, a tool that lets users create and run their own independent moderation services that will give users “unprecedented control” over their social media experience. In October 2024, Bluesky joined Instragram’s Threads app in an effort to court users who were frustrated by Meta’s moderation issues.
In January 2025, Bluesky published its 2024 moderation report that said it saw a 17x increase in moderation reports following the rapid growth on the platform. The report also noted that the largest number of reports came from users reporting accounts or posts for harassment, trolling, or intolerance — an issue that’s plagued Bluesky as it’s grown. To meet the demands caused by this growth, Bluesky increased its moderation team to roughly 100 moderators and will continue to hire.
What’s the difference between Bluesky and Mastodon?
Though Bluesky’s architecture is similar to Mastodon’s, many users have found Bluesky to be more intuitive, while Mastodon can come off as inaccessible: Choosing which instance to join feels like an impossible task on Mastodon, and longtime users are very defensive about their established posting norms, which can make joining the conversation intimidating. To remain competitive, Mastodon recently simplified its sign-up flow, making mastodon.social the default server for new users.
However, the launch of federation will make it work more similarly to Mastodon in that users can pick and choose which servers to join and move their accounts around at will.
Who owns Bluesky?
Though Jack Dorsey funded Bluesky, he is not involved in day-to-day development and no longer sits on the company’s board. The CEO of Bluesky is Jay Graber, who previously worked as a software engineer for the cryptocurrency Zcash, then founded an event-planning site called Happening.
This story was originally published in May 2023 and is updated regularly with new information.
Media pundits, journalists, and academics, including MSNBC commentator Matthew Dowd, have also been fired or targeted over their comments about Kirk. Executives from Comcast, which owns NBC Universal, sent out an email to employees seemingly referencing Dowd’s dismissal over an “unacceptable and insensitive comment about this horrific event. That coverage was at odds with fostering civil dialogue.” In response to a request for comment, Comcast redirected WIRED to the aforementioned letter.
Red Hood is also not the only cultural product being disappeared in light of Kirk’s death. Comedy Central has decided not to rerun the South Park episode “Got a Nut,” which satirized the right-wing activist. But Kirk himself had said the episode was “hilarious” and an example of the “cultural domination” of his Prove Me Wrong college campus debates; he even changed his show’s TikTok profile picture to an image of the South Park character Cartman parodying him. (The episode will still be available to stream on Paramount+.)
Kirk was one of the most influential conservative activists in the US. He cofounded Turning Point when he was just 18 and turned it into a multimillion-dollar enterprise. But his political views were frequently inflammatory, racist, and transphobic, and he had many critics, including people like Felker-Martin, who belonged to one of the groups he derided. In his final exchange before he was shot, Kirk was asked about transgender mass shooters. He responded that there were “too many,” repeating a myth that has been used to attack trans people.
Author Roxane Gay, who has spoken out in Felker-Martin’s defense, says that whether she agrees with Felker-Martin’s views “doesn’t matter.”
“Either you believe in free speech or you don’t,” she tells WIRED, describing DC Comics’ decision to pull Red Hood as the “overreaction of the century.”
From Trump’s plan to wipe “race-centered ideology” and trans people from the Smithsonian to the cancellation of The Late Show With Stephen Colbert, the campaign against Kirk’s critics and its impact on pop culture isn’t happening in a vacuum. Humor and satire are particularly triggering for authoritarian figures, according to curator and culture critic Hrag Vartanian, editor in chief of the arts publication Hyperallergic.
“Authoritarians can deal with violence. They can deal with everything except being laughed at,” Vartanian says.
Vartanian tells WIRED he has spoken with many artists who have delayed showing works about topics like the war in Gaza or queerness due to the current political environment, in a form of self-censorship.
Gay says because she has a family, she too has to take fewer risks. But she says she is still “shocked” that more writers aren’t openly backing Felker-Martin. “If it’s her today, it’s going to be someone else tomorrow,” she says.
For her part, Felker-Martin, who has also been outspoken in her support of Palestine, says that once she’s back on Bluesky, she’ll likely keep a lower profile.
Asked if there’s anything that’s making her feel positive right now, she recalls a recent baby shower for a queer family member.
“We had this huge crowd of trans and queer people, into which we dropped my very kind and normal parents. And it was just this really pleasant day with all of our lives kind of mixed together and kids running around,” she says. “I think that living in that is the best thing we can do for ourselves right now. Having and making community by being with each other.”
Bluesky, the funky, semi-decentralized Twitter spin-off, is rolling out age verification systems to comply with new regulations instituted in Europe and parts of the U.S. On Wednesday, the platform announced that it was expanding its verification systems in South Dakota and Wyoming.
The United Kingdom’s Online Safety Act created new requirements for platforms that want to operate within its borders, including steps to reduce the visibility of certain kinds of content that may not be age-appropriate for children. In July, Bluesky announced age verification checks for British users, as part of its compliance process with that law. In the U.S., meanwhile, the site has launched verification systems to deal with similar online safety laws that have popped up over the past few years, and which are designed to protect children from harmful content.
In a blog post, Bluesky said that it would be expanding its age-verification systems to new regions. The platform uses something it calls Kids Web Services (KWS), which offers a number of different ways for users to verify their ages, including ID scans and credit card checks. The platform also commented:
We recognize that promoting safety for young people is a shared responsibility, and we support the idea of collective action to protect children from online risks. We also recognize that governments may have strong, often conflicting, views on these issues and how to weigh competing priorities. In this rapidly evolving regulatory environment, our goal is to respect the law while balancing safety, free expression, and user privacy to serve the greater good of our community. Responding to new laws and regulations will require pragmatism and flexibility.
Age verification has become an increasingly important issue. It remains controversial, as privacy advocates hedge at its impact on the open internet. Meanwhile, companies—like porn platforms—have objected to it, largely due to the logistical difficulties of integrating such systems into their business models and the fact that the privacy risks are off-putting to their customers.
Earlier this month, an analysis by The Washington Post found that porn sites that followed the new rules for age checks were losing traffic, and users were flocking to shadier sites that were willing to skirt the law.
There are times when you may want to prevent videos and GIFs from automatically playing in your social media feeds. This could be because you’re trying to conserve cellular data, limit the addictiveness of these apps, or maintain better control over your viewing experience, as when a video is going viral that you don’t wish to see. Whatever the reason might be, here are the steps to turn off autoplaying videos and GIFs on popular social media platforms.
Facebook
To turn off autoplay on Facebook, navigate to your profile picture icon, which appears in the top right corner of the desktop version or in the bottom navigation bar of the mobile app. Then, scroll down to “Settings & Privacy,” then select “Preferences,” where you’ll find a menu option for “Media.” Within that menu, there is an option to toggle video playback in your Feed and in Stories. Select the “Never” option.
The quick path: Settings > Preferences > Media > Video Playback > Never.
Instagram
On the Instagram app, tap your profile picture in the bottom-right corner. Once you’re on your profile page, tap the menu icon in the upper right corner of your screen (it’s the icon with three horizontal lines). Then, scroll to “Settings and activity,” then navigate to “Your app and media,” where you’ll find “Media quality.” From there, you can toggle on the option to “Use less cellular data.”
This isn’t as foolproof as a “don’t autoplay content” setting, but it will at least slow things down if you’re off Wi-Fi. Instagram also won’t autoplay sounds unless you click on a post with sound first.
The quick path: Profile > Settings and activity > Your app and media > Media quality > Use less cellular data.
X (Twitter)
On X, navigate to your profile picture in the top left to access the sidebar (on desktop, the sidebar is already visible). Then, select “Settings and privacy” — this will be in smaller font at the bottom of the menu on the app, and on mobile, you have to tap the three dots at the end of the list to bring up more options, which includes “Settings and privacy.” Next, scroll down to “Accessibility, display, and languages,” which will open another menu with a “Data usage” option, where you can turn off “Video autoplay.”
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You can be extra thorough by navigating back to “Settings and privacy” and selecting “Display and sound.” There, you can toggle off “Media previews.”
The quick path: Settings and privacy > Accessibility, display, and languages > Data usage > Video autoplay, and Settings and privacy > Display and sound > Media previews.
Bluesky
Access Bluesky’s menu by tapping the three-line icon in the upper left corner of the mobile app, then choose “Settings” at the bottom of the list. On desktop, this menu is accessible via the sidebar. Select “Content and media,” which will display options that include “Autoplay videos and GIFs.” Toggle this option off.
The quick path: Settings > Content and media > Autoplay videos and GIFs.
Threads
Unfortunately, Meta’s two-year-old microblogging platform does not yet offer a way to turn off autoplay. Hopefully, that’s on the product roadmap.
Bluesky is expanding its features stateside. The service will require users in South Dakota and Wyoming to verify their ages in order to access direct messaging and adult content on the site.
The update comes after both states have enacted laws requiring online platforms that host “harmful” content to verify the ages of their users. Bluesky’s approach will mirror its actions in the UK, which also requires age checks following the passage of its Online Safety Act. The company has opted to use Epic Games’ Kids Web Services to conduct the checks and users can choose between several methods,including face scans, ID scans or using a credit card.
The service will still be available to people in the states that don’t verify their age, but specific features will be restricted. In an update, the company said “we believe this approach currently strikes the right balance.” Last month, the service opted to in the state of Mississippi rather than comply with a more restrictive age verification law that would have required it to block anyone whose age hadn’t been confirmed.
“To implement this change, we would have had to invest substantial resources in a solution that we believe limits free speech and disproportionately harms smaller platforms,” Bluesky explains. “We chose not to offer our service there at this time while legal challenges continue.”
The update comes as age verification laws have been ramping up in the US. So far, have passed laws requiring some form of age verification to access adult content, and numerous others have similar legislation in the works. In its post, Bluesky notes that it expects more regulations in other states and countries in the near term.
Bluesky has added a built-in bookmarking feature so users finally have a way to privately save posts on the platform. The update is out now on Bluesky’s website and app.
Bookmarks on Bluesky work pretty much like they do on any other service. Save a post and you can revisit it later from the “saved posts” section of the app and website. It’s overall a basic feature — there’s currently no way to organize your saves into folders, for example — but it’s a very long overdue addition to the platform.
Up to now, Bluesky users have technically been able to save posts via a workaround. Bluesky developer Jaz created a custom “pinned” feed that allowed subscribers to save posts by replying with a 📌 emoji. But while this provided a handy way to save posts in the absence of an official bookmarking feature, it wasn’t private since it created a public reply for every save. Now, though, there’s a handy tool to convert your previously “pinned” posts into private bookmarks. You can also opt to delete your public “pins” or leave them as is.
Per Shiffman and Wester, an “overwhelming majority” of respondents said that Bluesky has a “vibrant and healthy online science community,” while Twitter no longer does. And many Bluesky users reported getting more bang for their buck, so to speak, on Bluesky. They might have a lower follower count, but those followers are far more engaged: Someone with 50,000 Twitter/X followers, for example, might get five likes on a given post; but on Bluesky, they may only have 5,000 followers, but their posts will get 100 likes.
According to Shiffman, Twitter always used to be in the top three in terms of referral traffic for posts on Southern Fried Science. Then came the “Muskification,” and suddenly Twitter referrals weren’t even cracking the top 10. By contrast, in 2025 thus far, Bluesky has driven “a hundred times as many page views” to Southern Fried Science as Twitter. Ironically, “the blog post that’s gotten the most page views from Twitter is the one about this paper,” said Shiffman.
Ars social media manager Connor McInerney confirmed that Ars Technica has also seen a steady dip in Twitter referral traffic thus far in 2025. Furthermore, “I can say anecdotally that over the summer we’ve seen our Bluesky traffic start to surpass our Twitter traffic for the first time,” McInerney said, attributing the growth to a combination of factors. “We’ve been posting to the platform more often and our audience there has grown significantly. By my estimate our audience has grown by 63 percent since January. The platform in general has grown a lot too—they had 10 million users in September of last year, and this month the latest numbers indicate they’re at 38 million users. Conversely, our Twitter audience has remained fairly static across the same period of time.”
Bubble, Schmubble
As for scientists looking to share scholarly papers online, Shiffman pulled the Altmetrics stats for his and Wester’s new paper. “It’s already one of the 10 most shared papers in the history of that journal on social media,” he said, with 14 shares on Twitter/X vs over a thousand shares on Bluesky (as of 4 pm ET on August 20). “If the goal is showing there’s a more active academic scholarly conversation on Bluesky—I mean, damn,” he said.
And while there has been a steady drumbeat of op-eds of late in certain legacy media outlets accusing Bluesky of being trapped in its own liberal bubble, Shiffman, for one, has few concerns about that. “I don’t care about this, because I don’t use social media to argue with strangers about politics,” he wrote in his accompanying blog post. “I use social media to talk about fish. When I talk about fish on Bluesky, people ask me questions about fish. When I talk about fish on Twitter, people threaten to murder my family because we’re Jewish.” He compared the current incarnation of Twitter as no better than 4Chan or TruthSocial in terms of the percentage of “conspiracy-prone extremists” in the audience. “Even if you want to stay, the algorithm is working against you,” he wrote.
“There have been a lot of opinion pieces about why Bluesky is not useful because the people there tend to be relatively left-leaning,” Shiffman told Ars. “I haven’t seen any of those same people say that Twitter is bad because it’s relatively right-leaning. Twitter is not a representative sample of the public either.” And given his focus on ocean conservation and science-based, data-driven environmental advocacy, he is likely to find a more engaged and persuadable audience at Bluesky.
Bounce, a new technology that adds a critical component to the open social web, launches to the public on Monday. The cross-protocol migration tool offers a service that allows users of open social networks like Bluesky and Mastodon to move their follow graphs between their accounts, even though the networks rely on different underlying protocols.
Today, Mastodon users unhappy with the service can opt to move their account to a different Mastodon server, while Bluesky is developing technology that allows users to migrate their account to a new PDS (Bluesky’s term for “personal data server”) on its network. However, Mastodon runs on the ActivityPub Protocol and Bluesky on the AT Protocol, which has limited the ability to migrate accounts across the two platforms until now.
To work, Bounce uses technology first developed for Bridgy Fed, a tool that connects Mastodon and Bluesky by making users’ profiles on one service visible on the other.
To move accounts, Bounce first moves a user’s Bluesky account to a bridged account that straddles the two networks, then to the user’s Mastodon account. This migration also supports Pixelfed, an Instagram-like social app that also runs on ActivityPub, like Mastodon.
At launch, Bounce can migrate users from Bluesky to Mastodon or Pixelfed, but not the other way around. That’s because Bluesky’s infrastructure currently only allows users to move off their servers, but doesn’t allow migrations back. When that changes, Bounce will launch migration in the opposite direction, too.
In addition, early adopters should be aware that once they move their account off of Bluesky, they won’t be able to use their Bluesky credentials to log into the app again or other AT Protocol-based services again.
Developed by a nonprofit called A New Social, which is also the maker of Bridgy Fed, Bounce’s launch is particularly timely for Bluesky users in Mississippi. On Friday, Bluesky announced that it would block its service in the state rather than comply with a new age assurance law that it considers overly invasive from a privacy standpoint and that would require too many resources for Bluesky’s small team to manage. This has left Bluesky users in the state without access to the social network, highlighting the need for tools that would allow users to take their accounts elsewhere.
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Bounce’s beta is available starting Monday and is aimed at early adopters and open web enthusiasts who are willing to try the service and offer feedback. While the service is open to the public, users should familiarize themselves with the migration process before making the commitment to move their accounts, given that it’s not yet possible to move back to Bluesky after they leave.
Social networking startup Bluesky has made the decision to block access to its service in the state of Mississippi, rather than comply with a new age assurance law.
In a blog post published on Friday, the company explains that, as a small team, it doesn’t have the resources to make the substantial technical changes this type of law would require, and it raised concerns about the law’s broad scope and privacy implications.
Mississippi’s HB 1126 requires platforms to introduce age verification for all users before they can access social networks like Bluesky. On Thursday, U.S. Supreme Court justices decided to block an emergency appeal that would have prevented the law from going into effect as the legal challenges it faces played out in the courts.
As a result, Bluesky had to decide what it would do about compliance.
Instead of requiring age verification before users could access age-restricted content, this law requires age verification of all users. That means Bluesky would have to verify every user’s age and obtain parental consent for anyone under 18. The company notes that the potential penalties for noncompliance are hefty, too — up to $10,000 per user.
Bluesky also stresses that the law goes beyond child safety, as intended, and would create “significant barriers that limit free speech and disproportionately harm smaller platforms and emerging technologies.”
To comply, Bluesky would have to collect and store sensitive information from all its users, in addition to the detailed tracking of minors. This is different from how it’s expected to comply with other age verification laws, like the U.K.’s Online Safety Act (OSA), which only requires age checks for certain content and features.
Mississippi’s law blocks anyone from using the site unless they provide their personal and sensitive information.
“Unlike tech giants with vast resources, we’re a small team focused on building decentralized social technology that puts users in control,” the company’s blog post read. “Age verification systems require substantial infrastructure and developer time investments, complex privacy protections, and ongoing compliance monitoring — costs that can easily overwhelm smaller providers. This dynamic entrenches existing big tech platforms while stifling the innovation and competition that benefits users,” it noted.
Some Bluesky users outside Mississippi subsequently reported issues accessing the service due to their cell providers routing traffic through servers in the state, with CTO Paul Frazee responding Saturday that the company was “working deploy an update to our location detection that we hope will solve some inaccuracies.”
The company’s blog post notes that its decision only applies to the Bluesky app built on the AT Protocol. Other apps may approach the decision differently.
This post has been updated to reflect user issues outside Mississippi and Bluesky’s response.
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Users with Mississippi IP addresses can no longer access the Bluesky app. The decentralized social media network has explained in a post that Mississippi’s new age verification law for social networks “would fundamentally change” how it operates, and it wouldn’t be possible to comply with its small team and limited resources.
Bluesky says that while it does follow the UK’s Online Safety Act, it works very differently from Mississippi’s approach to age verification. In the UK, it’s only required to check for a user’s age if they’re accessing certain content and features. In Mississippi, however, it cannot allow anyone to access its service at all, unless they hand over sensitive data proving how old they are. Further, the platform will be required to keep track of which users are children under 18, and it will be responsible for making sure those users won’t be able to access “harmful materials.” Earlier this month, the Supreme Court decided not to intervene with the legislation, allowing it to go into effect.
The service says that it doesn’t have the significant resources needed to be able to build the required “verification systems, parental consent workflows and compliance infrastructure.” In addition, it could be penalized with up $10,000 per user if the government finds it to be non-compliant. Because only big tech companies can afford the costs associated with those requirements, Bluesky says the “dynamic entrenches existing big tech platforms while stifling the innovation and competition that benefits users.”
Bluesky will now show a note to any user accessing the service from Mississippi, telling them why it’s no longer available in the state.
X users may be migrating to bluer skies after a major change.
Bluesky is an open, ad-free social network that grew out of Twitter, now X, in 2019. The platform announced on Thursday that half a million new users signed up within a day of X announcing that it would be changing up its blocking feature “soon.” Blocked users on X will be able to see public posts but not like, reply or engage with them in any other way.
Although X said the change was to prevent people blocking others from sharing sensitive information about people they have blocked, X users stated that the move would support stalking, render the Block function useless and violate Google Play Store and Apple App Store requirements.
Meta’s Threads also appears to be experiencing a surge in users; it is currently first under the top free apps for iPhone list, with Bluesky coming in fifth. Threads surpassed 175 million users in July.
It’s easy to forget that there’s another social network besides Threads for people tired of Elon Musk’s . Bluesky is a fine alternative, as it definitely “feels” like Twitter. However, it has been lacking some of the features that made Twitter such an internet hotspot back in the day. Well, we just got a big one. The company just announced that users .
There are some caveats. First of all, the videos have to be under a minute. That’s a fairly huge hurdle for just about every piece of content other than TikTok-style shorts. As a comparison, allows for five minute videos. Also, the videos autoplay by default, though that can be handled in the settings. Finally, there’s a hard limit of 25 videos per user each day, though the company says it could tweak that in the future.
The platform supports most of the major video file types, including .mp4, .mpeg, .webm, and .mov files. Users can also attach subtitles to each video, which is a nice little bonus. There are some guardrails in place to protect against “spam and abuse.” Only users who have verified their email address can upload videos and illegal content will be “purged” from the infrastructure. There’s also a way to submit reports to the moderation team. Additionally, each video will be .
Update to version 1.91 of the mobile app to get started, though it also works via the desktop client. Not every user will be able to access this feature right away, as version 1.91 will be a gradual rollout to “ensure a smooth experience.”
Bluesky into the mix, which is something Threads doesn’t have. The platform may be a distant third, when compared to X and Threads, but it’s certainly growing. A massive influx of Brazilian users recently joined the social media site after .
