In the last month or so, the Bluesky team has made some updates and changes to the network; adding reply controls, starting to make the network publicly available, and working on the bulk follow spam accounts.

Reply controls

One of the main features recently released is the Thread Reply Controls. When you compose a post, you can now select who is able to comment. You can either select no-one, only accounts who are mentioned in the post, only your followers, or accounts that are on one of your lists.

Giving people control over who can comment is a significant improvement for the safety. It can help cut down on annoying or harmful replies. It should be noted that these reply controls can only be set during the creation of the post, and can not be changed afterwards. This means it is not possible to apply extra limitations on comments in case a post goes unexpectedly viral.

Public visibility of network

Soon, Bluesky will make the entire network publicly visible. Currently it is not possible in the standard web interace to view posts or profiles without an account, giving the impression that the network is private. However, the entire network has always been public, with posts and accounts visible for everyone, if one used 3rd party tools or the API.

As part of the preparation for federation and opening the entire network for everyone, Bluesky will soon be making all posts and profiles publicly visible for people without an account. When the team announced this a few weeks ago, it came with quite a few critiques that people had a need for their profile to be private, and that they did not want their posts to be easily accessible.

In order to accommodate the needs and requests for privacy, Bluesky has added the ability for people to opt out of the public web interface in a new setting. This reintroduces the current friction in viewing peoples profiles and posts: it is currently possible, but requires a certain technical know-how and effort. However, it is not certain that other third party clients will respect the setting. It can also create a false sense of security, where people think their posts are private when they have turned on the feature, when in practice it means that they are obscured instead, and still accessible to those who really want access.

Bluesky is aware that this opt-out setting is not equal to a full privacy setting, and the language used reflects this: the setting says that it will ‘Discourage apps from showing my account to logged-out users’, and comes with a warning that it does not make your account private.

Bulk following spam

Finally, Bluesky is stepping up enforcement against engagement farming. There are quite a few accounts that try to gain followers by following tens of thousands account at the same time, with the hope that these accounts will follow them back. These accounts will now get labelled as spam. The hope is that this label both deter the behaviour. With Bluesky’s composable moderation, the default value is that posts from accounts labelled as spam are hidden.