A busy news week for Bluesky, growing the network by 15% in a week. There are new types of labelers, Bluesky is banned in Pakistan, and much more.
The News
Growth
Bluesky grew by another 15% in a week, adding 3 million accounts. Bluesky now has a total of 23 million accounts. The growth of Bluesky has come with a variety of new challenges related to content moderation, access in Pakistan, and more:
Platformer spoke with Aaron Rodericks, Bluesky’s head of Trust and Safety. In the interview, Rodericks says that the company has decided to quadruple their contract workforce for content moderation from 25 to 100 people. He also says that the inflow has posed new challenges regarding CSAM, which now has started to appear. Rodericks is strongly focused on removing CSAM, and stated that due to the recent growth, the team has decided to prioritise safety over precision. This lead to an incident in which too multiple people got incorrectly banned for CSAM, and the team has been working on reinstating and appealing the mistakes. The episode shows the challenges that come with rapid growth, forcing the team to walk the difficult line between scaling up and rapidly remove the increasing number of banned material while not making mistakes and banning users by mistake.
That Bluesky is growing and not throttling links like other platforms, has also gotten the interest of major news publishers. Boston Globe reports a 3x traffic from Bluesky compared to Threads, as well as a 4.5x conversion rate. The Guardian only recently got active on Bluesky, and already sees a 2x traffic compared to Threads, all the while indicating this is likely an undercount in favor of Bluesky.
Pakistan is the first country to ban Bluesky. Pakistan had already limited access to X since February 2024, citing “escalating unrest and protests over allegations of election fraud.” Bluesky emerged as a new place for Pakistani people to talk online, as access to X has gotten much harder without a VPN. In November, Pakistan’s Council of Islamic Ideology declared the use of a VPN to be against Islamic law, and advised the government to ban the use of VPNs altogether. A day after Samaa.tv, one of the countries largest news channels, posted an article explaining the growing usage of Bluesky within Pakistan, Bluesky appeared to have been restricted in Pakistan.
Some other observations about Bluesky’s growth:
- The growing prominence of Bluesky has also impacted the scientific community, with both Science and Nature writing about how scientists are finding a new home on Bluesky.
- Specific communities such as the TTRPG community are finding a new place.
- Bluesky poses a new challenge for China’s state media.
- Bluesky apparently worries Elon Musk enough that he calls it Pedosky.
On Labelers
One continuing theme of this newsletter is how the Labeler system of Bluesky has evolved from a system meant for content moderation into different use cases, most notably for self-expression. This week saw the appearance of using labelers in a new way: as a form of accountability.
The Private School Labeler, Nepo Baby Labeler and Oxbridge Labeler all label famous UK people with the implicit goal to show that they are not regular people, but rich people from the elites. The Private School labeler even lists the yearly cost in tuition as part of the label. The US Government Contributions Labeler labels US politicians, and shows their top three corporate donors, as well as the top three industries that donate to that politician. This new type of labeler showcases aspect of elites that they often do not prefer to show themselves. It is not a use case I had seen coming for labelers, but I’m curious to see where people will take it, and what the impact of it will be on the community.
Account verification has come up regularly again, with people asking Bluesky to provide some form of account verification beyond the domain name verification. Bluesky has not interacted on that request, and remains steadfast in their conviction that domain name verification plus potential verification by third parties is the way to go. Journalist Hunter Walker has started a high-profile verification labeler where he personally verifies famous people and adds them to his own labeler as verified. The problem with these sort of labeler attempts is that it is hard to get a large enough number of people to actually use the labeler where it is widespread enough that impersonation attempts immediately get spotted. Walker’s labeler is one of the more well-known attempts in the space backed by a large account with good connections. It still only has a thousand likes, indicating how difficult it is to get a labeler that is wide-spread enough to make a meaningful impact on impersonation scams. Other verification labelers serve a specific community. For example, the labeler for the Microsoft community, which verifies Microsoft employees and MVPs, and the Pro Cycling Labeler verifies people within the professional cycling community. To me, specific use cases for a well-defined community seems like a more fruitful direction for verification labelers to head towards.
Competition with Threads
The growth of Bluesky, as well as it being hailed as the X replacement by news organisations such as The Verge, have put Threads and Meta on edge. Threads has rapidly added new features that it has blatantly copied from Bluesky:
- Threads has added custom feeds.
- You can now set the following feed as the default on Threads.
- Threads is working on their own version of Starter Packs.
- A redesign of the app where it shows the custom feeds at the top that is very similar to Bluesky.
Threads’ behaviour of copying features has not gone unnoticed, and the Financial Times reports (based on data from SimilarWeb) that Threads is only 1.5 times as large as Bluesky when it comes to daily US visitors. Personally, it seems to me that Threads is falling into a similar trap as Mastodon did, by focusing on technological features instead of the realisation that people and their posts is the only thing that matters for platform health.
AI Dataset
An employee at Hugging Face created a dataset of 1 million Bluesky posts and made them available on Hugging Face to “experiment with using ML for Bluesky”. The dataset was popular and became the top trending dataset on Hugging Face. Shortly after, 404 Media wrote an article “Someone Made a Dataset of One Million Bluesky Posts for ‘Machine Learning Research'” describing the situation. This quickly led to a backlash with parts of the Bluesky community who objected to their data being part of the dataset. The creator removed the dataset in response, writing that “While I wanted to support tool development for the platform, I recognize this approach violated principles of transparency and consent in data collection. I apologize for this mistake.”
In response to the situation, Bluesky gave a brief update, reiterating their commitment not to train generative AI on user data. They also noted that they are investigating a possibility for people to specify consent for their data to be used in AI training datasets, drawing comparisons to how websites use robots.txt.
The situation indicates the difficulty regarding how public data in an open network should be handled, as user expectations do not always line up with technical capabilities, nor are they always particularly consistent from a technological perspective. People’s expectations on how they feel comfortable that their data is being handled depends for a large part simply on vibes, for better or worse, and vibes are hard to manage. Nor is this a problem that is exclusive to people’s distrust of using their data for generative AI training, this is something that academic research also has to grapple with.
Bluesky and the DSA
Bluesky got in the news because a European Commission spokesperson said that Bluesky is not complying with DSA regulation. The DSA is mostly known for its regulation of “Very Large Online Platforms”, platforms that have over 45 million monthly active users in the EU, but also specifies certain requirements for all platforms in the EU. This sparked a minor news cycle with news outlets reporting that “Bluesky is breaking the rules in the EU”, and Bluesky responding that it will comply with EU regulation.
The regulation that is the matter is that every online platform operating in the EU needs to have a dedicated page on their website which reports the number of active European users as well as the address of where the organisation is located. Bluesky does not have this page currently. The DSA also has an exception of this requirement for small and micro enterprises, and it seems to my non-lawyer opinion that Bluesky is exempted from this requirement. This exemption might not last long with the growth Bluesky is experiencing however, and with the compliance being a fairly minor process it seems to me that Bluesky will likely simply comply.
The Links
There were so many new tools, tech, updates and articles for this week that I’ve posted all the links into a separate article, which you can find here.
And that’s all for this week, thanks for reading! You can subscribe to my newsletter to receive the weekly updates directly in your inbox below, and follow this blog @fediversereport.com and my personal account @laurenshof.online.