Bluesky keeps growing, and so do its problems

It's undoubtedly a good time to be upstart social media network Bluesky given its rapid growth in the wake of the US presidential election, but questions of moderation and compliance matters are growing along with the influx of humans seeking bluer pastures. 

According to a stat page developed by Bluesky backend dev Eric Volpert, the site is nearing 24 million users as of writing, up from 13 million in late October. For reference, Bluesky had around three million users when it opened to the public in February.

The surge in users is supported by data published last month by Similarweb, which noted what it described as a "dramatic uptick" in users on the platform in November. Along with a sharp spike in user growth, Similarweb also said that Bluesky has surpassed Meta's Threads in daily web-based visits in the US and UK, though Threads remains ahead globally.

While Bluesky still hasn't reached the self-professed levels of Threads (whose chief Adam Mosseri said had 275 million monthly active users last month), the Bluesky team did claim over the US Thanksgiving break that engagement on the platform had already surpassed that of Threads and Twitter (now X) in specific instances, particularly in terms of interactions with certain publications. Users have reportedly fled X since owner Elon Musk leaned hard into politicizing the app. 

"We could go on about how we welcome publishers, we don't demote links, we encourage independent developers to build apps and extensions on top of Bluesky's network," the platform said in a November 29 blog post. "But instead, we'll show you." 

Citing Bluesky posts from engagement team members at the Boston Globe and The Guardian, engagement numbers on articles were several times over what they see with Threads. Another poster indicated that, despite The New York Times having 55.2 million followers on X and only 679,300 on Bluesky, engagement on the latter was significantly higher.  

Matias Capeletto, a developer on the Vite front-end web development tool team, noted that "we have 6% of the followers here compared to the 100k in X," but an announcement of the 6.0 release of Vite was quickly closing in on the number of engagements despite the smaller follower count. 

"Most of the comments and quotes from OSS maintainers happened [on Bluesky]," Capaletto said. "I don't know about other communities, but OSS web dev is a Bluesky game now." 

Mo' users, mo' problems

Take a look at Bluesky's custom feed of posts from its team, and you'll notice pretty quickly that it's not all cloudless sunshine and rainbows. 

Along with reporting a bunch of anecdotal engagement claims on Thanksgiving day, the Bluesky safety team also posted a thread about its impersonation policy in the wake of a November 27 Substack post from Alexios Mantzarlis, the director of Cornell Tech's Security, Trust, and Safety Initiative, that found 44 percent of the top 100 most-followed BlueSky accounts had doppelgängers on the platform. 

"Most are cheap knock-offs of the bigger account, down to the same bio and profile picture," Mantzarlis said. "Only 16% of the duplicates that I reviewed had an 'impersonation' label."

In response, Bluesky noted it was "working behind the scenes to help many organizations and high-profile individuals set up their verified domain handles," while also updating its impersonation policy to be more aggressive. 

The platform also claimed to have quadrupled the size of its moderation team, though it's not clear how large the team was before and Bluesky didn't immediately respond to questions for this story. 

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Along with those changes, Bluesky said all "parody, satire or fan accounts … must clearly label themselves in both the display name and bio," with noncompliant accounts getting an impersonation label, though presumably only if someone reports the account. 

Bluesky said it's looking into "additional options to enhance account verification," but didn't share specifics. 

Along with impersonation, the surge has also led to a predictable rise in harmful content that Bluesky said it's trying to combat by making "some short-term moderation choices to prioritize recall over precision." 

"This resulted in over-enforcement and temporary suspensions for multiple users," the Bluesky safety team said. "We have reinstated accounts of some users, and are continuing to review appeals." The platform hopes its expanded moderation team will help improve the precision of its moderation actions, but such delays and the use of AI to moderate content are likely to continue if user growth doesn't slow down. 

Speaking of AI, Bluesky also reiterated last week that it "will not train generative AI on user data," but admitted it can do little to control such actions by third parties scraping Bluesky for user content. 

"Websites can specify whether they consent to outside companies crawling their data with a robots.txt file, and we're investigating a similar practice here," Bluesky said in last week's post. "This might look like a setting that allows Bluesky users to specify whether they consent to outside developers using their content … [but] it will be up to outside developers to respect these settings." 

Outside of issues with moderation, impersonation, and AI scraping worries, the company is also facing legal challenges in the European Union, as The Register recently reported. 

While not large enough to be considered a "Very Large Online Platform" under the EU Digital Services Act, the European Commission is already concerned that it is falling short of compliance with rules for smaller platforms by not properly reporting user numbers. Bluesky told us it's working to get compliant, but the problem indicates a trend: Bluesky is growing faster than its leadership probably expected. 

That's not a bad thing, necessarily, but expect more bumps in the road as the sky gets more crowded. ®