We're stepping up enforcement of the Community Guidelines against spam and automated unsolicited interactions on Bluesky, such as bulk follow/unfollow and other forms of engagement farming.
Details threaded: 🧵
Today, we're sending warning emails to several dozen accounts that have engaged in these patterns of behavior.
In the coming days, we'll apply the "spam" label to accounts that have not stopped their patterns of automated and spammy behavior after this warning email.
Behind-the-scenes: We're able to better regulate spam and automated behavior on the network in part because we've deployed updated automation that helps with spam detection, as we previously shared here:
This week, we’re deploying more advanced automated tooling to flag content that violates the Community Guidelines to our moderation team.
We’ll iterate on this so that mods can review offensive content, spam, etc. without any user seeing it first. That said, your reports help keep the network safe!
That's for the best as in my first couple months being on Bluesky, I noticed people following me, sometimes I follow back or don't follow and then outta no where I get unfollowed. As what do you expect? For me to engage with you by buying art with money I don't have?
I might be daft but I don’t really understand why people following accounts and then later unfollowing them is a big deal.
I mostly like to engage with accounts that want to engage with me. I like conversations between people not just reading stuff by others if they don’t like my stuff. 🤷🏻♂️
I can understand if people are following and unfollowing on a massive scale that might be annoying and antisocial, but on a small scale it seems like no big deal to me.
I doubt they care about the small scale ones either. Specifically following people and then unfollowing to get your follower ratio up is the spammy behaviour.
Essentially accounts like that amass a heavy number of followers and then sell off the accounts.
Next thing you know you thought you were following “Cute Kitties” and now you’re following some propaganda account that’s spewing bile.
Let me get this straight: You're banning bots so you've deployed bots to detect and ban bots. So who detects and bans your bots? Who watches the watchers?
Hey looks like someone is giving away invites to randos, not ensuring they are human beings. Is this against policy? This entire thread looks like a comment bomb against bluesky tbh.
There have been some gimmick accounts that have done this intentionally from the very beginning (very well knowing what they’re doing) and gained a sizeable following as a result of bulk following users. I’m guessing something would be done about that too. It really should be strictly discouraged.
Unfortunately, can’t really make them force unfollow, so even when blocking the user, they’d still count towards the follower count despite not being a legitimate follower.
not really. you can control who you follow but can't change who someone else follows because of how the protocol/account system works. i wrote a little thread about it a few months ago that goes into a bit more detail if you're interested
[1/3] i see this asked a lot & dug into it a while back: each account functions kinda like a github repository. there's no central database for "x follows y" or "y blocks x". all your data is stored in a repo attached to your DID, including follows & blocks so you can migrate to another instance.
no, it isn't a single server. we are federated right now, on many servers. you're on enoki, i'm on puffball. this is all built with scale in mind, what you are suggesting doesn't scale once people are running their own pds's. you can't write to someone else's user repo, and that's a good thing
correct, many have voice that concern, and I believe they said it was in the long list of features they are working on.
Check bsky.app for more up-to-date info🎶
Muting will not help to get rid of followers I don't like to seem to be related to by other people.
Imagine there is a radical political party and an account connected to them follows my account. There is nothing I can do about it. If I mute them, the account will still be listed as a follower.
"Remove this follower"
Is the feature you are asking for.
Blocking
Insulate you & the other from seeing each other posts.
If political cots is the issue, block should work, it shows:
1. you did not follow back
2. you blocked
Blocking AND reporting
are the strongest tools
to report violations
Please incorporate a feature to conceal the individuals we follow. Additionally, it would be beneficial to include functions such as long-pressing on a tweet to quote tweet and double-tapping to retweet.
