How to Remove NSFW and Spam Accounts from Bluesky

If you’ve been on any social media, including Bluesky, you’re no stranger to NSFW or spam accounts. Despite each platform’s best efforts to eliminate or contain them, many accounts still manage to slip through the cracks. It may feel hopeless to try removing them completely from your social media experience, but it doesn’t have to be! In this article, we’ll be exploring Bluesky’s spam and NSFW flagging system, where it falters, and how to utilize BluePilot to ensure these accounts don’t end up in your following.

Bluesky’s Flagging System for NSFW and Spam Accounts

Bluesky has a moderation system which identifies and labels accounts that are NSFW or spam. Settings do exist on Bluesky which lets you customize the visibility of NSFW on your feed. It can be found in your settings under “Moderation” and “Adjust Content Filters”. You have three choices:

• Hide all the NSFW content.
• Be warned about NSFW and see the content only if you choose to.
• Make all NSFW content visible by default.

There are also self-labeling options. They allow Bluesky users to label their own content as NSFW using tags such as “sexual” or “nudity”. If you post NSFW content without using these labels, you may be subject to restrictions on your account.

This level of customization does not exist for bot or spam accounts, but Bluesky still flags them. They do this by monitoring the amount of actions your account takes per hour (estimated to be a limit of about 1,666 actions). Once you surpass the maximum amount, your account may be labeled as spam. Yes, that means you have a chance of being impacted even if you are not a spam or bot account.

Users can see when Bluesky flags an account as spam. The spam tag becomes visible to other users, giving them the autonomy to unfollow or block an account if they notice it. That also means Bluesky will not automatically remove these accounts from the platform or from your following if you follow them.

For users with a large follower and following list, being able to weed out these types of accounts is tedious and challenging. It requires you to search through your followers and following list regularly and unfollow manually.

If you are someone who is posting content that would be classified as spam or NSFW we strongly recommend that you self identify as that with Bluesky. If you choose not to, Bluesky will likely tag you anyway and/or suspend your account.

Why Bluesky’s is Bad at Flagging Accounts for NSFW and Spam

Bluesky can’t be expected to catch every single account that fits into one of these two categories. They have to walk a very fine line of ensuring they don’t catch accounts that are genuine inside these filters. It is a very quick way to lose the love of the people.

This is where third party tools can come in handy as the restrictions or risk is up to the individual user.

Start filtering out all NSFW and Spam accounts - not just the obvious ones that Bluesky sees.

How to Remove NSFW and Spam Accounts on Bluesky Automatically

We’ve developed a tool that enables you to automatically detect and unfollow NSFW and spam accounts on Bluesky. Bluepilot’s Smart Unfollow feature is capable of reading tags from Bluesky’s own flagging system to identify and filter accounts who are NSFW or spam. Additionally, we have built in additional intelligence / analysis on accounts that you follow to look for spam or NSFW tendencies, keywords, etc. The combination of these two features means that our spam filter catches more accounts than the Bluesky default. Here’s what it does for you:

• Show you accounts that are labeled as NSFW, spam, or inactive.
• Show you accounts that don’t follow you back.
• Identify accounts you follow that have been hacked and, as a result, are now tagged as NSFW or spam.
• Identify accounts you follow that have shifted their content and are newly tagged as NSFW or spam.
• Make smart recommendations about who you should unfollow and why.
• Automatically unfollows accounts you don’t want on your feed.

At BluePilot, we want to make using Bluesky more seamless than ever before. We’re intent on filling the gaps left by Bluesky with user-made tools designed to further customize your social media experience.

This is especially relevant for up and coming influencers and content creators. Bluesky wasn’t initially created with these types of users in mind, but our features are designed to help track, manage, and grow your following. With BluePilot, you grow on Bluesky organically, and most importantly, on your terms.

Start enhancing your Bluesky experience today.