Building Healthier Social Media: Updated Guidelines and New Features

Public discourse on social media has grown toxic and divisive. Traditional social platforms drive polarization and outrage because they feed users content through a single, centralized algorithm that is optimized for ad revenue and engagement. Unlike those platforms, Bluesky is building a social web that empowers people instead of exploiting them.

Bluesky started as a project within Twitter in 2019 to reimagine social from the ground up — to be an example of “bluesky” thinking that could reinvent how social worked. With the goal of building a healthier, less toxic social media ecosystem, we spun out as a public benefit corporation in 2022 to develop technologies for open and decentralized conversation. We built Authenticated Transfer so Twitter could interoperate with other social platforms, but when Twitter decided not to use it, we built an app to showcase the protocol.

When we built the app, we first gave users control over their feed: In the Bluesky app, users have algorithmic choice — you can choose from a marketplace of over 100k algorithms, built by other users, giving you full control over what you see. There is also stackable moderation, allowing people to spin up independent moderation services, and giving users a choice in what moderation middleware they subscribe to. And of course there is the open protocol, which lets you migrate between apps with your data and identity, creating a social ecosystem with full data portability. Just today, we announced that we are taking the next step in decentralization.

Although we focused on building these solutions to empower users, we still inherited many of the problems of traditional social platforms. We’ve seen how harassment, vitriol, and bad-faith behavior can degrade overall conversation quality. But innovating on how social works is in our DNA. We’ve been continuously working towards creating healthier conversations. The quote-post used to let harassers take a post out of context, so we gave users the ability to disable them. The reply section often filled up with unwanted replies, so we gave users the ability to control their interaction settings.

Our upcoming product changes are designed to strengthen the quality of discourse on the network, give communities more customized spaces for conversation, and improve the average user’s experience. One of the features we are workshopping is a “zen mode” that sets new defaults for how you experience the network and interact with people. Another is including prompts for how to engage in more constructive conversations. We see this as part of our goal to make social more authentic, informative, and human again.

We’ve also been working on a new version of our Community Guidelines for over six months, and in the process of updating them, we’ve asked for community feedback. We looked at all of the feedback you gave and incorporated some of your suggestions into the new version. Most significantly, we added details so everyone understands what we do and do not allow. We also better organized the rules by putting them into categories. We chose an approach that respects the human rights and fundamental freedoms outlined in the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights. The new Guidelines take effect on October 15.

In the meantime, we’re going to adjust how we enforce our moderation policies to better cultivate a space for healthy conversations. Posts that degrade the quality of conversations and violate our guidelines are a small percentage of the network, but they draw a lot of attention and negatively impact the community. Going forward, we will more quickly escalate enforcement actions towards account restrictions. We will also be making product changes that clarify when content is likely to violate our community guidelines.

We were built to reimagine social from the ground up by opening up the freedom to experiment and letting users choose. Social media has been dominated by a few platforms that have closed off their social graph and squashed competition, leaving users few alternatives. Bluesky is the first platform in a decade to challenge these incumbents. Every day, more people set up small businesses and create new apps and feeds on the protocol. We are continuing to invest in the broader protocol ecosystem, laying a foundation for the next generation of social media developers to build upon.

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Today’s Community Guidelines Updates

In January, we started down the path of updating our rules. Part of that process was to ask for your thoughts on our updated Community Guidelines. More than 14,000 of you shared feedback, suggestions, and examples of how these rules might affect your communities. We especially heard from community members who shared concerns about how the guidelines could impact creative expression and traditionally marginalized voices.

After considering this feedback, and in a return to our experimental roots, we are going to bring a greater focus to encouraging constructive dialogue and enforcing our rules against harassment and toxic content. For starters, we are going to increase our enforcement efforts. Here is more information about our updated Community Guidelines.

What Changed Based on Your Feedback

• Better Structure: We organized individual policies according to our four principles – Safety First, Respect Others, Be Authentic, and Follow the Rules. Each section now better explains what's not allowed and consolidated related policies that were previously scattered across different sections.
• More Specific Language: Where you told us terms were too vague or confusing, we added more detail about what these policies cover.
• Protected Expression: We added a new section for journalism, education, advocacy, and mental health content that aims to reduce uncertainty about enforcement in those areas.

Our Approach: Foundation and Choice

We maintain baseline protections against serious harms like violence, exploitation, and fraud. These foundational Community Guidelines are designed to keep Bluesky safe for everyone.

Within these protections, our architecture lets communities layer on different labeling services and moderation tools that reflect their specific values. This gives users choice and control while maintaining essential safety standards.

People will always disagree about whether baseline policies should be tighter or more flexible. Our goal is to provide more detail about where we draw these boundaries. Our approach respects human rights and fundamental freedoms as outlined in the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights, while recognizing we must follow laws in different jurisdictions.

Looking Forward

Adding clarity to our Guidelines and improving our enforcement efforts is just the beginning. We also plan to experiment with changes to the app that will improve the quality of your experience by reducing rage bait and toxicity. We may not get it right with every experiment but we will continue to stay true to our purpose and to listen to our community as we go.

These updated guidelines take effect on October 15, and will continue to evolve as we learn from implementation and feedback. Thank you for sharing your perspectives and helping us build better policies for our community.