Progress Update: Building Healthier Social Media

October 31, 2025

by The Bluesky Team

At Bluesky, we’re building a place where people can have better conversations, not just louder ones. We’re not driven by engagement-at-all-costs metrics or ad incentives, so we’re free to do what’s good for people. One of the biggest parts of that is the replies section. We want fun, genuine, and respectful exchanges that build friendships, and we’re taking steps to make that happen.

So far, we’ve introduced several tools that give people more control over how they interact on Bluesky. The followers-only reply setting helps posters keep discussions focused on trusted connections, mod lists make it easier to share moderation preferences, and the option to detach quote posts gives people a way to limit unwanted attention or dogpiling. These features have laid the groundwork for what we’re focused on now: improving the quality of replies and making conversations feel more personal, constructive, and in your control.

In our recent post, we shared some of the new ideas we were starting to develop to encourage healthier interactions. Since then, we’ve started rolling out updates, testing new ranking models, and studying how small product decisions can change the tone of conversations across the network.

We’re testing a mix of ranking updates, design changes, and new feedback tools — all aimed at improving the quality of conversation and giving people more control over their experience.

Social proximity

We’re developing a system that maps the “social neighborhoods” that naturally form on Bluesky — the people you already interact with or would likely enjoy knowing. By prioritizing replies from people closer to your neighborhood, we can make conversations feel more relevant, familiar, and less prone to misunderstandings.

Dislikes beta

Soon, we’ll start testing a “dislike” option as a new feedback signal to improve personalization in Discover and other feeds. Dislikes help the system understand what kinds of posts you’d prefer to see less of. They may also lightly inform reply ranking, reducing the visibility of low-quality replies. Dislikes are private and the signal isn’t global — it mainly affects your own experience and, to an extent, others in your social neighborhood.

Improved toxicity detection

Our latest model aims to do a better job of detecting replies that are toxic, spammy, off-topic, or posted in bad faith. Posts that cross the line are down-ranked in reply threads, search results, and notifications, reducing their visibility while keeping conversations open for good-faith discussion.

Reply context

We’re testing a small change to how the “Reply” button works on top-level posts: instead of jumping straight into the composer, it now takes you to the full thread first. We think this will encourage people to read before replying — a simple way to reduce context collapse and redundant replies.

Reply settings refresh

Bluesky’s reply settings give posters fine-grained control over who can reply, but many people don’t realize they exist. We’re rolling out a clearer design and a one-time nudge in the post composer to make them easier to find and use. Better visibility means more people can shape their own conversations and prevent unwanted replies before they happen. Conversations you start should belong to you.

We won’t get everything right on the first try. Building healthier social media will take ongoing experimentation supported by your feedback. This work matters because it tackles a root flaw in how social platforms have been built in the past — systems that optimize for attention and outrage instead of genuine conversation. Improving replies cuts to the heart of that problem.

Over the next few months, we’ll keep refining these systems and measuring their impact on how people experience Bluesky. Some experiments will stick, others will evolve, and we’ll share what we learn along the way.