The decision to limit the spread of nudity may have been affected in part by the potential future growth of Bluesky as it tries to move out of its beta phase and become a viable alternative to Twitter, according to Are, who believes Bluesky’s team could well be asking themselves questions like: “If we want to grow, and there’s a bunch of people complaining about seeing ass, will we grow if we keep allowing that?”
In many ways, Bluesky is encountering—early on in its development—a fundamental question that every online platform or presence eventually has to answer. Sexual expression is a driver of growth for online platforms, while simultaneously also being the first thing that people latch on to as unacceptable once a platform reaches any kind of critical mass.
“My opinions on this boil down to, ‘Yeah I’d rather not see it’ or have it readily accessible,” says one Bluesky user who raised questions about why there had been backlash to the ban, and who requested anonymity because they had already experienced pushback from fellow Bluesky users for voicing their opinion. “Tons of people in my life have had issues with sex and porn addiction, and it being available behind a quick setting change on-off switch doesn’t really help,” he says.
The anonymous user suggests that Bluesky could follow an approach taken by Reddit, which allows users to block access to all properly-labeled “not safe for work” (NSFW) subreddits. “Bluesky has their current ‘turn off explicit content’ system, but you fall into the explicit labeling issue,” he says. Additionally, he says that the current system labels some content as nudity when it isn’t, while missing some that is.
For Sarah T. Roberts, faculty director at the UCLA Center for Critical Internet Inquiry, Bluesky’s challenges in tackling the wave of nudes highlights a naivety around user behavior. “Once again, a platform comes to market and acts surprised when users try to game and break things, and when they post nudity,” she says.
That lack of preparedness for what Roberts thought would be an inevitability could scupper Bluesky’s future growth. “Content moderation decisions as an afterthought, whatever level of permissiveness is decided upon, are costly both from a financial and a PR perspective,” she says. “Surely it wouldn’t have taken a genius to predict this turn of events. So why is it once again a surprise and not an inevitability?”
Whether the platform expected such user behavior isn’t known. Jay Graber, CEO of Bluesky, forwarded an interview request to Bluesky’s unnamed press team, who declined to provide anyone for an interview but instead directed WIRED to their FAQ page. One member of the Bluesky team posted that the decision to implement a “no boobs (or dicks, or asses) on whats [sic] hot” policy was “a difficult line to walk.” By default, Bluesky users will have a “show nudity” toggle switched on when they join, and “would prefer to keep it that way.” That means if people proactively follow a user who decides to share nudity, they will see it. “But whats [sic] hot is a bit different as you didn’t opt in,” they skeeted.
