Moderation lists are one of Bluesky's most powerful features and one of its most contentious. They let a single person's curation work protect thousands of other users – and they let a single person's mistake affect thousands of other users. Both things are true.

This is how they actually work in 2026.

The Two Types

Mute list Block list
Effect on you You stop seeing their posts You stop seeing them and they cannot interact with you
Can they see your posts? Yes No
Can they reply to you? Yes (you just don't see it) No
Do they know? No notification, but list is public Blocks are visible on the protocol
Reversible Unsubscribe Unsubscribe

The key distinction: a mute list is quiet, a block list is loud. Blocks on Bluesky are public records – the fact that you blocked someone is discoverable, which is unusual among social platforms and catches people out.

How Subscribing Works

The mechanic that makes moderation lists powerful: you can subscribe to someone else's list.

  1. Open the list – usually shared as a link or found on someone's profile.
  2. Choose Mute accounts or Block accounts.
  3. Everyone on the list is now muted or blocked for you.
  4. When the list owner adds someone, they are muted or blocked for you too – automatically, with no action on your part.

That last point is the whole value proposition and the whole risk. You are delegating moderation authority over your own feed to whoever maintains that list, on an ongoing basis. Choose carefully.

What Is Public (All of It)

Moderation lists are stored as records on the AT Protocol, which means:

  • The list is public. Name, description, creator.
  • The membership is public. Anyone can enumerate who is on it.
  • Your subscription is generally discoverable. Block records are public; if you subscribe to a blocklist, those blocks are on the record.
  • There are no private lists. Not a missing feature – a structural consequence of the protocol.

We covered the full privacy picture in are Bluesky lists public?. The short version: if you would not post it, do not put it in a list.

The Case For and Against Community Blocklists

The case for

Blocklists solved a real problem. When a coordinated harassment campaign targets a community, individual blocking does not scale – the targets spend their day blocking instead of posting. A shared list lets one person do that work once and protect everyone who trusts them. For marginalized communities on the platform, this has been genuinely load-bearing.

The case against

The failure modes are equally real:

  • No due process. Being added is instant; being removed depends entirely on the list owner responding to you.
  • Guilt by association. Some lists add accounts for following or interacting with someone else on the list.
  • Scale amplifies error. A wrong addition to a list with 20,000 subscribers effectively deplatforms someone from a large slice of the network.
  • Opacity. Many lists do not publish their criteria, and you often will not know you are on one until your engagement quietly collapses.

Both of these are honest descriptions of the same tool. Bluesky's design bets that user-selected moderation beats centralized moderation, and this is what that bet looks like in practice – more agency, less consistency.

How to Check If You're on a Blocklist

Because membership is public, this is answerable.

  • Community checkers. Several third-party tools index the large public moderation lists and let you look up a handle. Fastest route.
  • Query the protocol. Resolve your handle to a DID and look for listitem records referencing it. Reliable but technical.
  • Watch for the symptom. A sudden, sustained drop in replies and reach from a particular community without an obvious cause is often a blocklist.

If you are on one and think it is wrong

  1. Identify the list owner. The list record names its creator.
  2. Ask once, politely, in a DM. Public complaint about a blocklist reliably makes things worse.
  3. Accept that they may not respond. There is no appeals process and no obligation on their part.
  4. Do not build a counter-list. This has been tried repeatedly and has never once improved anyone's situation.

The uncomfortable truth is that there is no recourse if the owner declines. That is a genuine cost of the model.

Building a Moderation List Responsibly

If you are going to maintain one, especially a public one:

  • State your criteria in the description. People deserve to know why they might be added.
  • Prefer a mute list to a block list unless the accounts pose an actual interaction risk. Muting is proportionate; blocking is not always.
  • Do not add by association. Add accounts for what they did.
  • Provide a contact route for removal requests, and actually read it.
  • Audit periodically. Accounts change hands and people change behavior.
  • Remember it is permanent-ish. Deleting the list does not un-scrape it.

Moderation Lists vs Labelers

A frequent point of confusion. Moderation lists act on accounts. Labelers act on content – a labeler annotates posts and accounts with labels, and you decide whether to hide, warn or ignore each label category.

Labelers are generally the more flexible tool: they give you graduated responses rather than a binary, and you can adjust per-label behavior. For most people, subscribing to a good labeler plus a small number of personal mutes beats subscribing to a large blocklist. Our labelers and content filters guide covers setup.

Frequently Asked Questions

Does someone know when I add them to a moderation list?

No notification is sent. But the record is public and easy to look up, and if it is a block list, the block itself is visible.

Can I unsubscribe from a blocklist?

Yes, at any time. The blocks or mutes it applied are removed when you unsubscribe.

Do blocklists work across all Bluesky clients?

Yes – they operate at the protocol level, so they apply in the official app, Skyscraper, and any other AT Protocol client.

Can I be on a list without being blocked by anyone?

Yes. A list is just a set of accounts. It has no effect until someone subscribes to it.

Manage Moderation in Skyscraper

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