Parents' Guide to Bluesky

This app's core premise is promising—users control their feed's content—but parents may have concerns about moderation and other aspects. Rather than seeing an algorithm-driven feed, Bluesky users select what appears, such as posts featuring flower images. You can also limit your timeline to posts from people you're connected to. Another key feature is data ownership: You can store your data with Bluesky, another organization, or yourself. And if you leave the platform, you retain your connections and content instead of losing them. The app has faced criticism, including instances when users discovered an account with a racial slur as a handle and encountered heated exchanges between users involving racial posts and threats of violence. Bluesky has since evolved its moderation policies, but enforcing centralized community guidelines can be challenging for a decentralized social network.

Some of the app's subject areas, like news, are broad, meaning that teens could encounter content ranging from harmless topics to more mature discussions, including drug references and sexual terms. Users can choose to show, hide, or receive warnings about adult content, including nonsexual nudity, and filter out posts containing specific words or tags. But profiles can't be fully private—posts, likes, and blocks are always public. People can be muted privately, but adding them to a list of people you've silenced will also be public. Additionally, while users can delete posts and images immediately, Bluesky notes that fully deleting the text may take longer, as the platform periodically performs backend deletes to wipe data. Until then, deleted text could still be accessible via the API. Like any new social platform, starting fresh can be challenging. If few of your friends are on Bluesky, the experience may feel less engaging. But if retaining your content and handpicking your feed matters to you, Bluesky might be worth checking out.