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X's loss was Bluesky's gain in 2024, with the decentralized social network expanding its user base almost nine times over, from 2.89 million to 25.94 million.
More users mean more potential for trouble, so Bluesky was forced to boost its content-moderation team, which expanded to roughly 100 moderators and growing, Bluesky said in a moderation report released Friday.
In 2024, users submitted 6.48 million reports to Bluesky’s moderation service, a 17x increase from 2023, when users submitted 358,000 reports.
This increase wasn’t exactly linear. For example, Bluesky highlighted how in late August, when there was a large increase in user growth for Bluesky in Brazil (just as X was banned in the country), it saw spikes of up to 50,000 reports per day.
"For the first time in 2024, we now had a backlog in moderation reports," Bluesky says. "To address this, we increased the size of our Portuguese-language moderation team, added constant moderation sweeps and automated tooling for high-risk areas such as child safety, and hired moderators through an external contracting vendor for the first time."
The biggest reason for users reporting content was antisocial behavior, with people filing 1.75 million reports due to harassment, trolling, or intolerance. Bluesky users made about 1.2 million reports about misleading content, including impersonation, misinformation, or false claims about identity or affiliations, as well as 1.4 million complaints about spam.
In 2024, Bluesky moderators took down 66,308 accounts, while its automated systems took down 35,842 accounts for reasons such as spam or being part of a bot network.
In 2024, 93,076 people appealed at least one Bluesky moderation decision for for a total of 205,000 individual appeals. The app currently handles these requests via an email inbox, but "in 2025, we will transition to responding to moderation reports directly within the Bluesky app, which will streamline user communication.
Also on the roadmap: a paid subscription model, which could cost $8 per month, like X Premium.