Decentralized Twitter/X rival Bluesky announced today that it’s open sourcing Ozone, a tool that lets individuals and teams collaboratively review and label content on the network. The company plans to open up the ability for individuals and teams to run their own independent moderation services later this week, which means users will be able to subscribe to additional moderation services on top of Bluesky’s default moderation.
In a blog post, Bluesky said the change will give users “unprecedented control” over their social media experience. The company’s vision for moderation is a stackable ecosystem of services, which is why it will start allowing users to install filters from independent moderation services on top of what Bluesky already requires. As a result, users will be able to create a customized experience tailored to their preferences.
For example, someone could create a moderation service that blocks images of spiders on the network. If you’re someone who gets a jump scare when you see a spider, you could install the moderation service and have all labeled spider pictures disappear from your feeds.
“One team will never be perfect at moderation and curation for the entire world, with its wide variety of contexts, cultures, and preferences,” the blog post reads. “So we’re excited about opening the ecosystem to empower experts, developers, and users with local context to provide their own input that you can additionally subscribe to, on top of Bluesky’s moderation service.”
The moderation service filters will be available on the desktop version of Bluesky to start and will soon be available on mobile.
Bluesky says installing filters from independent moderation services will be as easy as following another account. Moderation services will allow users to report content, so if you saw an unlabeled image of a spider, you could report it to the service.
Although Bluesky already allows people to run a mute list or block list that other users can subscribe to, it often gets tied to a specific account, which doesn’t allow for collaboration and can be overwhelming if people start tagging you directly. Plus, unlike a block list that just lets you add accounts, Ozone lets you label specific posts.
Individuals and teams who create a moderation service will have access to a reporting queue, which gets rid of the need for people to tag you directly every time. People running moderation services will be able to set custom labels and determine what they do. Moderation services aren’t tied to individual accounts, so multiple people can manage them together.
Bluesky notes that moderation services will likely start off as community-run projects, but hints that “there is also nothing stopping a moderation service from having paid subscribers.”
The open source tool can be found on the GitHub repository here.
