Bluesky releases its first transparency report: users rose 60% in 2025 to 41.2M, including AT Protocol accounts; moderation reports from users grew 54% to 9.97M
Bluesky released its first transparency report this week documenting the actions taken by its Trust & Safety team and the results …
Context & Ripple Effects
Bluesky’s latest disclosure extends a moderation arc that already showed reports surging as the service added users: its 2024 report logged 6.48 million reports and a larger moderation team. The new report makes that operating burden visible at a substantially larger network scale.
Trust and safety has been a recurring product issue for Bluesky, from its earlier anti-abuse and anti-spam pilots to its plan for federation. Publishing outcomes now gives users and outside observers a clearer basis for assessing how those commitments hold up.
First-order effects
- Bluesky’s Trust & Safety operation must handle nearly 10 million user reports while serving 41.2 million accounts, making moderation capacity and workflow a more central operating constraint.
- The company has created a public baseline for scrutiny of its enforcement work through its first transparency report, rather than leaving its safety posture defined only by policy statements.
Second-order effects
- The 54% increase in reports means user growth is also expanding the volume of harmful-content, spam, and abuse signals Bluesky must triage; tooling and staffing choices will directly affect response quality.
- As federation remains part of Bluesky’s architecture, lessons from its earlier federation plans and the reported moderation workload will matter to how trust-and-safety expectations are set across the AT Protocol ecosystem.
Third-order effects
- If Bluesky continues regular disclosures, transparency reporting could become an accountability mechanism for a growing decentralized social network, allowing users to compare growth with safety operations over time.
- The pattern points to a structural tension in open social systems: network expansion and interoperability can broaden participation, but they also make scalable, legible moderation governance a core product capability.
The trend: Bluesky is part of the broader shift toward treating transparent, scalable trust-and-safety operations as essential infrastructure for growing social platforms.