I maintain the @filknews account on Bluesky, which is a manually maintained mirror of the one on Mastodon. It includes reports of upcoming conventions, online filksings, and other things of interest to filkers. This morning I got an email saying:
A Bluesky account you control has been assessed as a spammy, fake, or inauthentic account. Your account was reviewed by Bluesky content moderators and was found to be in violation of our Community Guidelines. As a result, your account has been taken down.
As a reminder, Bluesky requires that users not use Bluesky to do harm to others, including spamming, phishing or otherwise using technical means to disrupt the Bluesky experience for other users.
The email came from an address on “blueskyweb.xyz”, so I figured it was phishing. Bluesky’s usual domains are bsky.app and bsky.social. I didn’t feel worried, but I checked my account with a browser to make sure — and discovered that it in fact had been taken down! I made the incident known to people in the filk community through various channels, then decided to reply. Here’s what I wrote:
I will attempt not to be furious. Unless my account was hijacked within the last 12 hours, this takedown makes NO sense.
@filknews is an account I created, manually mirroring https://liberal.city/deck/@filknews, to provide information on conventions and other activity in the filk music community. It’s one of two accounts I control, the other being @gmcgath, which so far hasn’t been taken down. I have never heard that having two Bluesky accounts for different purposes is forbidden.
The volume of posts is not unusual. Nor is the subject matter. I specifically avoid listing merchandise such as new albums on that account so as not to appear spammy.
If Bluesky is just a reincarnation of Old Twitter, kicking people off because some random person complained or some computer acted off an out-of-context keyword, I’d say I’d rather be done with it. But @filknews has been a popular resource for the filk community, picking up about 200 followers in a short time, and many of them find Mastodon confusing or otherwise unsatisfactory.
I’m not going to beg. I’m not going to offer a defense where there are no charges. I’m just going to say I’m disgusted with Bluesky.
About half an hour later I got an email saying my account had been taken down in error and had been reinstated. I checked, and it was.
This is a reminder that all social media accounts exist at the pleasure of the hosting company, and they can be and sometimes are taken down for no understandable reason. Maybe some malicious person complains. Maybe their software finds a word in a post objectionable out of context. That’s why I favor blogs hosted on a domain the creator controls. If the hosting company kicks you off, you can move somewhere else.
Bluesky’s use of domains is strange. It uses bsky.app, blueskyweb.xyz, and bsky.social. If you enter https://blueskyweb.xyz in a browser, it redirects to bsky.social. Why use one domain for the Web and another, unfamiliar one for email?
It leaves me with a bad taste and the recognition that I shouldn’t have been as surprised as I was. Bluesky’s recovery from its mistake is impressive, but the mistake shouldn’t have happened.