Bluesky is a social media platform loved by liberals, leftists, progressives, woke people, or whatever you want to call dislikers of Donald Trump. When a bunch of Donald Trump-associated accounts started using Bluesky ahead of this weekend in order to provoke a food fight, some were outraged or trolled back, but Bluesky’s robust blocking feature and cultural norms around ignoring right-wing trolls and harassers made their presence mostly a non-issue.
On Friday afternoon, the Trump 2.0 White House account, @whitehouse-47.bsky.social, announced its momentous arrival by posting a vaguely triumphalist montage of clips that referenced a lot of inside jokes for Republicans that probably don’t even register for outsiders, like one about Joe Biden’s autopen.
To clarify that this was not meant to earnestly signal the opening of a channel for information exchange between citizens and the head of the U.S. federal government, the text of the post was a sarcastically cheerful provocation: “What’s up, Bluesky? We thought you might’ve missed some of our greatest hits, so we put this together for you. Can’t wait to spend more quality time together! ❤️🇺🇸”
The replies from the Bluesky faithful included a whole lot of invocations of Trump’s alleged connections to Jeffrey Epstein, and references to the #NoKings movement.
Mostly, however, the account got blocked. According to the Bluesky block tracking site Clearsky, @whitehouse-47.bsky.social is already the second most blocked account on Bluesky, just below Vice President J.D. Vance, who joined the site over the summer and has since secured a durable position atop the ranking.
The White House’s bid for attention was accompanied by similar introductory posts from the departments of State, Health and Human Services, Homeland Security, Commerce, the so-called “Department of War,” and many other cabinet departments and executive branch offices. Their posts and videos mostly just greet the users of Bluesky and hint at future dialogue in the same sarcastic tone at the initial White House post.
These accounts all show tens of thousands of blocks in the past 24 hours as of this writing—more blockers than followers in most cases. Some, like the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, earned themselves follower counts under 1,000. Most have spent the weekend posting platitudes, and receiving double-digit repost counts as users avoid taking the bait.
If the White House communications people who likely orchestrated all this were hoping to be able to generate epic lib meltdown content, it’s doubtful the mostly muted reaction was worth their effort. That’s because blocking on Bluesky is public, conspicuous, and designed to be total. Embeds will break. Reply chains will crumble. Further clashes, friction, and cognitive dissonance will drop off abruptly. The blocker and blockee will basically vanish from one another’s universes.
Bluesky blocking culture also includes the use of block lists, one-stop-shopping for blocking all accounts in some category or group with a single tap. There is even, somewhat more controversially, at least one block list of all users who interacted with the White House account rather then simply blocking it. The many, many blocked nodes in the network weaken the network effect of posting on a platform, which in turn appears to have resulted in low engagement for a bunch of accounts associated with the most powerful person in the world.
Bluesky critics like Mark Cuban call Bluesky an echo chamber, and it’s hard to argue that they’re entirely wrong. But all the Trump White House set out to do this weekend in that echo chamber was make a screeching noise, and since users are equipped with very effective earplugs, it wasn’t even all that annoying.