Your BlueSky Feed Is Porn You Didn’t Ask For Because Your Friends Are Gooners With a Severe Porn Addiction

A common complaint I see people make on Bluesky is: why am I being served so much porn or things I am not interested in? They will incorrectly believe that the algorithm is broken. It’s not broken. You didn’t know the people you knew as well as you thought you did. Porn addiction is a thing, and porn addiction is especially common with weebs. You’re seeing deranged shit because people you follow have porn addictions and are into deranged shit. So, though you may not be consuming porn, people in your network are. That activity kicks into your feeds.

The issue I have with that is that it essentially normalizes being sex pests in a space on the Internet. That sets the expectation that it is good—attractive, even—to act like that elsewhere. That expectation alienates relationships. Bluesky creates a cultural space that offers an unrealistic, bizarre representation of social relationships, which isolates and alienates the users who stay on there consuming erotica and porn like they do.

So, user repos in Bluesky have a property for likes. Bluesky’s underlying AT Protocol stores likes as first-class structured records in each user’s AT Protocol repository. In the AT Protocol lexicon, a like is an app.bsky.feed.like record type. Unlike a simple boolean flag on a post, it is its own record with a creation timestamp and a subject field that holds a strong reference to the liked record.

That strong reference is composed of an AT-URI and a CID. The AT-URI identifies the exact record in the network by DID, collection, and record key. The CID is a cryptographic content identifier that uniquely identifies the exact content of that liked record.

These like records exist under the app.bsky.feed.like namespace in the user’s repo. Bluesky’s repo model is built so that these repos are hosted on a user’s Personal Data Server and are publicly readable through the AT Protocol APIs. Because of that, the like record and its fields can be fetched, indexed, and used by any client or service that can query the protocol.

The protocol exposes operations like getLikes. This returns all of the like records tied to a particular subject’s AT-URI and CID. It also exposes getActorLikes. This returns all of the subject references a given actor has liked. Those API calls return structured like objects with timestamps and subject references directly from the public repository data.

Various feeds hosted by different PDSs use the likes property to construct the feeds that you see. Since the likes of people you follow are included in your social graph, along with your own likes, you’re going to get served the porn they are consuming. Because likes are public and anyone can write an algorithm to see everyone’s likes, you can clearly see just how much porn people are consuming.

Honestly, what started to turn my stomach about the people on Bluesky is how they behave across different contexts. If you look through the records of the posts they interact with, you’ll see them engaging with political posts in the replies like a normal person. Then, when you look through their AT Protocol records, you see hours and hours of them interacting with every kind of porn imaginable. I am not exaggerating. Hours of likes for porn posts within 1–10 minutes of each other. Am I sex-negative? A prude? No, this site is filled with furry, gay bara porn, lol. You can have a drink without being an alcoholic. The problem with these people is like people who can’t have one drink without drinking the whole fucking day; they can’t consume porn in healthy ways.

I think people assume that their feed is customized for them and based on their likes. No—feeds are generalized based on what everyone likes and then served to your subgraph. It’s not just about who you follow; it’s about who they follow. So if you follow someone who follows a lot of people with porn addictions, you will see porn. Bluesky isn’t weighting the algorithm to do this. Basically, it’s the people in your social network with furry, hentai, or trans porn addictions who are driving it.

Astroturfing Is Pretty Pointless When Social Subgraphs Are Fragmented (e.g., the Fediverse)

I am seeing astroturfing in the fediverse again, by AT Protocol developers implicitly trying to shill their products. I think it is stochastic behavior by developers with too much time on their hands. Honestly, I do not care. I like the people on ActivityPub more, but I like the AT Protocol better, and I have developed for both. Astroturfing on ActivityPub networks is fascinating to me because it is so pointless.

I am actually a Computational Biologist and Computer Scientist whose specialty is combinatorics, social graphs, graph theory, etc. Specifically, I use this to create epidemiological models for the memetic layer of human behaviors that act as vectors for diseases, using the SIRS model. I do not just study germs; I study human behaviors.

The models I construct extend into a “memetic layer,” in which beliefs, norms, and behaviors (such as risk-taking, compliance with public health measures, or susceptibility to misinformation) spread contagiously through social networks. These behaviors function as vectors that modulate biological transmission rates. As a result, the spread of ideas can accelerate, dampen, or reshape the spread of disease. By running computational simulations and agent-based models on these graphs, I study how network structure, influential nodes, clustering, and platform-specific dynamics affect behavioral contagion. I also examine how these factors influence epidemiological outcomes.

To say it very concisely, I study how the spread of bat-shit insane beliefs, shit posts, and memes influences whether or not there is a measles outbreak in Texas. Ironically, this is an evolution of my studying semiotics, memetics, and chaos magick in high school. I got a job where I can use occult, anarchist techniques professionally.

I think a large reason why I do not care about astroturfing in the fediverse is that it’s so pointless, lol. Astroturfing to manipulate the narrative would actually work better on Bluesky to keep people there than trying to recruit from the fediverse. Furthermore, big instances are relatively small. Some people on Bluesky have follower lists larger than an entire large instance in the fediverse.

Within ActivityPub networks, astroturfing rarely propagates far, because whether information spreads depends on properties of the social graph itself. Dense connectivity, short paths between communities, and a sufficient number of cross-cutting ties support diffusion. ActivityPub’s architecture tends to produce graphs that are fragmented and highly modular. This limits the reach of coordinated activity.

ActivityPub is a system where each instance maintains its own local user graph and exchanges activities through inboxes and outboxes. This makes it autonomous and decentralized. The network consists of loosely connected subgraphs. Cross-instance edges appear only through explicit follow relationships. The ActivityPub protocol does not provide a shared or complete view of the network. Measurements of the fediverse consistently show uneven connectivity between instances, clustering at the instance level, and relatively long effective path lengths across the network. Under these conditions, large cascades are uncommon.

Instance-level clustering means that in ActivityPub networks, users interact much more with others on the same server than with users on different servers. Because each instance has its own local timeline, culture, and moderation, connections form densely within instances and only sparsely across them through explicit follow relationships. This creates a network made up of tightly connected local communities linked by relatively few cross-instance ties, which slows the spread of information beyond its point of origin.

However, with the AT Protocol, global indexing and aggregation are explicitly supported. Relays and indexers can assemble near-complete views of the social graph. Applications built on top of this infrastructure operate over a graph that is denser and easier to traverse. There are fewer structural barriers between communities. The diffusion dynamics change substantially when content can move across the graph without relying on narrow federated paths.

Astroturfing depends on coordinated amplification, typically through tightly synchronized clusters of accounts intended to manufacture visibility. Work on coordinated inauthentic behavior shows that these tactics gain traction when they intersect highly connected regions of the graph or bridge otherwise separate communities. In networks with strong modularity, coordination remains local. ActivityPub’s federation model produces this kind of modularity by default. Coordinated clusters stand out clearly within instances. Their effects remain confined to those local neighborhoods.

Astroturfing on ActivityPub therefore tends to stall on its own because of the underlying graph topology. Without dense inter-instance connectivity or any form of global indexing, coordinated campaigns have a hard time moving beyond the immediate regions where they originate. Systems built on globally indexable social graphs, including those enabled by the AT Protocol, expose a much larger surface for viral spread. Network structure and connectivity account for the divergence where that is independent of moderation, cultural norms, ideology, or intent.

It’s just really funny to me how these stochastic techbro groups waste so many resources. I personally don’t want to go viral, which is why I avoid platforms where I can. The fact that it’s harder to achieve high virality on ActivityPub is exactly why I prefer the fediverse over the Atmosphere. One way to think about it is that you can change the ‘genetics’ of a system with a retrovirus, where memetic entities act as cultural retroviruses to reprogram the cultural loci of a space. That is their end goal. They are trying to hijack cultures memetically. You see this a lot with culture jamming.

Basically, the astroturfing on ActivityPub networks is designed to jam and subvert the culture. But, as I have already said, the topological structure makes memetic virality stall. They cannot achieve that kind of viral spread in the fediverse, which is why I cannot understand why they do this every year.

Quitting #BigTech isn't always easy.
But it's worth it.

The Virulent Infection of BlueSky by Extremely Online, Brain-Rotten Zombies from X Continues

So, it appears a new migration from Twitter to Bluesky is underway. It appears to be some of the most virulent former 4chan users possible. Yep, I got off Bluesky just in time, lol. I’ve been keeping tabs on a particularly virulent and toxic subgraph on Twitter for years. It pretty much stayed off Bluesky because they couldn’t act like abusive dumpster fires there. Welp, looks like they’re becoming more active on Bluesky. It’s not looking good over there.

That they are on the move says something. It’s sort of like how the US is suddenly a place that is hospitable to measles. It was all but eradicated here.

My husband likes to say that you can tell where not to be by where I am looking from somewhere else. I like fires. So if I am observing your platform or community from a distance, you probably don’t want to be there.

Edit:

I had originally posted the above on a now-defunct federated blog. It got blasted to Mastodon. Someone replied and asked what I think is causing this. I debated actually answering, then decided that I’ve had enough of the dumpster fire that is social media. I decided not to wade through social media tech discourse into what will mostly likely be an Internet argument with a complete stranger. I am a techie dragon, and I engage with things to learn how they work so I can tinker with them. I only engaged with tech discourse to get my hands on how the tech works. There’s nothing in it for me to be part of larger conversations. Arguing with random strangers on social media is not an epistemically useful format. I do think I should answer, though. Just on my blog.

I treat social media like I do an addictive substance. I do not believe in abstinence, but I do believe in harm-reduction paradigms, so when I see everyone overdosing on social media, I pull back and shut down a lot of accounts. The Fediverse instance where the first part of this blog post was posted has been taken down, moved to this blog, and this section appended to it.

I often use the word weeb pejoratively. Here, I am using it categorically. There really isn’t an “official” name outside of otaku or weeb culture. I am at the fringes and intersections of it as a furry. My husband is a millennial weeb. With that being said—

The migration is in large part because Bluesky is capturing the otaku/weeb niche of X. X hosted networks that were ecosystems of “anime fans.” These included anime and manga artists, doujin and hentai artists, VTuber fans, NSFW illustrators, fandom shitposters, niche fetish communities, and other chronically and extremely online content creators and influencers. That culture relied heavily on timelines, informal networks, and discovery through reposts, replies, and algorithmic amplification.

Elon Musk pretty much destabilized X’s ecosystems and social networks from multiple directions at once. Algorithm changes made reach inconsistent. Moderation created anxiety and uncertainty about what would get suppressed or unintentionally “viral”. Bots, engagement farming, and blue-check reply spam actively poisoned fandom conversations.

Bluesky is the memetic and cultural progeny of early imageboard cultures. I conducted a phylogenetic analysis of the memetics, which you can check out here:

Bluesky is a competitor of X for otaku and fandom communities. Bluesky has a lot of the aspects of old Twitter dynamics around which fandom culture evolved. Recently, Bluesky introduced something big in those communities: going live. Since X is no longer habitable for weebs, they are moving to Bluesky.

For example, the AT protocol already has PinkSea:

https://pinksea.art

And, of course, there is WAFRN:

https://app.wafrn.net

I cope and deal with issues via personal, private sublimation and not so much exhibitionism of my art or consumption of art. So, while I do make comic books and do a shit ton of weeby art, it’s for the purpose of sublimation, so I’m not too interested in being a part of a community. That’s a large reason I am not active in those spaces. I’m quite cynical, in general, so I am suspicious of any community — and I mean any community, at all. Honestly, I am mildly contemptuous of mass participation or any sense of belonging. So, my art stays private, because it is created for me – and just me.

DI.DAY is a Movement to Encourage People to Ditch Big Tech.

https://itsfoss.com/news/di-day-celebration/

A new day for privacy advocates to look forward to.

#DiDay #digital #BigTech #privacy #security #europe

Das Blog als Basis für meinen Digital Independence Day

https://speicherbereich.net/2026/02/10/das-blog-als-basis-fuer-meinen-digital-independence-day/

Slowly getting my #bigtech pants taken down with another move and today it was @protonprivacy so I'll be hoovering all my accoutns to there very soon. Happy lad.

📊 Poll of the Day

More governments are moving away from Big Tech and adopting open‑source alternatives — from office suites to national cloud platforms. 🌍

Why do you think this shift is happening? 👇
Vote your reason — and reply with why you think so! 💬

Vote + Boost 🔁 = ❤️

#TechNews #Tech #OpenSource #Privacy #Security #Government #EU #Data #Sovereignty #IT #PublicSector #Digital #Microsoft #Office #Software #Tech #Cloud #FOSS #Europe #Linux #LibreOffice #Politics #BigTech #Freedom

It was really great to have a call with Canadian collaborators sharing values of the Leave X campaign and leading the @ElbowsUpforDigitalSovereignty.

Thanks to @ZebKing for taking the initiative and to @smattymatty for creating an awesome app. Let's continue to work together to push this forward.

Soon, policymakers will realize that an interoperable social web is public digital infrastructure. The missing ingredient is political will, not technology, to treat Big Tech social media as a thing of the past.

#LeaveX #Canada #EU #EUPol #BigTech #ElbowsUp

Deze week ben ik gestart met “degooglen”, ben overgestapt naar het Proton Unlimited‑pakket, ben van Google Keep naar Joplin gegaan, heb Signal geïnstalleerd en probeer nu iedereen die me dierbaar is te overtuigen om ook over te stappen.

Heel gek, maar het voelt bevrijdend.

#google #bigtech #privacy #degoogle

https://winbuzzer.com/2026/02/10/meta-google-face-jury-landmark-social-media-addiction-trial-xcxwbn/

Meta and Google Face Jury in Landmark Social Media Addiction Trial

#Google #Instagram #YouTube #TikTok #Snapchat #BigTech #Meta #SocialMedia #TechRegulation #ChildProtection #BigTech

@Bundesregierung
Eine eigene App ist dafür nicht notwendig. Ihr könnt es komplett im Fediverse (Mastodon und Co.) abbilden. So unterstützt ihr auch gleich den Umzug weg von #BigTech hin zu mehr digitaler Souveränität.

RE: https://norden.social/@SheDrivesMobility/116046456069795762

Selbstbestimmte und gleichberechtigte #Mobilität zu Fuß mit dem #Fahrrad #Zug #Roller #Ruftaxi oder per #ÖPNV statt der unbedingten Herrschaft des #Auto|s...

Plätze zum Verweilen statt #Stress allen Ortens. Bänke unter #Bäume|n, Füße im #Springbrunnen und #Kaffee im #Café statt #Franchise an Franchise gerahmt von #Asphalt #Stahl und #Hitze ohne Ende...

#Bibliothek der Dinge statt der immer neuesten #App. Echte Treffen mit schönen Gesprächen statt digitaler #Einsamkeit oder wüster Erregung bei #BigTech

Lernt von und mit @SheDrivesMobility und der @tu_freiberg wie eine lebenswerte #Zukunft aussehen könnte!

Gemeinsam mit "Freiberg für alle" findet am 12.03.2026 der nächste tolle Abend aus der Veranstaltungsreihe "Was bedeutet (uns) #Demokratie? in #Freiberg #Sachsen statt.

Kostenlos anmelden könnt Ihr Euch hier:

https://tu-freiberg.de/universitaet/universitaetskultur/was-bedeutet-uns-demokratie

Anfang des Jahres wagen wir mal wieder eine Workshop-Reihe um möglichst vielen Queers den Ausstieg aus BigTech leichter zu machen – und unsere kollektiven Strukturen weiter aufzubauen.

https://infodienst-makeit.social/queers-raus-aus-bigtech-online-workshop-reihe/

#Digitalisierung #Beratung #digitaleTeilhabe #BigTech #queer #QueerIT #queer*it

White House mulling tariff exemptions for Big Tech — Amazon, Google, Microsoft, other AI hyperscalers to be spared worst of import duties with U.S.-Taiwan deal

https://fed.brid.gy/r/https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/big-tech/white-house-mulling-tariff-exemptions-for-big-tech-amazon-google-microsoft-other-ai-hyperscalers-to-be-spared-worst-of-import-duties-with-u-s-taiwan-deal

RE: https://ec.social-network.europa.eu/@HennaVirkkunen/116047373310424694

It's about time the #EU did something against #cyberbullying.

In Germany, 62 % of teenagers (14-17 y.o.) have some kind of experience with it. This number has been increasing since it was first analyzed in this study in 2021 (51%). 16 % of teens have been victims of cyberbullying themselves, where lower educated teens were more effected than higher educated ones.
In most cases, #WhatsApp was the place where CB happened (50%), followed closely by #TikTok (43%) and other #BigTech platforms.

Being insulted was the most common way of CB, followed by rumors that were spread, social isolation and posting of pictures or videos that were embarrassing.

(Source see link)

https://www.sinus-institut.de/media/pages/media-center/studien/barmer-jugendstudie-2024-25/ada75998e3-1742803601/jugendbericht-2024_2025_teilbericht-cybermobbing.pdf

#Cybermobbing #Medienbildung #SaferInternetDay #SID26 #FediEltern

Help me choose a new email service! I've been researching Gmail alternatives, and have chosen autistici/inventati for my main email... BUT... people have a difficult time understanding the @autistici.org
So I'm considering a few others for my business email. Please fill in the poll to help me understand which FEELS easiest and most trustworthy for people to use! And boost this please!

#poll #bigtech #bigtechalternatives #antifascist

The space where we form our opinions is being manipulated. Ressa calls this the operating system of our democracies. She points to the fusion of the tech oligarchy with political power, a dangerous merger with the tools to manufacture consent or drown out dissent. A merger that no longer targets our attention only, but is moving towards an intimacy economy where it is getting harder and harder to form opinions without interference.

#IntimacyEconomy #BigTech