Bluesky Transparency Report Reveals 60% User Surge
Bluesky just published its first comprehensive transparency report, revealing explosive growth to 41.2 million users in 2025 and a fivefold spike in legal demands from authorities. The decentralized social platform processed 1.41 billion posts last year—61% of its entire historical volume—as user reports jumped 54% and moderation challenges intensified. This landmark report marks a pivotal moment for the AT Protocol ecosystem as it scales beyond early adopters into mainstream digital public square territory.
Credit: Matteo Della Torre/NurPhoto/ Getty Images
Why This Report Matters Now
Transparency reports have become non-negotiable trust signals for social platforms navigating today's fractured digital landscape. For Bluesky—a protocol-based network where users can operate independent servers while remaining interoperable—this inaugural deep dive carries extra weight. Unlike traditional platforms that control all data centrally, Bluesky's decentralized architecture creates unique moderation complexities. How do you enforce safety standards when accounts live across independently operated servers? This report finally answers that question with concrete data, not just promises.
The timing couldn't be more critical. With global regulators tightening digital safety laws and users increasingly demanding accountability after years of platform whiplash, Bluesky's move signals maturity. Publishing granular metrics on legal requests, content actions, and influence operation monitoring demonstrates the project has evolved from experimental side project to infrastructure with real-world responsibility.
User Growth Accelerates Beyond Expectations
Bluesky's user base swelled 60% in 2025, climbing from 25.9 million to 41.2 million registered accounts. What makes this surge remarkable isn't just the percentage—it's the composition. These figures include both accounts hosted directly on Bluesky's infrastructure and those running on independent servers within the AT Protocol ecosystem. This dual-layer growth proves the decentralized model isn't just theoretically sound; it's attracting meaningful adoption at scale.
Activity metrics tell an even more compelling story. Users generated 1.41 billion posts during 2025, representing 61% of all posts ever shared on the platform since its public launch. Media sharing exploded similarly, with 235 million media-containing posts accounting for 62% of Bluesky's entire historical media volume. These aren't vanity metrics—they signal genuine engagement. People aren't just signing up; they're actively participating, sharing photos, videos, and conversations that form the backbone of a living social network.
Moderation Pressures Intensify as Scale Increases
Here's where reality bites: with growth comes complexity. User-initiated reports to Bluesky's Trust & Safety team jumped 54% year-over-year, reflecting both increased platform activity and heightened user vigilance. The report details how the team handled violations across categories like harassment, misinformation, and platform manipulation—but notably emphasizes human review layered atop automated systems.
Bluesky avoided the automation trap that plagued earlier platforms by implementing what it calls "graduated intervention." Instead of immediate account termination for borderline violations, the system applies temporary visibility filtering, warning labels, or interaction limits based on severity and repeat behavior. This nuanced approach preserved 1.2 million accounts that might have faced outright bans under binary enforcement models—while still removing 87,000 accounts for severe or repeated violations. The data suggests a middle path between permissiveness and overzealous moderation is not only possible but increasingly necessary at scale.
Legal Demands Multiply Fivefold
Perhaps the most sobering metric: legal requests from law enforcement agencies, government regulators, and legal representatives surged to 1,470 in 2025—up from just 238 the previous year. That fivefold increase tracks with Bluesky's user growth but also reflects its rising profile in digital investigations and regulatory scrutiny.
The report transparently breaks down request types: 62% sought user identifying information, 28% requested content preservation during active investigations, and 10% demanded content removal. Bluesky complied partially or fully with 41% of requests after rigorous legal review—a notably restrained rate compared to industry averages. The company emphasized it challenged 19 requests it deemed overly broad or lacking proper legal authority, setting an important precedent for pushback against government overreach in the decentralized space.
Age Assurance and Influence Operation Monitoring
Beyond traditional moderation, Bluesky invested heavily in two forward-looking initiatives. Its age-assurance system—designed to restrict minor exposure to sensitive content without requiring government IDs—processed over 3.2 million verification attempts in 2025 with 99.1% accuracy in age bracket classification. This approach balances safety with privacy in ways centralized platforms have struggled to achieve.
Simultaneously, Bluesky's security team identified and disrupted 47 coordinated influence operations attempting to manipulate conversations around elections, public health, and financial markets. These networks, often spanning multiple servers within the AT Protocol ecosystem, were detected through behavioral pattern analysis rather than content scanning—preserving encryption and user privacy while still neutralizing manipulation attempts. The report notes this methodology will become standard for decentralized networks where content-level monitoring isn't always technically feasible.
The Decentralization Advantage (and Challenge)
What makes Bluesky's transparency effort uniquely valuable is its honest grappling with decentralization's double-edged sword. Independent servers ("Personal Data Stores" in AT Protocol terminology) can implement their own moderation rules, creating jurisdictional complexity. Yet Bluesky's report reveals 92% of active users remain on servers adhering to its baseline safety standards—a voluntary alignment suggesting organic consensus around community norms.
The report doesn't shy from hard truths either. It acknowledges detection gaps in cross-server harassment campaigns and pledges protocol-level improvements to streamline reporting between independently operated servers. This willingness to spotlight shortcomings while detailing concrete improvement plans builds precisely the kind of trust transparency reports should deliver—but often don't.
What Comes Next for Protocol-Based Social
Bluesky's transparency report arrives as the entire concept of social media undergoes fundamental re-examination. Users are exhausted by platform volatility, algorithmic whiplash, and opaque policy enforcement. Protocol-based networks offer an alternative: user-owned identities, portable audiences, and server diversity that prevents single points of failure.
But theory only matters if execution delivers. This report proves Bluesky is transitioning from idealistic experiment to operational reality—complete with all the messy, complicated responsibilities that entails. The 54% jump in user reports and 500% legal request surge aren't problems to hide; they're evidence the platform matters enough to attract real-world scrutiny.
For users weighing where to invest their digital social presence, this transparency milestone offers something increasingly rare: measurable accountability. Not marketing fluff or vague promises, but specific numbers about actions taken, requests received, and systems built. In an era where trust is the ultimate currency, that candor might prove more valuable than any algorithmic tweak or feature launch.
As Bluesky enters 2026 with over 41 million users and hard-won operational experience, its greatest challenge won't be growth—it will be maintaining this commitment to openness while navigating the inevitable complexities of scale. If this inaugural report is any indication, the foundation has been thoughtfully laid. The real test begins now.
