Move your Bluesky account out of Bluesky (while keeping your followers)
Bluesky has come under fire yet again for a moderation decision. For those unfamiliar: this is more or less a weekly event.
Bluesky's underlying technology, AtProto, allows you to speak to Bluesky users while being hosted and moderated by someone other than the Bluesky team. Their specific implementation comes with many issues and caveats, which other people have talked about at length, but it remains a good idea to transition out of Bluesky's infrastructure if you're already invested in that platform and their users. This article is meant to be a layman's reference that skips some details in favor of the practicalities of how and why.
Why move?
The tale of every big social media platform goes like this: Get popular (usually thanks to large amounts of investor money and debt that allow you to be feature complete and competitive without worrying about profitability), introduce a business model (tipping, freemium perks, and ad-free plan), then significantly worsen the median user's experience in your efforts to pay the aforementioned debt.
The way social media users historically deal with this 'inescapable' fate is with migrations that force them to start from scratch: abandon the post history and the follow connections they made in the previous platform, on the off chance that the new platform will be better.
Before Bluesky, there was ActivityPub, a technology that allows multiple "Social Medias" (called 'instances') to talk to each other, as long as they all use the same tech, or 'speak the same language'. Each instance has its own moderation team, and you can follow people from other instances, as long as your instance's mods approve of theirs. (When you hear about 'Fediverse', they're probably talking about Mastodon, which is built on top of ActivityPub.)
However, ActivityPub did not resolve the problem of migration[1]. Your identity on ActivityPub is tied to a domain on the internet. Want to fully control it? You must purchase and maintain your own domain. If you make an account on https://mastodon.social, amass followers, then that instance dies or is moderated in that way you don't like? All those posts and attached identity will be lost. (However you can still transfer follow relationships!)
Bluesky created a new technology, the AT Protocol. With it, you can move your account including your posts, likes and followers from one 'instance' to another. However, unlike ActivityPub, the AtProto system works off of many pieces; the piece that holds your posts, images, followers and videos and ties them to your identity is called the PDS.
Bluesky is 'federated' in the sense that there's a large, Bluesky PDS with millions of users, and many alternative PDS providers. If you've seen an account name that ends in "myatproto.social", "blacksky.app", "northsky.social" or "eurosky.social", that account was hosted on an independent PDS.
TL;DR if we don't like how Bluesky is doing things, we can simply move somewhere else! That way, we don't have to stop seeing accounts just because Bluesky banned them, and we don't risk our account being lost because Bluesky didn't like it. Problem solved?
Caveats
In AtProto, pieces other than the PDS are responsible for labelling and filtering content, as well as powering search throughout the network. In a sense, moderation lives outside the PDS. If you only control a PDS, you can ban users from being hosted by it, but you still depend on someone else to fetch posts from other PDSes for your users around the web. Possibly, the person who controls that 'aggregator' piece can ban a user that you don't want to be banned.
This happened to Blacksky in 2025. At the time, they depended on Bluesky's tools to perform those filtering tasks. When a popular user from Blacksky's PDS was banned from Bluesky, fellow Blacksky users couldn't see his posts[2]!
So, if we want to be rid of Bluesky's moderation tyranny, how do we achieve that? Well, we need to pick a provider that implements all the pieces necessary to make the social media function, not just the PDS. Or, at the very least, they need to implement all the pieces that filter posts from the network, so that they can moderate posts themselves and be truly independent.
To my recollection, here are the instances that are independent from Bluesky in this sense:
- Blacksky: As of 2026, if you use blacksky.community, Blacksky's client, you will be subject to their pieces ('Relay' and 'AppView').
- Red Dwarf: This is a client, so it doesn't store your data in a PDS, you can't make an account on it. However, once you have an account somewhere else, using this site means you can see posts in the network without being affected by their moderation.
- Wafrn.net: Wafrn is a complete package. A wafrn instance will store your account in its PDS, fetch posts for you, and provide a view that looks kinda like Tumblr. You can also bite people, for some reason. If you're into that.
Additionally, EuroSky has a roadmap where they plan to eventually be independent.
That doesn't sound like a lot of options
Yeeeeah. Thing is it's actually pretty hard to run an essential piece: the AppView. That's more or less the reason many Fediverse nerds hate AtProto. You can have all the PDSes you want, but in its current state, there aren't a lot of folks running the tech that filters and moderates posts. I use Wafrn, and it can occasionally miss a few notifications that do arrive to Bluesky. I'm told Blacksky can have the same problems.
However, I promise the landscape is much better than you might hear elsewhere. Even if flawed, the alternate offerings are enough to power a thriving platform. They probably couldn't handle Bluesky shutting off overnight and leaving 40 million accounts scrambling, but it is enough that people should be slowly transitioning away from Bluesky architecture, especially if they publicly claim to give a rat's ass about LGBTQ people, NSFW artists and racial minorities. If you're in so deep that you don't want to delete you Bluesky despite being constantly disappointed by their actions, you really should move your account as soon as you're able.
How to move
Option 1: Blacksky
- Go to PDS Moover and read the warnings & precautions
- Go to PDS Moover's Blacksky Moover, which preloads some information for you
- Input your old handle, which probably looks like yourusername.bsky.social
- Input your password, e-mail and your new handle. If unsure, pick something that ends in 'myatproto.social'. You can only pick a 'blacksky.app' handle if you're Black.
- Press the MOOve button. Don't close the window - the move is happening through your browser. The more data you have, the longer it takes.
- Wait until the move is complete. If there is an issue, consult the Info page or contact @baileytownsend.dev. This is rare but possible!
- (Optional) Send some money over to either Blacksky or @baileytownsend.dev, who runs the Moover cow!
Note: You don't need to be Black to use Blacksky.
Option 2: Wafrn
- Pick an instance. I recommend:
- https://bark.wolp.chat
- https://meowing.men
- https://app.wafrn.net
Make sure to read their TOS carefully, most instances require you to be an adult.
- Register on Wafrn's website like any other website. You need to first create a new Wafrn account, and then move your Bluesky account into it.
- Follow these instructions from their site. If you need help, you can tag @wafrn.net on Bluesky. In summary, you will press a button on their site, then use PDS Moover.
Option 3 (easy): Use a different client
This option won't protect you from Bluesky banning you, but it will let you see people who are banned or labeled by Bluesky, if those bans aren't respected by the new client.
A client is just a website. It defines which pieces of AtProto you are using during your experience using the network, but you can 'log in' to any PDS from another service. You don't need to do the Moover stuff to use a new client.
Blacksky.community is a client you can use. If you use it, you use Blacksky's moderation piece (AppView). Red Dwarf is another option. You go into the client, input your handle, and then it will redirect you to Bluesky, where you will input your password and give the new client permission to access it on your behalf.
Don't worry, it's not permanent. You will still be able to use Bluesky normally after you do this.
