I downloaded all 1.6M posts on Bluesky
some quick thoughts&#x2F;notes (I am on the bluesky team, but this isn&#x27;t an official policy statement):<p>- content on bluesky <i>is</i> public, but we have not set expectations&#x2F;comms around that well yet, and this dump may be a surprise to some existing accounts. where exactly bluesky falls on the spectrum from &quot;congressional register (immutable)&quot; to &quot;public web&quot; to &quot;public IRC or discord room&quot; to &quot;private signal group&quot; is still being worked out, but probably closest to &quot;public web&quot;<p>- the protocol supports both &quot;deletions&quot; (retaining history), and &quot;purge&quot; (aka &quot;rebase&quot;) to remove all not-current content. this isn&#x27;t exposed via UI yet and accounts have not had the chance to purge old deletions<p>- the federation protocol and unified firehose should make it possible for third parties to maintain a live mirror of the entire corpus. importantly, it will be easy (or at least &quot;easier&quot;) to respect intents w&#x2F;r&#x2F;t deletions when done this way, compared to dumps<p>- obviously neither &quot;deletion&quot; nor &quot;purge&quot; can perfectly remove content from 3rd party dumps and infra, or from hostile parties. but it <i>does</i> signal user intent clearly, and we expect as a norm that third parties will respect that intent. ADS-B, robots.txt, CC licensing are related to these norms, though all unique. right-to-be-forgotten, archiving, re-use licensing, use in ML training, commercial&#x2F;non-profit reuse, search indexing, etc, are all on our radar<p>- blobs&#x2F;images are not included in this corpus<p>- this specific corpus does not (I assume) include our important &quot;label&quot; moderation metadata. at least for our (Bluesky) core moderation decisions, that information will be public<p>- private&#x2F;group content is not yet part of protocol. eg, no built-in mechanism for DMs or follower-only posts. we will probably do those eventually, but it will be basically a whole separate protocol, not a bolt-on to existing stuff. wildly different privacy&#x2F;security concerns with non-public content<p>- there are some other cool projects, like <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;bsky.jazco.dev&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;bsky.jazco.dev&#x2F;</a>, working with the full social graph, pulled via public API