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455 words by attila written on 2025-06-09, last edit: 2025-06-27, tags: bsky, networks, palestine, racism, scaling, socialmedia, zionism ⋔ Previous post: Offline Search for Privacy
The number of followers that appears on an account in BlueSky will not include deleted accounts. This becomes problematic in various contexts, such as their wholesale deletion of Palestinian accounts that is a direct consequence of their racist moderation policies biased towards making a few white users feel "safe".
If you have an account that supports Palestinians, you have probably been followed by thousands of deleted accounts, and so your followerCount (the number that appears as your number of followers) will reflect all of the deleted accounts, whereas if you investigate your followers you will find a drastically lower number.
This seems like a non-problem: just go through your followers, if you care, and remove the deleted ones. When it comes to those you follow you can do this even in their own web application. However when it comes to those who follow you the situation is... trickier.
The record in ATproto that establishes a follower relationship between two accounts is owned by the follower, not the followee, so once the follower's account is deleted this become murky: the person being followed can do nothing about it if the record remains. Furthermore, the list of followers for an account is filtered by the normal endpoint used to fetch it, with removed and blocked accounts taken out, whereas the followerCount integer reflects the actual length of the followers list. This is why if you investigate the situation with any of the many ATproto-based tools on the web, such as follower explorer, you might see a drastically different number reported for the number of followers than you see on the account: one is the followerCount that reflects the total length of the list, the other is the number of non-deleted/non-blocked accounts on the list.
It is unclear why their account deletion code does not simply clean up all follower records and decrement everyone's followerCount. The only reasons I can think of have to do with monetization and not wanting to trouble influential users with dips in their followerCount - what passes for currency on social media.
But since they've taken this approach, I must point out that their scalability is a lot more limited than they might want us to think. Can they scale from roughly 30 million accounts to 300 million this way?
Absolutely not. Without deleting those records and adjusting those counts their databases will quickly be overwhelmed with data pertaining to deleted accounts, which they will have to rack up in the millions if they don't change their policies. Their approach to all of this, in fact, does not scale and should scare any investors who think this might be real competition for Xtter or Threads.