Support for Private Accounts

[h3zjp]

Prominent SNS (X [Twitter], Instagram, Mastodon, etc…) have the ability to make accounts private.
This means that the other party cannot follow you unless you allow them to.
Currently, Bluesky (AT Protocol) does not seem to have such a feature implemented, so there is a risk that an unknown user may see your posts and feel uncomfortable.
Please consider implementing private accounts to make it as easy to use as other SNS.

Thank you in advance for your cooperation in the above.

[bnewbold]

My understanding of private accounts on most platforms is that it isn't just following that is controlled, but general public access to all of the content.

The current version of the federated protocol that Bluesky is built on, atproto, only supports public content, not private content. A future iteration of the protocol may support private content, using group encryption, but this will be a large piece of work. We have ideas on how to achieve this (and we are not looking for suggestions or opinions at this time), but we are focusing on getting the public content use-case to work well before we tackle the private-content use case. We understand that this is an important feature and use case for many people.

[joeyoropesa-dev]

Well in that case can we expect (testers) to get an pre-release of an DM feature because using DM as temporary solution to share some private info with people we trust only seems much more safe than publishing it as an public post

What you think about this as an temporary solution while waiting for private posts/accounts support

Thanks in advance for your response and support!

[mmhil]

With Bluesky opening up to the general web public, what is the status of this feature? Privacy settings should always be a priority before any kind of open internet access to avoid opening the users to unfiltered abuse.

[Zero3K]

I'm just guessing.

[pfrazee]

Months is probably too optimistic

[Zero3K]

Then year(s)?

[Zero3K]

If so, then a lot of people are going to drop it and move on.

[heartpunk]

@pfrazee very worth considering partial measures in the meantime; it would be fairly trivial to do account wide reply limitations for example, and one could also do frontend level fixes for prohibiting access within the app.

None of this should in any way be considered an alternative to proper private account implementation later on, of course, but, it sure would mitigate possible harms a lot in the meantime!