How to Mute Words and Phrases on Your Bluesky Feed

If you were looking for a respite from X, but Threads didn't work out for you, you might have ended up at Bluesky. Sure, Mastodon is great in theory, but it doesn't have nearly as many users talking in one place. And as a single app, Bluesky is simply easier to use.

Bluesky also feels like an app that has learned (or is still learning) from the mistakes of its peers. It has superior built-in moderation and troll-fighting features, and is relatively easy to get started with. But if you're going to pick up a new social network, you're going to want to carry over your mute words with you—that is, the collection of terms you've made over the years that you just don't want to see displayed on your feed. Maybe it's political stuff, or news about a certain celebrity, or even AI.

Bluesky makes it easy to mute words, and there's even a feature called Moderation Lists, where you can use crowdsourced lists and bulk-mute accounts at once. Here's how to use both.

How to mute words and phrases on Bluesky

Open the Bluesky website or smartphone app. From the sidebar, go to Settings > Moderation > Muted words & Tags.

Credit: Khamosh Pathak

Here, you'll see many options for muting a word. First, write the phrase or word you want to mute in the text box. Then, go through your options—though I think the default options are the best choice. Still, in the Duration section, you can choose to only mute the word for 24 hours, or 7 days, or 30 days, which can be great for, say, temporarily blocking out spoilers for a TV show you haven't watched yet.

Next, you can choose if you want to mute just Bluesky posts, to also mute tags. Here, too, the default of Text and Tags works quite well, instead of blocking just tags.

Lastly, you can choose to exclude users you follow from your mutes, in case you still want to hear about a topic like AI, but only from people you follow. When you're all set, click the Add button. Repeat the process to add more mute words and phrases.

Credit: Khamosh Pathak

Your muted words will show up in the section below. To unmute a word, all you have to do is to click the little X icon next to the word and confirm from the pop-up box.

Credit: Khamosh Pathak

How to mute accounts in bulk

Like other social media services, Bluesky lets you mute or block individual accounts right from that person's profile view. Click the three-dotted menu, choose Mute account, and you're done.

But the service goes beyond that: It also lets users create Moderation Lists that can be shared freely with a link, and it's possible to mute or block all the accounts included on such a list with just a click. It's a handy way to block a bunch of known NFT scammers, or notorious trolls, for example.

To create your own Moderation List, go to Settings > Moderation > Moderation Lists > New. Then give the list a name and description, and click on Save.

Credit: Khamosh Pathak

Use the search bar up top to search for and add any number of profiles to the list. Then, click the Subscribe button up top (confusing, I know), and from the popup, choose Mute account.

Credit: Khamosh Pathak

Then, click on Mute list from the popup to confirm.

Credit: Khamosh Pathak

This process becomes a lot more interesting when you start to search for crowdsourced lists about different profiles. For example, Skywatch Blue has curated many lists for blocking specific scammers or trolls. There's even a list dedicated to people who have Elon Musk's name or reference in their profile or description, which some people might find particularly handy in 2025.

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