Tech Talk

Tech Talk: PMsky, enabling Peer Moderation on Bluesky

Drew McArthur is building PMsky, a tool for peer moderation on Bluesky. Rather than only privileged moderators, user consensus can be used to guide and adjust moderation labels.

Boris Mann

Jan 27, 2025 — 2 min read

Photo by Ehud Neuhaus, Prinsengracht, Amsterdamn, Netherlands

Drew McArthur is building PMsky, a tool for peer moderation on Bluesky, where users can participate in voting on labels that have been applied to posts and users.

Moderation usually is done by privileged moderators, and in most cases this is handled entirely by the platform itself.

PMsky offers a new option, where moderation can happen based on consensus rather than consolidated opinions.

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About PMsky

Why Peer Moderation?

Bluesky introduced composable moderation to augment their moderation capabilities and allow third parties to participate in the moderation process. This has flourished, with community-specific labelers like Blacksky, automated models like Xblock, and self-labeling like the Pronouns labeling system.

Whether moderation is done by the platform itself or third-party labelers, in both cases these decisions are made behind closed doors, by small groups of people.

How does it work?

PMsky is a platform where users vote on labels that have been applied to users and posts, publishing those votes as ATproto records.

Labelers can then be built independently, using those votes to determine which labels to publish on Bluesky.

It also would allow for "bidirectional" labels where, for example, if pmsky users are voting on whether an account is authentic or not, a labeler could be defined to publish "Impersonation", "Contested Authenticity", and "Authentic" labels, all derived from the same set of votes.

Who is building this?

Drew McArthur (@drewmca.dev) is doing the initial work for the project, as part of his thesis for a degree in Media and Public Engagement at the University of Colorado at Boulder.

A goal of my studies has been to explore how groups make decisions in the absence of leadership making decisions for them. In this context, the question is how moderation can work in the absence of a privileged group of moderators.