Please stop inviting heads of state to Bluesky

And could you let the team know if you’re going to invite a celeb?

Bluesky, the chaotic, invite-only “errors and asses” platform, told its users today there’s a new rule: no heads of state. I’m guessing the posters are too feral to be trusted.

In some sense, this is understandable. The thing is still in beta. The team is tiny, and actively juggling moderation while trying to ship features. I’m not sure who got invited, but something prompted today’s announcement.

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is already there, as is Sen. Brian Schatz and Sen. Ron Wyden. There are celebrities there, as well — CNN’s Jake Tapper, filmmaker Rian Johnson, model Chrissy Teigen, and filmmaker Lilly Wachowski. But the more high-profile members that join, the more moderation challenges the Bluesky team is likely to encounter. After all, when pundit Matt Yglesias joined, before a block button was available, one user threatened to beat him with hammers.

So I’m sympathetic to the motivation for this policy, but it’s also too bad. On Wednesday, for reasons I’m not entirely clear on, the shitposters of Bluesky were sending each other sexy jpegs of Alf, a sitcom puppet from a TV show airing in the late 1980s. Personally, I think it would be very funny for King Charles to inadvertently see Alf’s hog.