gomoderate - for a pleasant Bluesky experience

There are many people in the world -- you are not obligated to see them all in your timeline skyline.

gomoderate is a command-line utility that gives you more control over your Bluesky Social experience by helping you do automated bulk moderation.

Features

• Automatically mute users based on the block list of one or more accounts you trust.
• Import lists of users to mute from trusted URLs or files.
• Mute named users individually or in bulk.

Also, those workflows will optionally allow blocking rather than muting soon (hopefully!).

Note that on the Bluesky platform:

• Mutes are private -- only you can see who you have muted (plus in theory the system admins)
• Blocks are public -- anyone in the world could see your own block list, though the mobile apps and web apps don't yet show this info

In some cases, an account wishing to maintain a lower profile might prefer muting to blocking at this point, but the main point is it is important to be aware that your block lists are public data.

Usage

A simple example invocation that doesn't require authentication is asking who someone else has blocked:

gomoderate list blocks @thepudds.bsky.social

If you run that, you'll see @thepudds.bsky.social is blocking a single account -- @berduck, a chatty robot.

In that example above, list and blocks are considered "commands". The general pattern for gomoderate commands is:

gomoderate [auth options] command subcommand [command options] [command arguments]

But it is likely best understood by example, so we have included several concrete examples below.

Many of the commands require authentication (though not all do). Before you can modify anything via gomoderate, you need to get an application key.

Go to Settings > App Passwords in the Bluesky web interface and create an application key, which will look similar to xj5s-fqo6-rtfm-lsrt. (For brevity, we use xyz in the examples below).

Installation

Downloadable binary releases will be available eventually, but for now, to install gomoderate, make sure you have Go installed on your system, then run:

go install github.com/thepudds/[email protected]

That will download & compile the source code. By default, it will install to the go/bin directory in your home directory.

One approach to run gomoderate is:

1. Open a terminal (Mac Terminal on macOS, Command Prompt on Windows, or your shell on Linux).
   • Unless you have a custom setup, a fresh terminal will start in your home directory.
2. Type cd go/bin to change directories to the Go binaries directory.
3. You can run gomoderate by typing:
   • ./gomoderate (MacOS, Linux)
   • gomoderate (Windows)

Alternatively, you can add $HOME/go/bin to your path.

Examples

Here are some more examples of how to use gomoderate:

Mute users

Bulk muting of unpleasant accounts that were blocked by accounts you trust. Here, you trust the blocking decisions of @trusted1 and @trusted2 and apply their blocks to your account as mutes:

gomoderate --my-user @me.bsky.social --app-key xyz mute from-user-blocks @trusted1.bsky.social @trusted2.bsky.social

Mute one or more specified users:

gomoderate --my-user @me.bsky.social --app-key xyz mute users @user1.bsky.social @user2.bsky.social

Mute users from a list available via a URL:

gomoderate --my-user @me.bsky.social --app-key xyz mute from-url https://example.com/a-trusted-list-of-users-to-mute.txt

Mute users from a file:

gomoderate --my-user @me.bsky.social --app-key xyz mute from-file users-list.txt

Block users (soon)

Block one or more specified users:

gomoderate --my-user @me.bsky.social --app-key xyz block users @user1.bsky.social @user2.bsky.social

Block users based on the users blocked by accounts you trust:

gomoderate --my-user @me.bsky.social --app-key xyz block from-user-blocks @trusted1.bsky.social @trusted2.bsky.social

Block users from a file:

gomoderate --my-user @me.bsky.social --app-key xyz block from-file users.txt

Block users from a URL:

gomoderate --my-user @me.bsky.social --app-key xyz block from-url https://example.com/a-list-of-trusted-users-to-block.txt

List mutes or blocks

List all users muted by you:

gomoderate --my-user @me.bsky.social --app-key xyz list mutes

List all users blocked by a specified user:

gomoderate list blocks @user1.bsky.social

trusted-unpleasant-user-list.txt

gomoderate effectively defines a very simple file format that lists DIDs and handles, which can then be shared via URL or as files.

One way to create such a file is via the --verbose flag:

gomoderate list blocks --verbose @trusted-user-1.bsky.social > trusted-unpleasant-user-list.txt

That file can be served from any web server, and then anyone in the world can:

gomoderate <auth-flags> mute from-url https://example.com/> trusted-unpleasant-user-list.txt

At which point the person who ran that mute from-url command will be muting based on whatever DIDs were in that file. When reading the file, gomoderate only examines the DIDs, which are more permanent.

Contributing

Open source makes the world go around! PRs welcome.

If you are not a developer, you can still contribute by:

• filing a bug report (for example, if you see an error message that you think someone might find confusing)
• improving the README
• answering someone's question

License

gomoderate is released under the open source Apache 2.0 license.