Reasons for Automatically Deleting Your Bluesky Messages
Whether you joined Bluesky this month or are a first-time user, it’s likely that you already have a lot of posts on the new social network. (I don’t call them “skeets”, okay?)
With all the talk about whether you should delete your X messages or move them all to Bluesky , you probably haven’t considered deleting your Bluesky messages either. After all, Bluesky is a relatively new product, but it’s still pretty good at some things . Why delete all the funny, poignant, insightful and smart messages you’ve written so far?
Your social media posts should be ephemeral
This is actually a conversation not just about Bluesky, but about social media posting in general, especially those where your account is public. These platforms are designed to allow you to share your thoughts on any topic at any time. They invite you to take part in current events as they happen. Some amazing news has just been announced: what do you think about it? You’ve just walked out of the biggest movie of the season: tell the world why you hated it. This is your personal soapbox that you can stand on anywhere, anytime. Your place to comment, disagree, rant, or otherwise share your opinion.
There are known disadvantages to this approach to continual thinking. A viral post may attract unwanted attention; a heated comment can cause a heated online debate that can cause problems for you offline; a misunderstanding can develop into a scandal.
While you run the risk of negative reactions to messages as you create them, there are similar risks for the messages you leave: in a few years, someone will discover your message, taken 100% out of context, and interpret your feelings in a completely different way . By the way, what did you mean by them? Or perhaps you actually meant them that way, but now you’ve changed and no longer hold that way of thinking. You may not even remember what you talked about or even wrote the post. Either way, this post doesn’t represent you as you are now – so why is it still hanging around the internet attached to your name?
This is why automatically deleting messages may seem wise. We’ve all scrolled through our social media accounts before, cringing at all the crap we used to post and deleting the worst of it one by one. But there are reasons to take a more consistent approach to erasing the past—an automated solution that you (unlikely) have to think about.
You can automatically delete your Bluesky messages.
Instead of going through your past posts yourself and manually sorting through which ones to keep or delete, you can use a program that will automatically delete all of your posts after a certain period of time. Consider this option , created by writer Emily Gorsen.
Gorzen’s script is designed to maintain a private archive of everything you post on Bluesky and delete each post after a set period of time or after reaching a set level of “popularity”. This prevents the post from going viral and thus attracting too much attention to your feed. This is a fun twist on public social media accounts, since for much of the history of social media, virality has been something of a goal for many posters. Gorsen practices what she preaches: In her Bluesky account, you can see that posts are automatically deleted every two days. (The original post that introduced me to this topic has been removed accordingly.)
However, you’ll quickly notice that Gorzen’s feed contains posts that are older than two days. This is because not every message is deleted two days after it is posted, as the script ignores any messages you “like”. While it may be a little weird to like your own posts, it can be a little easier if you remember that by doing so you are saving that post from being deleted after 48 hours.
You don’t really lose anything by using this script: although the messages are deleted from your account, the script still saves your archive of messages in them. This way, you can link to everything you’ve ever posted without worrying about how your posts will be perceived by strangers on the Internet months or years from now, or that the post’s viability will be too much for you to handle.
Choose what to delete and when
The script requires some coding skills (which I unfortunately don’t have). Gorcen has installation instructions in your Python management solution,including the need to download libmagic . Once installed, you need to run various command lines to define your variables: one to set the threshold of shares a post can receive before it is deleted; one to set the age limit for posts (Gortzen’s is two days, but you can set whatever you want); and one to select domains that will ignore deletion, so you can avoid deleting posts that link to certain websites. Gorzen emphasizes that you should configure the command line with “-y, –yes” as this is necessary to automate the script.
With the right setup, you can use this automated script to delete almost everything you post after a certain number of days or after reaching an engagement threshold, except for posts you like or posts that contain certain links. Of course, you can always think a little more about what you post and post less often, but that’s not as fun.