Bluesky Hits 900 Members Without Ads

I run a small Bluesky community for sysadmins and homelab folks. On June 23, 2026, the member count crossed 900. That is not a viral moment, and it is not a story about a platform beating Twitter (a task Bluesky is not trying to do). It is a smaller story about how an ad-free, privacy-respecting social network can grow without algorithmic tricks when it treats the people on it like adults.

If you have been waiting for someone to write the “I tried Bluesky and it was fine” article without the boosterism or the doomscroll nostalgia, this is it.

What 900 members actually means

The number is not the point. Most of the work to get here happened in 18 months of small, boring actions: posting a thread about a NAS recovery, replying to a question about IPv6 in a homelab, sharing a Tailscale tip that saved someone an afternoon. Each post invited maybe three or four new members who found the conversation useful. Some stuck. Most did not. The ones who stayed are the kind of people who would have shown up to a 2003-era IRC channel if you had handed them a hostname.

Bluesky (a microblogging service built on the AT Protocol, a federated social networking standard that lets users move between servers without losing their follower graph) makes this kind of slow, organic community possible in two specific ways. The first is the chronological feed. There is no engagement ranking, no “For You” tab, no “people you may know” carousel. You see what the people you followed posted, in the order they posted it. The second is the ability to host your own feed. My community runs on a custom feed (a Bluesky feature that lets a user or server define a list of posts based on rules like “posts that mention this hashtag from accounts with at least 30 followers”) I wrote that filters for sysadmin-relevant posts. Anyone can subscribe to the feed with one click. Nobody has to accept an ad to see the content.

The result is a community that looks more like a forum than a feed. People start threads. People reply days later. People quote-post (Bluesky’s equivalent of a retweet with comment) other people’s threads with corrections instead of dunking. None of this is unique to Bluesky in principle, but it is rare in practice on the platforms that have shaped the last decade of social media.

Why the ad-free part matters

Most platforms that promise ad-free experiences eventually add ads. The history of social media is a long list of companies that grew on the back of “we will never show you an ad” promises and then reneged once the user base was large enough to monetize. Bluesky’s structure is different in a way that makes that path harder.

Bluesky is funded by users paying for the Bluesky+ subscription (a $8 per month or $96 per year plan that adds profile customization, higher media upload limits, and a few quality-of-life features) and by the underlying Bluesky social PBC, a public benefit corporation that publishes its finances. The company does not sell ad inventory. The model is closer to how a paid newsletter or a self-hosted forum works than how a typical social network works. That does not make Bluesky invulnerable to enshittification (a term coined by writer Cory Doctorow to describe the lifecycle where a platform treats users well until it locks them in, then degrades the product to extract more revenue). It does make the immediate pressure to add an ad network weaker.

For privacy, the story is mixed but better than the mainstream alternative. Bluesky does not show ads, but it does collect metadata (the IP address you connect from, the time you logged in, the device you used) and stores it for operational reasons. The AT Protocol’s federation model means your posts live on the server you signed up with, and that server’s operator can technically read them. If you are willing to run your own PDS (Personal Data Server, the per-user server component of the AT Protocol), you can host your own data and only federate the parts you choose to share. Most users will not do this. But the option exists in a way it does not on closed platforms.

What my community looks like

Around 900 members is small by mainstream platform standards. By forum standards, it is a healthy mid-size community. The active daily user count is closer to 80 to 120. Conversations run the gamut:

• NAS recovery stories (one of the most common thread types)
• Tailscale and WireGuard setups
• Plex, Jellyfin, and audio book library management
• Home Assistant and self-hosted home automation
• Self-hosted Git (Gitea, Forgejo, sourcehut)
• Privacy-respecting email (Stalwart, mailcow, Fastmail)
• Local LLM setups (Ollama, LM Studio, llama.cpp)
• Networking edge cases (IPv6, BGP, multi-WAN)

I do not moderate much. The chronological feed means low-effort outrage bait does not surface. The custom-feed model means spam mostly stays out. The members self-police in a way that is rare on larger platforms, partly because the community is small enough that bad behavior is visible and partly because the people who are here chose to be here instead of being funneled in by an algorithm.

What I would tell past me about Bluesky

If I could send a message back to the version of me that joined Bluesky in late 2024, I would say three things.

• Pick a niche, do not try to be everything. My community works because it is specifically for sysadmins and homelab folks. A general “tech” feed would have been drowned out by the broader Bluesky firehose (the term for the unfiltered stream of every public post on the network).
• Write the custom feed yourself. The default Bluesky experience is fine but not distinctive. A custom feed that solves a specific filter problem (in my case, “show me posts about self-hosted infrastructure from accounts I have not followed yet”) is what makes the community feel like a community and not just a hashtag.
• Do not optimize for member count. The metric that matters is the number of people who post in any given week. That number is around 60 for my community. The 900-member total is mostly lurkers, and that is fine.

Trade-offs

Bluesky is not free in time. The custom feed I maintain takes about an hour per week to update when the rules need adjusting. The community moderation takes another hour per week on average, more during incident weeks. The Bluesky+ subscription costs $96 per year. None of this is a deal-breaker, but it is real cost, and it scales linearly with community size.

The migration story is non-trivial. If I were moving from a different platform, the export-import path is workable but not seamless. The closest direct competitor is Mastodon (a federated microblogging service that runs on the ActivityPub protocol, an older and more widely adopted standard than AT Protocol), which has more mature migration tooling but a slower-moving codebase and a different culture. Migration is a weekend project, not an afternoon project.

For most users, the right call is to keep your existing social media accounts and add Bluesky as a third or fourth channel rather than a replacement. For community organizers who want a smaller, slower, more deliberate space, Bluesky is worth the setup time. The 900 members in my community would not have shown up on a platform that optimizes for engagement, and that is exactly the point.

If you are a sysadmin or homelab enthusiast looking for a feed that respects your time, my community is at bsky.app/profile/did:plc:[redacted] and the custom feed is linked in the profile. If you are looking for a privacy-first social network that you can actually leave, AT Protocol federation makes that easier than any closed platform can match.