How to Make your Profile Private on Bluesky

Currently, it's not possible to make your profile private on Bluesky (i.e. there is no way to "lock" your profile).

It could be that it won't even be possible in the future due to the technical architecture of the federated social media, the ATProtocol¹. The only thing that is possible is to block users on Bluesky.

Can I set my profile to be private?

Currently, there are no private profiles on Bluesky.

https://bsky.social/about/blog/5-19-2023-user-faq (accessed 2024-08-28)

Explanation

On centralized social media, like Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter, it's possible to make profile private. This means two things:

1. Only your followers can view your profile page and posts.
2. For someone to follow you, you must approve them as follower, and you have the option to not allow that they follow you.

Together, this means that you have control over who may view your profile and posts in these social media.

On decentralized social media, like Bluesky and Mastodon, it's not possible to make the profile private. That's because for the decentralization to work, a server (an instance in the federation) must be able to receive posts from other instances. Since each instance is controlled by different people, it's not possible to guarantee that a post that goes to an instance with 500 users will only be viewed by the user that follows you. This depends entirely on how the instance was programmed. If the instance is programmed in a malicious way, it won't honor the notion of privacy, and then you'll have a profile that seems "private" in one instance, but would be completely public in another.

Privacy of this kind only works on centralized networks, since it's like a secret. Two people may have difficult in keeping a secret, but three people will have more difficult. With an unlimited number of people (instances in this analogy), the secret (your profile) will inevitably stop being kept one day.