How to Clean Up Your Bluesky Following List

A following list accumulates like a junk drawer: follow-backs from 2024, abandoned accounts, that guy who posts about one hackathon per year. Cleaning it up makes your feed livelier and your follower-to-following ratio honest. The catch: doing it too fast is exactly what bots look like, and platforms notice. Here's how to do a deep clean without tripping any alarms.

Step 1: Decide who goes (without doing math in your head)

Sync your handle in Kaleidorabble and open the You follow filter - accounts that don't follow you back. Sort it by last activity or post count and the cuts pick themselves: accounts with no posts in a year, accounts that turned out to be pure repost amplifiers (the post-mix scan shows you each account's post/reply/repost split), and accounts whose bot score explains itself when you click it.

Two protections worth using as you review:

• Lock any account you never want touched (your friends who post rarely, small accounts you're rooting for). Locked accounts are skipped by every bulk action, full stop.
• Back up first. One click exports your whole graph to a JSON file. If you over-prune, the restore flow offers to re-follow anyone you followed at backup time. It's an undo button for your entire cleanup.

Step 2: Bulk unfollow, at a human pace

Log in with an app password (created in Bluesky's Settings, revocable any time), tick "Select all" on the filtered list (or just the rows you mean), and choose "Unfollow selected" from the bulk action menu. There is deliberately no one-click "unfollow all" button: you pick the rows, then confirm twice. Here's the part that matters for account safety: Kaleidorabble deliberately throttles every write action to roughly one per second. A 200-account cleanup takes a few minutes instead of four seconds - and that's a feature. Rapid-fire unfollows are the signature of automation; a paced stream of actions looks like what it is, a person tidying up.

The same philosophy applies in the other direction: batch follows are metered by a daily budget (default 40) with several seconds of random jitter between each, so no burst of activity from your account ever pattern-matches to a follow-train bot.

Step 2½: Exorcise your ghost follows

After a big cleanup, people often notice that their Bluesky profile still says something like "294 following" while every list - in Kaleidorabble or in the Bluesky app itself - shows far fewer. That's not a counting bug. The profile number counts raw follow records, and a follow record outlives the account it points at: when an account is suspended, deactivated or deleted, or when it blocks you, Bluesky quietly drops it from every list but keeps counting your follow. Kaleidorabble calls these ghost follows.

Sync while logged in and the Overview tab reads your own follow records straight from your account, compares them with what Bluesky lists, and shows the ghosts with a reason each: suspended, deleted, deactivated, or hidden (public and active, but they block you). Open the Ghost follows filter, tick "Select all", and choose "Unfollow selected". The records go at the same human pace as everything else, and your profile's following number drops to match reality. The follower-side number has the same kind of inflation, but that gap is other people's records, which nobody can list or clean.

Step 3: Maintain instead of purging

The nice thing about the sync history is that maintenance becomes tiny: re-sync every couple of weeks, glance at who unfollowed, skim the new arrivals for engagement-farm patterns, unfollow the two or three accounts that went dormant. Five minutes, done. The junk drawer never refills.