Whether you joined Bluesky this month, or you're a day-one user, it's possible you've got a lot of posts on the new-ish social network already. (I'm not calling them "skeets," okay?)
In all the talk about whether or not to delete your X posts—or whether to port all of them over to Bluesky—you probably haven't considered deleting your Bluesky posts too. After all, Bluesky is relatively new, and still, somehow, pretty good. Why delete all the funny, trenchant, insightful, intelligent posts you've made so far?
This isn't really a conversation not just about Bluesky, but about posting to social media platforms in general—particularly ones where your account is public. These platforms are all about sharing your thoughts on any given subject at any given moment. They invite you to engage with current events as they are happening. A bombshell piece of news just dropped: What do you think of that? You just walked out of the season's biggest movie: Tell the world why you hated it. It's your own, personal soapbox, to stand on wherever, whenever. Your place to comment, disagree, rant, or otherwise share your state of mind.
There are known downsides to this kind of always-on mindset. A viral post can draw unwanted attention; a hot take can start a heated online debate that might cause trouble for you offline; a misunderstanding can snowball into a scandal.
While you risk a negative responses to posts as you make them, there are equal risks to posts you leave up: Years down the road, will someone unearth a post of yours, 100% out of context, and interpret your feelings in a totally different way than you meant them? Or, perhaps you did mean them that way, but you are now a changed person, and no longer align with that way of thinking. Maybe you don't even remember what you were talking about, or making the post at all. Whatever the case, that post doesn't represent you as you are now—so why is it still floating out there on the internet, attached to your name?
That's why automatically deleting posts can start to look a lot like wisdom. We've all scrolled through our social media accounts before, cringing at the crap we used to post, and erasing the worst of them one-by-one. But there's a case to be made for taking a more consistent approach to erasing the past—an automated solution you'll (hardly) have to think about.
Rather than go through your past posts yourself and hand-sort the ones that should stay or go, you can use a program to automatically delete all your posts after a set period of time. Consider this one, created by writer Emily Gorcen.
Gorcen's script is designed to save a private archive of everything you post on Bluesky, and delete each post after a preset length of time, or after it reaches a preset level of "popularity." This prevents any given post from going viral, and thus, drawing too much attention to your feed. It's a funny twist on public social media accounts, since, for most of social media history, going viral has been a bit of a goal for many posters. Gorcen practices what she preaches: On her Bluesky account, you can see that posts auto-delete every two days. (The original post that introduced me to this topic has, appropriately, been deleted.)
You'll quickly notice, however, there are posts on Gorcen's feed older than two days. That's because not every post is deleted two days after it's posted, as the script ignores any posts you "like" yourself. While it might be a bit weird to like your own posts, it might be a bit easier when you remember that by doing so, you're saving that post from deletion 48 hours hence.
You aren't really losing anything by using this script: While the posts are deleted from your account, the script still saves to them your post archive. This way, you can reference anything you've ever posted, without worrying about how your posts will be received by internet strangers months or years from now, or if a post's vitality would have been too much for you to handle.
The script does require some coding know-how (which I, regrettably, do not have). Gorcen has instructions for installation in your python management solution, including the need to download libmagic. Once set, there are different command-lines to run to determine your variables: there's one for setting a threshold of reposts a post can receive before it's deleted; one for setting the age limit for posts (Gorcen's is two days, but you can set yours to anything you want); and one for choosing domains to ignore deleting, so you can choose not to delete posts linking to specific websites. Gorcen emphasizes that you should set up the "-y, --yes" command line, as this is required to automate the script.
When properly set up, you can use this automated script to deletes nearly everything you post after a set number of days or after it reaches a threshold of engagement, minus posts you like, or posts that contain certain links. Of course, you could always think a little harder about what you post, and post less often, but that's not as much fun.
