Table of Contents

Labels

Labelers and labels are how Bluesky allows for composable moderation. A label is published by a moderation service, which a user or an application can choose to subscribe to.

Once subscribed to a labeler requests to a Bluesky API can request the labeler's labels to be applied to posts or actors, and the labels will be applied to records underneath the labels key. When an application encounters a label it should act on it based on the users preferences for that labeler.

Getting a user's labeler subscriptions

A user's labeler subscriptions are part of a user's preferences, and can be loaded through the Bluesky agent's GetPreferences method once the agent has authenticated.

using Bluesky.Agent;

Preferences userPreferences;
var userPreferencesResult = await agent.GetPreferences();
if (userPreferencesResult.Succeeded)
{
    userPreferences = userPreferencesResult.Result;
}
else
{
    userPreferences = new Preferences();
}

From there, you use the SubscribedLabelers property and pass that into any API that takes a subscribedLabelers parameter. For example, to get a user's notifications with labels applied:

var notificationsList =
    await agent.ListNotifications(
      limit: pageSize,
      cursor: cursor,
      subscribedLabelers: userPreferences.SubscribedLabelers);

For notifications labels are applied to the Author property and the PostView property. You can iterate through the collection, and act on it. For example, to display labels applied to the author of a notification:

foreach (Notification notification in notificationsList.Result)
{
    StringBuilder labelDisplayBuilder = new ();
    foreach (var label in notification.Author.Labels)
    {
        labelDisplayBuilder.Append(CultureInfo.InvariantCulture, $"[{label.Value}] ");
    }
    labelDisplayBuilder.Length--;

    Console.WriteLine($"Author: {notification.Author} {labelDisplayBuilder}");
}

Many APIs will take a subscribedLabelers parameters, including GetProfile, GetSuggestions, SearchActors, GetFeed, GetTimeline and so on. It is recommended you cache the user's subscribed labelers and provide them to any API that accepts them.

By default idunno.Bluesky will return the Bluesky moderation labeler as part of a user's labeler subscriptions. This can be controlled with the includeBlueskyModerationLabeler parameter on the GetPreferences method.

Reacting to labels

The value of a label will determine your application's behavior. Some example label values are porn, gore, and spam. Label values are interpreted by their definitions. Those definitions include these attributes:

  • blurs which may be content or media or none
  • severity which may be alert or inform or none
  • defaultSetting which may be hide or warn or ignore
  • adultOnly which is a Boolean

A user chooses to hide, warn, or ignore each label from a labeler.

For more information on labels, their values and how your application should react to them, see the Bluesky moderation guide.

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