Are Bluesky Lists Public? Yes — But Nothing Will Tell You Which You're On
Every Bluesky list is public — curation lists, mute lists, block lists, all of them — and Bluesky's own release notes say so in one line: "Mod Lists are public, just like User Lists." No setting changes it. Anyone can read a list's name, its description, and every member without logging in.
Which sets up the genuinely strange part, and the reason I wrote this. All of that data is public, and yet there is no way to ask Bluesky which lists contain you. Not a hidden setting, not a paid feature — no endpoint exists. The one whose name sounds like it does points the opposite way. Below: why that gap is there, and what to use instead.
Are Bluesky Lists Public or Private?
Public, because a list is a record in its creator's repository rather than a setting on an account. Bluesky writes an app.bsky.graph.list record into your repo, and that repo is served to the open network. Bluesky's help pages are blunt about the neighbourhood this sits in: "Mutes are private, but mutelists are public lists."
Lists come in three flavours, and the visibility rules differ only in what your use of one reveals:
| List type | Who can read it and its members | Are you notified you were added? | Is your own use of it public? |
|---|---|---|---|
Curation list (curatelist) |
Anyone, no login | No | Reading a feed is private |
| Moderation list, used to mute | Anyone, no login | No | No — "The mute state is private" |
| Moderation list, used to block | Anyone, no login | No | Yes — creates a public listblock record |
Starter pack's list (referencelist) |
Anyone, no login | No | Joining a pack is a public follow |
Look at the third row again. Subscribing to a block list is itself a public act, so anyone can see which curated blocklists you've adopted — the same design decision that makes who blocked me on Bluesky an answerable question. Muting that identical list leaves no trace at all. (I've written up mute versus block for individual accounts; lists inherit those rules wholesale.)
A list being public doesn't make it findable, mind you — nobody is browsing a directory of block lists looking for your handle. But "hard to stumble across" and "private" are very different guarantees, and only one of them is real here.
How Do I See What Bluesky Lists I'm On?
Bluesky can't tell you, because being added to a list doesn't touch your account. The app writes an app.bsky.graph.listitem record into the list owner's repository. Yours is unchanged. Here's a real one, read off Bluesky's server with no credentials:
at://did:plc:z72i7hdynmk6r22z27h6tvur/app.bsky.graph.listitem/3lvpd7j2ikb2c
list: at://did:plc:z72i7hdynmk6r22z27h6tvur/app.bsky.graph.list/3lvpca43j5z26
subject: did:plc:e5sycehmo2p3ze6qvrrsurcc
Check the DIDs. The record sits under did:plc:z72i..., the list's owner, while the person on the list is did:plc:e5sy... — a different account. Every membership you have is a row in somebody else's filing cabinet, and there is no index pointing back. Which is why the app.bsky.graph namespace answers every neighbouring question except yours:
| Question | Endpoint | Exists? |
|---|---|---|
| What lists did this account create? | getLists |
Yes, no login needed |
| Who is on this list? | getList |
Yes, no login needed |
| Which of my lists is this person on? | getListsWithMembership |
Yes, needs login |
| Which lists have I muted or blocked? | getListMutes / getListBlocks |
Yes, needs login |
| What lists am I on? | — | No such endpoint |
getListsWithMembership is the trap in that table, because the name reads like the answer. It faces the other way: its own description says it "enumerates the lists created by the session user, and includes membership information about actor in those lists." That's the Add to List dialog — one dialog, reachable from a profile menu and from a list's member view. It tells you who's on your lists, never whose lists you're on.
Nor does anything alert you. Bluesky's documented notification types run like, repost, follow, mention, reply, quote, verified, starterpack-joined and a handful more, and none of them covers being added to a list.
Third parties have filled both gaps, unevenly:
- To check what you're already on, use ClearSky — the same no-login handle box from the blocked-me post, under its lists view. It gives you the list and the date you were added, but not the list's purpose, so open anything that looks like a moderation list yourself. Treat it as best effort: a handful of lists it showed me had already stopped resolving, which is what an index of other people's records gets you.
- To be told in future, follow @listifications.app (93,000-odd followers), a bot that DMs you when you're added to a block list, a starter pack, or a feed.
Notice the hole in that second one. Listifications covers block lists, packs and feeds — not curation lists. So the one category with no native notification and no third-party watchdog is the ordinary user list, which is exactly the kind someone makes quietly. Starter packs are a separate question again with a separate tab in ClearSky, and worth keeping distinct from this one: getListsWithMembership explicitly excludes the reference lists that starter packs are built on.
Can You Make a Bluesky List Private?
No, and the reason is more final than a missing toggle: there is nowhere in the data format to put the flag. The app.bsky.graph.list record schema allows a purpose, a name, a description, an avatar, and a timestamp. No visibility field, at all. The app matches its schema — the list creation dialog has two text fields, Name and Description, plus an avatar picker. (The word "private" does surface exactly once in those screens, and it's the subscribe menu telling you that muting is private. Never the list.)
So Bluesky has no private lists, and pages saying otherwise are describing something else. Two currently near the top for this question get it wrong: one states that "Other lists are private, which means only you can view and manage them," another that "Personal Mute Lists: These are private lists that only the creator can see." No Bluesky list has ever worked either way. A third page is accurate but easy to misread — the private lists it documents are its own product's, held in its own database, sat in a comparison table against a column headed "Public Bluesky Lists." Fine tool, different noun.
The feature has been asked for since almost the beginning. social-app #1056 — "User-created public and private Lists to curate user experience as well as help build community" — was filed in July 2023, collected 157 reactions and 44 comments, and is still open. #6625 asked again in November 2024, wanting to organise people "without having the list name, membership or existence visible to anyone else," and was closed as a duplicate the same day. Three years, requested, not built.
If you want a genuinely private grouping today, the honest answers are a note kept off-platform, or a mute list — not because the list hides, but because your subscription to it does. (Weighing a list against a starter pack for a public purpose instead? They differ in more than visibility.)
How Many Lists Is a Normal Account On?
Almost certainly none — and if any, it's probably somebody's block list. On August 7, 2026 I looked up every public list appearing for each of 150 sampled accounts. Only 8 of the 150 (5.3%) were on a list at all. The median account is on zero.
It's what those lists were that I'd have guessed wrong. Between them the 8 accounts held 15 memberships, and 13 of the 15 were moderation lists — one curation list, one pointing at a list that no longer resolves. For a rank-and-file account, "on a list" and "on someone's blocklist" are nearly the same event.
Visibility flips that completely. The same lookup, the same day: Bluesky CEO Jay Graber (jay.bsky.team) comes back on 3,567 public lists, Paul Frazee (pfrazee.com) on 2,358. Neither can see that inventory in the app either.
Two things this number is not. It's what one third-party index happens to know, so a list nobody has crawled stays public and invisible at once. And my sample was the 150 most recent followers of @bsky.app — overwhelmingly accounts created this year, which have barely had time to be filed anywhere. Given where Graber and Frazee land, a sweep of heavy posters would surely come in higher — I'd treat 5.3% as a floor for the quiet end of the network rather than a figure for you personally. Eight out of 150 is a wide enough interval that the shape is the finding, not the decimal point. Anyone can re-run it: bsky_stats.py listexposure bsky.app 150 for the sample, listsonme <handle> for a single account.
Where Does Agent Sky Fit?
The fact this whole post rests on — the graph is readable by anyone, no permission asked — is the fact Agent Sky is built on too. It walks public follower lists to find people in your niche.
I should say plainly that it has never touched a list. Targeting runs off source accounts and their followers; git log -S"app.bsky.graph.list" -- lib/ in our repo returns zero commits, all the way back. Nothing above describes a feature I'm selling you.
The connection that is real is less flattering. Those 13 moderation-list memberships out of 15 are the far end of a process, and the process usually opens with somebody following aggressively. Being mass-followed by a stranger is among the most common reasons a person reaches for a blocklist — and where a rate limit forgets you within the hour, a blocklist entry has no clock on it. Nobody reviews it, nobody appeals it, and the person who wrote it moved on years ago. It's a permanent public record with your DID in it, written by someone you annoyed once.
That's the argument for pacing, and it's why the built-in default here is 5 to 20 follows a day, three to ten minutes apart — against a documented ceiling of 11,666 records a day, roughly three orders of magnitude of headroom left on the table. The point was never the API's limit. It's not becoming the account that gets flagged as spam and then curated into a blocklist a thousand people subscribe to. Both tiers run that identical loop; paying $9/month buys more accounts and more history, not a faster pace.
If all you came for is your own name, stop at ClearSky. Paste your handle in and you'll know inside a minute whether anyone has filed you anywhere. Most people find nothing, which is a perfectly good outcome and the end of the matter.
Quick FAQ
Are Bluesky lists public? Yes — every list on Bluesky is public, and no setting changes that. Bluesky's own release notes for mod lists say it plainly: "Mod Lists are public, just like User Lists." Anyone can read a list's name, description, and full membership without logging in, because a list is stored as a record in its creator's public repository. The only thing that stays private is what you do with a moderation list: muting the people on it is private, while blocking them creates a public record.
How do I see what Bluesky lists I'm on? Not through Bluesky, which has no endpoint that answers in that direction. You need a third-party index like ClearSky (clearsky.app), which reads the public records and shows the lists containing your account without a login. The reason the app can't do it is structural: when someone adds you to a list, the record is written into their repository rather than yours, so nothing about your account changes and no notification is generated. Bluesky's documented notification types don't include one for being added to a list.
Can you make a Bluesky list private? Not in Bluesky itself. The list record format has no visibility field — the schema allows a purpose, a name, a description, and an avatar, so there is nowhere for a private flag to live even if the app offered one. The ask is three years old: social-app issue #1056 was filed in July 2023, has 157 reactions, and is still open. Some third-party tools offer their own private lists, but those live in that tool's database rather than on Bluesky, which is a different thing.
Does someone know if you add them to a Bluesky list? Bluesky itself never tells them — there is no notification for being added to a list, and nothing appears on their profile. A popular third-party bot called Listifications will DM people when they're added to a block list, a starter pack, or a feed, so for those three the answer is often yes in practice. Curation lists are the gap: nothing notifies anyone about those, which is where the quiet additions happen.