What Is a Good Bluesky Engagement Rate? 10,422 Posts Say Your Follower Count Sets It
A good Bluesky engagement rate is whatever is normal at your follower count, because follower count sets the number almost by itself. Across 496 active accounts and 10,422 original posts read on September 11, 2026, the median engagement rate was 1.20% — but that's 16.48% for accounts under 100 followers, 1.04% at 1,000–9,999, and 0.06% above 100,000. The median post got 25 likes, 3 reposts and 1 reply. A single platform-wide benchmark measures your size, not your posts.
The pages ranking for this are confident and unsourced. Infloq's calculator tells an account with 2,500 followers to expect "1.8%" and "approximately 34 likes and 7 comments per post," under a disclaimer that the estimates are "based on industry averages and platform-specific data." BskyGrowth (February 21, 2026) says "average engagement rates typically fall between 1.5% and 4% for micro-accounts (under 5,000 followers)." Neither names a sample. (The disclaimer does the work the number doesn't — "based on industry averages" is how you say nobody counted.)
Bluesky, unusually, lets anyone check: every post's counters are public and unauthenticated.
So I measured it: 10,422 original posts from 496 accounts, read logged out on September 11, 2026, sampled out of three public feeds, plus a 300-account control group of brand-new users. Engagements = likes + reposts + replies + quotes, top-level posts only, other people's reposts excluded. Per account I take the median post rather than the mean — one lucky post otherwise defines a month — then take the median across accounts.
What Is a Good Bluesky Engagement Rate?
Whatever the accounts your size are getting — and the spread across sizes is roughly 270-fold. Here is the whole sample, bucketed by followers:
| Followers | Accounts | Posts | Typical account's median likes/post | Median engagements/post | Median engagement rate | Posts with zero likes |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Under 100 | 72 | 922 | 4.0 | 5.0 | 16.48% | 14.1% |
| 100–999 | 110 | 1,955 | 6.5 | 8.0 | 1.83% | 14.5% |
| 1,000–9,999 | 187 | 4,108 | 33.5 | 39.0 | 1.04% | 2.6% |
| 10,000–99,999 | 102 | 2,737 | 100.0 | 120.0 | 0.46% | 1.6% |
| 100,000+ | 25 | 700 | 147.5 | 191.5 | 0.06% | 0.3% |
| All | 496 | 10,422 | 16.0 | 19.0 | 1.20% | 5.4% |
Read down the rate column and the "benchmark" framing falls apart. A 2% engagement rate is an ordinary month for a 300-follower account and a spectacular one for a 300,000-follower account. Of the 494 accounts with at least one follower, 53.6% cleared 1%, 29.6% cleared 3% and 14.2% cleared 10% — so "above 1% is good" describes half of everyone.
The likes column moves the other way, and it's the column that matters to you: more followers buys more likes per post, just nowhere near proportionally. Going from ~3,100 followers to ~166,000 — a factor of 53 — took the typical post from 33.5 likes to 147.5, a factor of 4.4.
Where does that leave Infloq's calculator? Its likes projection is close to right: at 2,500–3,500 followers my 37 sampled accounts had a median post of 31 likes against its "approximately 34." Its "7 comments" is about seven times the median reply count of 1. And its rate is a constant — the 800-follower page also says "approximately 1.8%," while the measured rate halves between those two sizes. Both pages also state that "the average engagement rate for Bluesky is 1.2%" and then call 1.8% above average. That 1.2% happens to land on my all-sample median of 1.20%, which I'd call a coincidence except it's the only figure on the page that survives contact with data.
What Does the Average Bluesky Post Actually Get?
25 likes, 3 reposts, 1 reply. Those are the medians across all 10,422 posts, and the mean (170 likes) is useless here because a few viral posts own it. The distribution:
| At least | Share of the 10,422 posts |
|---|---|
| 1 like | 94.6% |
| 10 likes | 66.9% |
| 100 likes | 27.4% |
| 1,000 likes | 3.2% |
Two things in there surprised me. First, posting into the void is rarer than it feels: only 5.4% of posts got zero likes, though that rises to one in seven for accounts under 1,000 followers. Second, the engagement mix is lopsided — likes 81.0%, reposts 15.1%, replies 2.9%, quotes 1.1%. Replies are the thing everyone says they want and the thing almost nobody gives.
Bookmarks sit outside all of that. Bluesky added them on September 8, 2025 as a private alternative to the public like: who bookmarked is hidden, but the count rides along in the API. I excluded them from every engagement figure and counted them separately — 38,676 bookmarks, on 34.5% of posts, equal to 2.2% of the like volume. Small, but it's real signal that no benchmark on the web includes yet.
Your number also depends enormously on which room you're standing in. The same method, run the same day on three feeds plus a control group:
| Sample | Accounts that posted | Posts | Median followers | Median likes per post (all posts) | Median engagement rate (per account) |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Authors in the Discover feed | 200 | 5,745 | 11,974 | 52 | 0.56% |
| Authors in the Photography feed | 149 | 2,600 | 2,210 | 33 | 2.17% |
| Authors in the Game Dev feed | 147 | 2,077 | 209 | 5 | 1.64% |
| 300 recent followers of @bsky.app | 15 | 35 | 0 | 0 | — |
That last row is the one to sit with. Those are the 300 most recent accounts to follow @bsky.app — a rough proxy for new users, though I didn't check creation dates, and 260 of them had zero followers. 285 of the 300 (95.0%) posted nothing at all in 30 days. The 15 who did post produced 35 posts between them, 85.7% of which got zero likes. Engagement rate is a conversation among the minority of accounts that post at all.
That row is also why this sample reads so much higher than the only other real dataset out there. Buffer analyzed 1.7 million posts from 56,000 users in early 2025 and found a Bluesky median of 3 engagements per post (mean 21) — against my 31. Both are right. Buffer measured everyone posting through a scheduling tool; I measured accounts whose posts show up in public feeds. The gap between 3 and 31 is the finding: most of the distance between a typical Bluesky account and a visible one sits upstream of anything you'd call engagement rate.
Why Do Small Accounts Show Engagement Rates Over 100%?
Because on Bluesky the engagement doesn't come from your followers. Five accounts in my sample cleared 100%, topping out at 125% — impossible if the denominator were the audience. All five had fewer than ten followers. Feeds are the answer: a post surfaces in custom and algorithmic feeds, gets reposted, and reaches people who have never heard of you. The typical account in the under-100 bucket has 34 followers and a 4-like median post, and most of those likes are from strangers.
This is why the metric is borrowed badly from Instagram, where reach is roughly bounded by audience. At small sizes the Bluesky ratio measures feed luck, not audience quality — which is exactly where the flattering numbers live. The 16.48% median for sub-100-follower accounts is not evidence that tiny accounts have superfans. It's four likes divided by not very many followers.
Honest limits on my numbers. The 500 sampled accounts are authors of posts appearing in three public feeds, so every one of them posts — not a random slice of Bluesky, as the control row above makes embarrassingly clear. Each bucket is a different mix of those feeds: the under-100 row is four-fifths Game Dev authors, the 100,000+ row is 24 Discover authors and one photographer, so read the shape of the column rather than the second decimal. The window is 30 days, but the per-account post cap usually binds first — 86.5% of Discover authors hit the 30-post limit, and 192 of 296 niche-feed authors hit their 20-post limit — so in practice it's "the most recent N posts," and likes on the newest of those are still arriving. Every figure here is a floor, most of all for high-volume accounts. Quote posts count as originals, replies and other people's reposts are excluded, two accounts with zero followers are excluded from the rate figures, and four sampled accounts posted nothing at all. Everything was read logged out with bsky_stats.py engagement.
How Do You Calculate Your Bluesky Engagement Rate Without Impressions?
You can't compute the standard formula on Bluesky, because impressions don't exist in the product. BskyGrowth gives the usual one — "(Likes + Reposts + Replies + Quote Posts) ÷ Impressions × 100" — and works an example against "2,000 impressions." Every post the API serves carries likeCount, repostCount, replyCount, quoteCount and bookmarkCount, and no view count, no reach, nothing (I re-checked the live API while writing this). The app shows you no dashboard either; third-party analytics tools are built on the same public API you can query yourself.
So use the followers denominator, the way I did above:
- Take your last 20–30 top-level posts, not your best one. Exclude replies and reposts — mixing them in is how people accidentally measure their own conversation habits.
- Add likes + reposts + replies + quotes on each post, take the median across those posts, and divide by your current follower count. Medians, because one lucky post will otherwise define your month.
- Compare against your bucket in the table above, then against your own last month. The second comparison is the only one that says anything about your content — the first one mostly tells you your follower count.
What Should You Track Instead of Bluesky Engagement Rate?
Your odds of posting into silence. That's the number that genuinely improves as an account grows, and the rate metric hides it: 14.1% of posts from sub-100-follower accounts got zero likes, 14.5% at 100–999, then 2.6% at 1,000–9,999 and 0.3% above 100,000. One in seven versus one in three hundred. Meanwhile your engagement rate falls the whole way down that list, which is arithmetic rather than decline — and it's the most common reason people conclude they're not gaining traction when they are.
Getting out of the one-in-seven column is about who's on the other end of the post. When I measured 7,652 follows on September 9, accounts with over 100,000 followers followed back 13.8% of the time and accounts with under 100 followers followed back 51.0%. Chasing big accounts builds a follower list of people who were never going to reply; peers reply.
That's the job Agent Sky does, and I sell it, so discount accordingly. It looks for accounts genuinely active in your niche rather than the biggest ones available, and it verifies a live follow-back before it unfollows anybody, so what you end up with is mutuals rather than headcount. $9 a month, free to start. It will not move your engagement rate — anything promising that is selling you a ratio — and it doesn't need to.
You don't need us to use the table above, either. The whole finding fits in one sentence: compare your number with accounts your own size, then with your own last month, and ignore every benchmark that does neither.
Quick FAQ
What is a good engagement rate on Bluesky? There isn't one number, because the ratio is set by the denominator. Across 496 active accounts and 10,422 original posts I measured on September 11, 2026, the median engagement rate — the typical post's likes plus reposts plus replies plus quotes, divided by followers — was 1.20%, and it fell from 16.48% for accounts under 100 followers to 1.83% at 100–999, 1.04% at 1,000–9,999, 0.46% at 10,000–99,999 and 0.06% above 100,000. Compare yourself with your own bucket rather than a platform average: among the sampled accounts at 2,500–3,500 followers, 1.14% was the middle of the pack and 2.28% was the top quarter.
What is the average number of likes per post on Bluesky? The median post in my sample got 25 likes, 3 reposts and 1 reply. The mean is 170 likes, because a handful of viral posts own it — which is why medians are the honest number here. 94.6% of the 10,422 posts got at least one like, 66.9% got at least ten, 27.4% got at least a hundred, and 3.2% cleared a thousand. Likes track follower count sublinearly: the typical account under 100 followers had a median post of 4 likes, at 1,000–9,999 it was 33.5, and above 100,000 followers it was 147.5.
How do you calculate engagement rate on Bluesky? Add the likes, reposts, replies and quote posts on a post, divide by your follower count, multiply by 100 — and treat it as a rough proxy. The formula most articles give divides by impressions instead, which you cannot do on Bluesky: every post the API serves carries likeCount, repostCount, replyCount, quoteCount and bookmarkCount, and no view or impression count at all. Nothing in the app shows reach either, so any Bluesky engagement rate quoted against impressions was not computed from Bluesky data.
Does Bluesky have analytics? Not natively. The app shows per-post likes, reposts, replies, quotes and bookmarks, plus your follower count — no dashboard, no history, no reach figure. Everything else comes from third-party tools built on the same public API, which is also why anyone can audit the numbers in this post. Bookmarks, added on September 8, 2025, are a halfway case: who bookmarked a post is private, but the count is public. In my sample bookmarks appeared on 34.5% of posts and came to 2.2% of the like volume.