What Is Follow Farming on Bluesky? What 100,000 Labeled Accounts Show
Follow farming on Bluesky means following lots of accounts to get follows back, so your follower count grows faster than your posts would earn it. It comes in two forms. In follow-back networks, people trade follows through hashtags like #FBR and #BlueCrew. In bulk following, one account follows thousands of strangers and often unfollows the ones who don't follow back. Bluesky's rules say not to artificially inflate follower counts, and an independent labeler called Skywatch labels accounts it thinks do this.
Bluesky doesn't publish who it thinks is doing it. Skywatch does, as public labels anyone can read. I replayed Skywatch's entire label history, up to October 28, 2026. It has labeled 100,122 accounts for follow farming or bulk following, and the two labels catch very different accounts.
(Disclosure: I make Agent Sky, a Bluesky growth tool that follows people for you. More on how it compares at the end.)
What Counts as Follow Farming on Bluesky?
Bluesky's own line is "artificially manipulating" follower counts. Skywatch draws two narrower lines with two labels. Here's who says what:
| Who | Rule or label | What it covers |
|---|---|---|
| Bluesky | Community Guidelines (updated Sept 19, 2025) | "Do not artificially manipulate features or social signals to gain unearned reach or mislead users, including engagement metrics, follower counts" |
| Bluesky Safety | Post, Dec 8, 2023 | Named "bulk follow/unfollow and other forms of engagement farming" as spam it would act on |
| Skywatch | Follow Farming label (since Dec 2024) | "accounts which engage in indiscriminate follow farming and follow-back networks", plus posts "using hashtags or linking to sites utilized for follow-farming" |
| Skywatch | Bulk Following label (since Feb 2026) | "mass following, numeric handle floods, new account bulk follow, follow/unfollow farming" |
Skywatch is an independent moderation service, a labeler that anyone can subscribe to. Its profile says it's "Not able to perform takedowns." It also keeps a Follow Farming moderation list (6,727 accounts on October 28), which people can subscribe to and mute or block in one go. If someone you don't know has blocked you, a list like this may be why.
What triggers the labels is only partly public. Skywatch's automatic rules are open source, and they have one hard rule here: an account with more than 20 starter packs gets the Follow Farming label. Only 2.0% of the accounts labeled today have that many, so most labels come from other signals (and the code Skywatch runs may differ from the public copy). The list description adds accounts "which contain follow-farming oriented hashtags in their bios." Any bulk-following thresholds aren't public.
For the Follow Farming label, a lopsided ratio isn't the trigger. When a user claimed that following more people than follow you would earn it, Skywatch replied on May 6, 2025 that this "is absolutely not true." The exception it gave was accounts with "roughly the same amount of followers as follows" where both numbers are "in the thousands or tens of thousands," which it called "generally a sign" of follow-for-follow schemes, "though not sufficient evidence in its own right." A lopsided ratio can still make people less likely to follow you back, which is a reason to unfollow people who don't follow back slowly.
Who Gets Labeled for Follow Farming on Bluesky?
The Follow Farming label mostly lands on big, established accounts in follow-back networks. The Bulk Following label mostly lands on brand-new accounts, and about half of those end up suspended.
I looked up every account currently carrying each label and compared them with 9,088 accounts that posted during four minutes on the same day:
| What I measured | Follow Farming label (5,605 accounts) | Bulk Following label (4,242 accounts) | Baseline posters (9,088) |
|---|---|---|---|
| Median followers | 6,670 | 105 | 514 |
| Median accounts followed | 6,393 | 405 | 279 |
| Follow more accounts than follow them | 52.6% | 92.8% | 27.4% |
| 10,000+ followers | 40.9% | 3.3% | 6.1% |
| "Follow back", "FBR" or similar in bio | 21.2% | 0.3% | 0.4% |
| Any hashtag in bio | 72.6% | 13.2% | 10.8% |
| Median account age when labeled | 231 days | 0 days | n/a |
Accounts with the Follow Farming label are big. 40.9% have over 10,000 followers, nearly seven times the baseline rate. Their follower and following counts are almost equal (a median ratio of 1.02), which is what you get when follows are traded one for one. That's the pattern Skywatch described. #BlueCrew is in 41.7% of their bios, followed by #Resist, #FBR and #FBPE. All of them are follow-back hashtags: FBR stands for "follow back resistance", and #BlueCrew is a US Democratic-leaning community tag where people follow each other.
Accounts with the Bulk Following label are new. The median one was labeled on the day it was created, and 82% within a week. Three in four follow at least twice as many accounts as follow them.
The 67,281 posts Skywatch has labeled look similar. In a random sample of 1,844 of them, 86.6% used a hashtag and 55.2% used #BlueCrew, followed by #StrongerTogether, #BreakfastCrew, #Resistance and #Trump (#FBR was in 11.3%). 14.3% linked a starter pack (a go.bsky.app link) and 10.0% linked change.org. Skywatch labels posts that link to sites used in follow-back drives, so a petition link counts here when it's shared that way. Most of these are political posts built around follow-back hashtags.
Does Follow Farming Get You Banned on Bluesky?
The label doesn't. But about half the accounts with the Bulk Following label had been suspended by Bluesky when I checked. I took 2,000 random accounts ever labeled Bulk Following and 2,000 currently labeled Follow Farming, and checked which still exist:
- Bulk Following: about 53% suspended. 1,151 of 2,000 accounts no longer return a profile. I checked 200 of those, and 184 showed "Account has been suspended", which means Bluesky took them down. Among accounts still carrying the label, it's about 67%.
- Follow Farming: about 6% suspended. Only 243 of 2,000 were gone, and fewer than half of those were suspensions. The rest were deleted or deactivated.
Skywatch can't suspend anyone, so the label isn't what causes the ban. Bluesky's own moderators seem to treat the same new, mass-following accounts as spam. Most Bulk Following labels are also short. Of the 93,167 accounts Skywatch has labeled for Bulk Following, 78,820 carry only a label set to expire, 92% of them after 24 hours. Most accounts in follow-back networks keep the Follow Farming label and stay active. (If you're unsure whether Bluesky has acted on your account, here's what a spam label looks like.)
Even the label is quieter than it sounds. Skywatch sets both labels' default to ignore. Subscribers see nothing until they change that setting, and people who don't subscribe to Skywatch never see it at all.
How Do You Get a Follow Farming Label Removed?
Appeal it to Skywatch from your own profile, or wait if it's a Bulk Following label.
- Check whether you have it. Subscribe to Skywatch from its profile. If it has labeled you, your own profile shows a button with the number of labels on your account.
- Tap it and choose Appeal. Bluesky's app sends the appeal to the labeler that applied the label, which here is Skywatch, not Bluesky.
- Remove what triggered it. Take follow-back hashtags out of your bio, and stop posting follow trains.
- For Bulk Following, slow down. Most of these labels expire after 24 hours. Following thousands of accounts again brings it back.
To hide these accounts instead, subscribe to Skywatch and set Follow Farming and Bulk Following to warn or hide. Or subscribe to its Follow Farming list to mute or block all 6,727 accounts at once.
How Do You Grow on Bluesky Without Follow Farming?
Follow people you'd actually want to read, at a pace a person could keep up. The data points to three habits:
- Pick who you follow. People who follow you through a follow-back hashtag may not be interested in your posts. Following accounts that post about your topic is more likely to bring readers (here's what that does to follow-back rates).
- Keep the volume human. The Bulk Following label and the suspensions land on accounts that follow thousands in their first days. Bluesky's rate limit is much higher than a safe pace.
- Unfollow slowly, and only after checking. Bulk follow/unfollow is the exact pattern Bluesky Safety named in 2023. If you clean up non-followers, do it a few at a time, after giving people days to follow back.
How I measured it, and the limits. I replayed Skywatch's whole public label stream (subscribeLabels on ozone.skywatch.blue), from its first label in March 2024 to 17:07 UTC on October 28, 2026, about 7.7 million label records. The first Follow Farming label is from December 28, 2024. The replay gives the latest state of each label, so an account labeled, removed and relabeled counts once. In total, 7,116 accounts have had the Follow Farming label and 93,167 the Bulk Following label (161 had both). "Currently carrying" means the label wasn't removed and hadn't expired: 6,336 accounts for Follow Farming and 14,831 for Bulk Following. Profiles came from Bluesky's public getProfiles API on October 28. Accounts that didn't return one are missing from the comparison table, which is why the Bulk Following column has only 4,242 accounts, all of them ones Bluesky hasn't suspended. Its 0-day median age is for those accounts only. The baseline is every account that posted on Bluesky's public Jetstream feed during 16:12–16:16 UTC that day, which leans toward active accounts. The suspension samples were 2,000 random accounts ever labeled Bulk Following and 2,000 random accounts currently labeled Follow Farming, with 200 missing accounts from each checked one by one. The 1,844 posts were a random sample of the 67,281 labeled posts, each counted once per link site. All of it is public data.
Follow-back trades grow the number. I built Agent Sky to find followers who'd want your posts anyway. It finds active accounts in your niche and follows them one at a time, at least 30 seconds apart and at most 300 new accounts a day on the fastest setting (the default is far lower). By default it unfollows accounts that haven't followed back after 3 days, and it checks for a live follow-back first. That loop is close to what Skywatch's Bulk Following label describes, so if you'd rather not run it, turn unfollowing off in your growth settings. $9 a month, free to start. To see which of your posts land, try our free Bluesky analytics tool.
Quick FAQ
What is follow farming on Bluesky? Following lots of accounts to get follows back, so the follower count grows faster than the posts would earn. It's often done through follow-back hashtags like #FBR or #BlueCrew, or by following and unfollowing in bulk. Bluesky's Community Guidelines say not to artificially inflate follower counts, and the independent labeler Skywatch labels accounts it thinks do this.
Is follow for follow allowed on Bluesky? Following someone back is fine. What Bluesky acts on is doing it in bulk to inflate numbers. Its Community Guidelines say not to artificially manipulate social signals, including follower counts, and its safety team has named bulk follow/unfollow as a form of engagement farming since December 2023.
What does the Follow Farming label mean on Bluesky? It's a label from Skywatch, an independent labeler, not from Bluesky. Skywatch applies it to accounts in follow-back networks and to posts that use follow-farming hashtags or links. In the Bluesky app, only people who subscribe to Skywatch can see it, and even they see nothing until they change its setting, because the label's default is ignore.
Can follow farming get you banned on Bluesky? The Skywatch label itself can't. Skywatch says it isn't able to perform takedowns. Bluesky can, and in my samples about 53% of the accounts Skywatch had labeled for bulk following were suspended when I checked, against about 6% of the accounts labeled for follow farming.