Yesterday, I made an attempt to “moove” my Bluesky account to my PDS and while everything in the process seemed to go great, when actually logging into my moved account on Bluesky, all of my posts, images and data were missing, and I was getting an error on every page, “jwt signature does not match jwt issuer”. I looked up the error it didn’t point to a direct reason or fix, but it seemed to be related to a mismatched key somewhere and suggested to just retry the migration. That I did, and it only made matters worse, generating another error that didn’t exist before, so I backed up my image on my PDS and just decided to start over with a new account, but instead of using my new PDS account on Bluesky, I chose to use Blacksky instead.
While I’m sort of bummed of having to start over with a new account, it’s for the better because due to Bluesky’s weird moderation algorithm, which I and many others have complained about on Bluesky’s GitHub, my account was blackballed across much of the community I interacted with. I knew something was up when not much longer after I started posting, that I was seeing less engagement and follows on my page. When I brought the issue up, someone told me to check Clearsky because they saw I was on multiple very large blocklists. I’ve already written extensively about this and how I don’t like Bluesky in my other post, but after digging further about the blocklists, come to find out the admins of those blocklists were trolls, some aimed at sabotaging the Blacksky community by making users not see each others’ posts and others were Zionists blacklisting anyone who said anything criticizing Israel and falsely labeling the accounts as “antisemites”. At that time back in April when I discovered the lists, I had just started using Bluesky but was being blocked by over 70,000 users who had subscribed to those blocklists and my Bluesky account went from active to dead in a matter of weeks if not days. So, I largely stopped posting there and wanted nothing to do with Bluesky.
But two good things happened. I learned that Bluesky accounts could be migrated off to another server and that I could host my own. So that’s what I’ve done. And also, Blacksky is now it’s own community, so I don’t have to use Bluesky; I guess that’s three good things. There’s no need trying to recover my original account since it’s dead; it’s indefinitely shadowbanned into oblivion so I’m going to leave it dead. And for anyone else who just blindly subscribes to Bluesky blocklists, please verify the moderators of said lists first before using them because some of them are trolls intentionally trying to sabotage Bluesky. Right-wing trolls I’m sure as no one else would go to great lengths to do it. Pouring one out to my OG account.
That said, I was able to follow back everyone I was following on Bluesky from a backup I did before I attempted the migration. There were only 219 but it took me 2 days to do it only because I had to add them back one by one and I wasn’t going to spend much time doing it. While not all 200 have followed me back, I’m seeing engagement on my posts again, which is a good thing that wasn’t happening on my old account.
Now that I’m starting over fresh, I want to think about how I want to refocus my content on Blacksky. I cross-post from my WordPress blog and Mastodon with ActivityPub over to Bluesky and frankly, I want to redo my WordPress site as well because I’ve discovered that my theme actually blocks some ActivityPub elements from working. But anyway, a lot of people just post random stuff on social media, but I’m a blogger and want to write real content, so I’m going to give it some thought. Lots of things to rethink for 2026. Once I figure out a way to repay my school tuition and get back in, I’m also going to join my school’s Writer’s Guild, so really looking forward to that. 🦉
