21 points pirhoo 1 hour ago 13 comments

pirhoo 1 hour ago | parent

Hi HN, I'm Pierre!

Byesky is a toolbox I created last year for cleaning up your Bluesky account, or erasing it altogether:

- Unfollow the accounts that don't follow you back, or unfollow everyone except the ones you lock

- Disappearing posts: tag a post #vanish (or #) and it gets deleted after a delay you pick

- Weekly auto-clean, and a list of who unfollowed you

- Nuke my account: deletes everything you ever created

- And more to come!

How it works: you log in with Bluesky's own OAuth (ATProto), so Byesky never sees your password. The web app only queues jobs. Background workers do the deleting, and when Bluesky's rate limit kicks in, a job pauses and picks up where it left off once the limit resets. A big account is tens of thousands of deletions, so a full cleaning tasks run for a long time with a progress screen.

The basics are free for accounts with up to 5,000 follows and followers.

To help me cover server costs, a Plus subscription (€3/month) covers bigger accounts and adds the heavier tools, including the nuke.

I'm finally doing a proper launch au the tool and I'd love feedback, especially from anyone who has left a social network and wished they'd had this!

lapetitejort 19 minutes ago | parent

Why can't I host this locally?

techmunky 1 hour ago | parent

I'm out of the loop why are we raising our pitchforks this time? Or is this astroturf?

kev009 53 minutes ago | parent

There are plenty of reasons someone might want or need to scrub/obfuscate their online identity regardless of the platform.

vvpan 44 minutes ago | parent

Not sure what this is besides a piece of marketing for a closed-source pay-for service.

F3nd0 37 minutes ago | parent

So not out of place at all on Hacker News?

ck2 41 minutes ago | parent

instead of wasting time with tools like this

why not create tools that help people auto-crosspost from Threads to Bluesky, etc.

F3nd0 39 minutes ago | parent

Opposite goals. This is a tool for having less posts on Bluesky, not more.

jon128 27 minutes ago | parent

There are some people, particularly in the Minneopolis area, who really need exactly this tool.

nazgulsenpai 19 minutes ago | parent

do they drive a honda fit

BugsJustFindMe 25 minutes ago | parent

The concept of "mutuals" is fundamentally influencer-centric. A person who uses their account for reading rather than just posting only hurts themself by refusing to follow an account that doesn't follow them back.

"See who your real friends are" is either:

1) confused branding that conflates two unrelated user domains

2) grossly and manipulatively trying to make people feel bad by pushing the idea that following means friendship and needs to be reciprocal

self_awareness 17 minutes ago | parent

Soooo we don't like Bluesky now? Ok.

izzydata 5 minutes ago | parent

Can we get the ability to delete posts on Hackers News?