Decentralized social platform Bluesky has open-sourced a tool called Ozone that facilitates custom moderation. Debuting this week, Ozone lets individuals or teams collaboratively review and label content on the platform. “We’re opening up the ability to run your own independent moderation services, seamlessly integrated into the Bluesky app,” the company says, explaining “you’ll be able to create and subscribe to additional moderation services” on top of that which is administered by Bluesky’s moderation team, “giving you unprecedented control over your social media experience.”

“Bluesky was created to put users and communities in control of their social spaces online,” the company wrote in a blog post, adding “our online experience doesn’t have to depend on billionaires unilaterally making decisions over what we see.”

This could be a dig at Elon Musk, who acquired Twitter, or even Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg. Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey incubated Bluesky there before spinning it out while Musk transformed the platform into X.

Ozone and related implementations “will let users expand what’s moderated to their liking, allowing them to subscribe to additional moderation services that label, annotate, or hide certain types of posts,” according to The Verge, which explains “the company’s vision for moderation is a stackable ecosystem of services, which is why it will start allowing users to install filters from independent moderation services on top of what Bluesky already requires.”

The result is that users should be able to tailor moderation experiences to suit their preferences.

TechCrunch supplies the example that “someone could create a moderation service that blocks images of spiders on the network. If you’re someone who gets a jump scare when you see a spider, you could install the moderation service and have all labeled spider pictures disappear from your feeds.”

The new moderation service filters debut on the desktop version of Bluesky and will come to mobile shortly thereafter. Bluesky promises installing the third-party moderation services will be as simple as following another account.

“Although Bluesky already allows people to run a mute list or block list that other users can subscribe to, it often gets tied to a specific account, which doesn’t allow for collaboration and can be overwhelming if people start tagging you directly,” notes TechCrunch, adding that “unlike a block list that just lets you add accounts, Ozone lets you label specific posts.”