The wording “inactive followers” often mixes up two different lists. BskyDelete's Following workspace loads accounts that you currently follow. It can help you review and bulk unfollow selected accounts, but it cannot remove people who follow you.
It also cannot prove that an account is inactive. The Pro inactivity filter is a heuristic based on public profile data, including the reported post count relative to account age. Treat that signal as a place to start reviewing, not as a factual label or an automatic removal rule.
Following Is Not the Same as Followers
AT Protocol models each direction of a relationship separately. The official getFollows Lexicon returns accounts that a specified actor follows. A different endpoint is used for accounts that follow that actor.
That distinction determines what BskyDelete can change in this workspace:
- It can display the current accounts you follow.
- It can submit an unfollow request for accounts you explicitly select.
- It cannot remove one of your followers from your follower list.
- It does not keep a history of who followed or unfollowed you.
If your goal is to remove a follower, this workflow does not perform that action. Do not select accounts on the assumption that you are editing the opposite relationship direction.
What the Inactivity Signal Actually Means
The Following workspace can show an activity-level signal from public metadata. The heuristic compares a profile's reported post count with the age of the account and can flag a very low lifetime posting rate as inactive.
This has important limits:
- It does not inspect a private activity history.
- It does not confirm when the person last used Bluesky.
- A long-lived account that posts rarely may be intentionally quiet, not abandoned.
- A creator may remain valuable even with a low posting frequency.
- Missing or delayed public metadata can affect the signal.
BskyDelete also has a heuristic bot score in the Pro filters. That score uses public profile attributes such as profile completeness, account age, moderation labels, and count ratios. Neither score is a definitive judgment about the person or account.
Review the Accounts You Follow
- Connect your Bluesky account with OAuth and open the Following workspace.
- Load the current following list. Complete lists can require paginated requests, so wait for loading to finish before judging the result count.
- Use basic filters for handle, display name, bio, and current mutual-follow status to narrow the list.
- If you have Pro, enable the inactive-user filter as an initial review queue. You can combine it with public post, follower, or following count ranges when useful.
- Open or inspect each profile that you are considering. Check the biography, visible activity, relevance to your feed, and whether the relationship is one you still want.
- Select only the accounts you have decided to unfollow. Changing a filter clears the current selection.
- Optionally export the selected rows to CSV with Pro before making changes. The export records the selected current data; it does not create an automatic re-follow or restore operation.
- Confirm the bulk unfollow action and review which requests succeeded or failed.
The Free plan permits up to 30 successful delete or unfollow operations per local calendar day across supported workspaces. Paid plans remove BskyDelete's daily quota, while Bluesky API limits and temporary failures still apply.
A Better Decision Checklist
Before unfollowing an account marked inactive, ask:
- Is the account genuinely irrelevant to the feed I want, or simply infrequent?
- Does it publish occasional posts that are still useful?
- Is the account part of a current mutual relationship I want to keep?
- Am I relying on a heuristic without opening the profile?
- Have I reviewed the full selection instead of assuming every filtered result is the same?
Cleaning up your following list can make your own feed easier to review, but it does not guarantee higher engagement, reach, or follower growth. The reliable outcome is narrower: you stop following the accounts you selected after reviewing the current public data.