Why Does Bluesky (bsky) Want My Birthday?
Updated  by  nm  2025-May-6

I’m pretty happy with Mastodon for public messaging, but because some people and businesses I want to follow aren’t there, I sometimes think about joining Bluesky. But, so far, I’ve resisted mainly because I have a personal rule of not signing up for any system that asks for my birthday.1

Since there does not seem to be a way to opt out of giving my birth date when creating an account and because I’m a privacy nut, especially about PII (personally identifiable information),2 I have not joined Bluesky and fear that it will go the same way Twitter went.◊


Update 2025-May-06:  Thanks to Bridgy Fed, I might be able to read from and write to Bluesky (bsky) through my Mastodon account. My Bridgy Fed profile is fed.brid.gy/ap/@nm@mathstodon.xyz.


Endnotes


  1. For example, I never joined Facebook because they require a birthday. I wrote about resisting Facebook, and Meta in general, in Infinite Ink’s Meta Nope: What I’m Doing to Help Kill Facebook. ↩︎

  2. To learn about PII, which is also known as personally identifiable information, see wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_data. ↩︎

Please share & discuss 📝 👎 👍 📯