ICE (U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement) has now change into the No. 3 most-blocked account on Bluesky, after receiving its official verification on Friday, in line with third-party trackers. Bluesky users, unsurprisingly, are offended in regards to the government account being hosted on the platform. Many are recommending that others block the account directly or subscribe to a block list that features all the U.S. government’s official accounts.
The blocklist was introduced after the White House and other government agencies under the Trump administration signed up for Bluesky last October to post messages blaming Democrats for the federal government shutdown. The accounts that joined on the time included the Departments of Homeland Security, Commerce, Transportation, the Interior, Health and Human Services, State, and Defense, along with the White House itself.
The move made the White House one among the most-blocked accounts on Bluesky, and today it stays within the No. 2 position, just behind Vice President J.D. Vance, per stats shared on the tracking site Clearsky. (The location leverages Bluesky’s API to trace which accounts are essentially the most blocked and other blocking activity.)
ICE, nonetheless, didn’t join Bluesky in October. In line with Bluecrawler’s Join Date Checker, the account @icegov.bsky.social joined the social network on November 26, 2025.
The account was verified a number of days ago in line with the independently-run Verified Account Tracker, which suggests that either Bluesky’s team didn’t have enough information to use the verification checkmark, was one way or the other unaware of the account’s existence (doubtful!), or was internally debating easy methods to handle the difficulty. Bluesky hasn’t responded to a request for comment.
One tracker now shows the ICE account as being over 60% of the approach to being the most-blocked Bluesky account.
ICE today has many accounts across other social media sites, including X, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, and LinkedIn. These accounts are likely to be verified on platforms which have a verification mechanism, with YouTube being an exception.
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The choice from Bluesky to host and confirm ICE establishes the social network as one which’s now fitting in additional with other, larger social media giants, fairly than with the unique ethos of the open social web generally known as fediverse, where the user community is more answerable for which accounts gain attention and traction.
The fediverse, which represents a network of independent but interconnected social media platforms, includes apps like Mastodon, Pixelfed, PeerTube, Flipboard, and, to some extent, Instagram Threads, though Meta’s app isn’t fully federated. The U.S. government doesn’t have Mastodon accounts, but users can follow accounts like @potus on Threads from their Mastodon accounts, in the event that they select.
One reason for avoiding Mastodon, an open source federated app that runs on the ActivityPub protocol, might be its smaller size. But in addition, any government account joining this network might be easily blocked by individual server operators. This wouldn’t prevent the account from organising its own server to post to the fediverse, but other communities could refuse to federate (interoperate) with that server, greatly diminishing its reach.
Mastodon’s founder Eugen Rochko, who stepped down as CEO in November, citing burnout, recently posted an anti-ICE message on Mastodon, noting that “Abolish ICE” doesn’t go “nearly far enough” to deal with the issue within the U.S.
A day later, he announced he was opting his account out of the bridge that connects Mastodon with Bluesky.
Bridging technology, which incorporates the project generally known as Bridgy Fed, is supposed to permit different decentralized platforms to attach with one another, even in the event that they run different protocols, as is the case with Bluesky, which runs on AT Protocol. Coincidentally, Bridgy Fed today launched a approach to add domain blocklists to bridged accounts, which might conceivably allow fediverse users to dam the federal government agencies posting on Bluesky.
Reached for comment, Rochko wouldn’t confirm whether or not ICE’s participation on Bluesky was a consider his decision to go away the bridge, saying that the choice was a “personal” one.
Nevertheless, there has often been tension between the fediverse and the atmosphere, or the decentralized social platform that features Bluesky and other, newer networks and apps like Blacksky, Northsky Social, and more. Since the networks have different approaches to decentralization, they each have their very own supporters and critics, a few of whom can’t even agree that the networks ought to be bridged in the primary place.