Every social network limits how fast you can act. Bluesky is unusual in that it publishes the numbers, and they are worth knowing before you start tidying up a few hundred follows, because “clean my following list” is exactly the kind of job that runs into them.
Writes are billed in points, not requests
Bluesky’s rate limiting for anything that creates or changes a record works on a points budget. Each write costs:
| Operation | Points |
|---|---|
| Create a record (post, follow, like, repost) | 3 |
| Update a record | 2 |
| Delete a record (unfollow, unlike) | 1 |
Bluesky-operated PDS services document 5,000 write points per hour and 35,000 per day. At three points per creation, a budget spent only on new records permits at most 1,666 creations per hour and 11,666 per day. These figures follow from the points budget; they are not additional independent allowances.
Two things fall out of that immediately.
Unfollowing 500 accounts costs 500 write points; following 500 costs 1,500. These actions use different shares of the same budget. Neither example alone exhausts the documented daily budget. Blue Horizons also applies the limits of your plan, and other clients may already have used some network capacity.
The budget is shared across everything you do. Points spent liking posts from your phone are points you cannot spend following people from a tool. If you have been active all morning, your remaining budget is smaller than the headline number suggests.
Sessions have their own limit
Creating a session, signing in with an app password, is limited separately: about 30 per five minutes and 300 per day per account. That sounds generous until a badly written tool logs in on every request. Any client worth using keeps one session alive and refreshes it instead.
Reading is limited too, just differently
The public AppView and authenticated PDS have different limits. Bluesky documents 3,000 API requests per five minutes per IP for its hosted PDS; that is not a published universal AppView allowance. Other providers may use different limits. Cached public reads reduce duplicate requests. Check response headers and back off after rate-limit errors.
What happens when you hit a limit
Blue Horizons applies shared application budgets and plan limits. Bluesky may impose additional limits, and activity in other clients also consumes network capacity. A larger plan does not guarantee that every action will succeed; review the result and any retry time.
How to stay clear
- Spread big clean-ups. A few hundred unfollows in one session is fine. Thousands in one hour is not, even though the arithmetic technically allows it.
- Leave headroom. Aim to use roughly half to two thirds of the hourly allowance, so normal activity from your phone still fits.
- Prefer deletes over creates when you have a choice: they are three times cheaper.
- Use a tool that tracks the budget for you rather than one that fires requests until the server says no. Blue Horizons caps itself at 3,000 points per hour and 20,000 per day, checks the budget before every single write, and stops the run cleanly with a report of what is left.
The limit that isn’t a number
There is a second kind of limit, and it is social. Following a thousand accounts and unfollowing them a week later is a recognisable pattern, and other users recognise it faster than any algorithm. Blue Horizons deliberately has no auto-follow and no scheduled churn for that reason: the tool is for cleaning up an audience you actually have, not for manufacturing one.
If you are about to spend a chunk of this budget, the guides on pruning in the right order and on growing without follow-for-follow are worth reading first: the second one covers the pacing that keeps a cleanup from looking like farming.
Want to see where you stand? Analyze any handle for free, no sign-in, and you will see how many of the accounts you follow never followed you back.
The hourly and daily usage bars describe Blue Horizons activity and rolling windows. Protect prevents unfollowing; blacklist prevents following. Mute and block have separate controls. Blue Horizons budgets mute/block conservatively with follows and their reversals with unfollows; this does not claim that every operation has the same upstream cost.