Boops: the story so far...

Boops are simple. You see someone on Chunky Guys, you like the look of them, you send them a boop. No pressure, no expectation, no agonising over what to say. Just a nudge.

The original plan was to run them through a dedicated bot account. You boop someone, the bot creates a post mentioning their Bluesky handle, they find out they've been booped, they download the app and boop you back. Cute, right? A little moment of connection that could also introduce new people to the community.

We built it. We launched it. And then it immediately hit a snag.

What went wrong

Bluesky has had to introduce restrictions on accounts using mentions to reach large numbers of people. Even with the best intentions, it looks like spam to the platform; and honestly, it's not hard to see why. Bad actors have absolutely ruined that mechanic for everyone. We weren't aware of the restriction while we were building the feature, which is on us, and shortly after launch we had to rethink.

Here's where we landed. Boops between Chunky Guys members are handled entirely inside the app, and they're private. No public posts, no external noise, just a quiet nudge between two people. If you boop someone who isn't a member yet, a post goes out from your account mentioning their handle. We're upfront about this in the app, you're told exactly what will happen before you confirm, but we won't pretend it's the experience we wanted. It loses a little of the fun.

The spam thing

Some people might say it feels like we're spamming folks. We get it, and we want to be straight about where we stand on that.

We genuinely don't want anyone on Bluesky to feel hounded. One of the reasons we love the platform is that it still feels like a place where people behave like people. The bear community has always had to find its own corner on platforms that weren't designed for us, and making that corner feel worse for anyone is the last thing we want to do.

More broadly: We think digital spaces are quietly ruined by people treating them as extraction opportunities. Scammers, spammers, corporations packaging your data and selling it to the highest bidder. It's why we run our infrastructure in Europe. It's why data ownership isn't just a line in our privacy policy; it actually shapes how we build things. So we take the issue of spam seriously, even if we think the specific situation is different.

What's next

We've been talking to Bluesky about the boop bot. They recently launched a feature that lets accounts formally identify themselves as bots, and the expectation is that their policies around bot behaviour will evolve alongside it. If that happens, we might be able to get back to something closer to what we originally had in mind. A proper boop bot, clearly labelled, doing its thing without anyone feeling blindsided.

Fingers crossed. In the meantime, boops work, member-to-member they're private, and we'll keep pushing. Keep on booping!