Do not ask whom the Lover of Bluesky is for — it is to your own detriment.

This has been a bleak weekend on Bluesky, as one of its finest accounts has vanished — though we still dare to hope for its resurrection. 

Known simply as The Lover of Bluesky, this account struck fear into the hearts of terrible posters everywhere. It occasionally posted its own barbed commentary and quips, but its most savage and unsettling work came in the form of screenshots — showcasing the most unhinged and absurd Bluesky posts in all their chaotic glory.

Now that the Lover has disappeared, it feels almost impossible to do justice to their craft, let alone to catalogue the full taxonomy of posting maladies they exposed. Perhaps the hallmark of The Lover of Bluesky’s most memorable work — beyond the subtle failure of its subjects to grasp the joke — was a tone that was at once scolding and yet burning with indignation that somewhere, someone on the internet was having fun in the wrong way.

Perhaps I am projecting too much onto what was, after all, an anonymous, screenshot-laden social media account — but to me, it always felt like the perfect antidote to the tiresome, self-congratulatory complaints that Bluesky is merely a liberal echo chamber. This was no tourist who logged on for a few minutes to have their biases confirmed and crank out another repetitive thinkpiece. Whoever was in charge of the account obviously knew the darkest areas of the site, regardless of whether they loved or hated Bluesky. They realized how really strange its users could be.

Their feed occasionally even reads as a silent warning that anyone could reveal something ignorant or embarrassing in a moment of weakness. Just knowing the Lover was out there was often enough (though, admittedly, not always enough) to make me delete some half-baked or painfully obvious reply before hitting send.

So where has the Lover of Bluesky gone? In a Patreon post, the account’s owner explained that “losers and cowards” had emailed their employer — and even their spouse’s boss — prompting them to take the account down for the time being. They added that they weren’t sure if or when it would ever return.

There is little left to do now but wait. Like a real museum, one can only hope that the Lover of Bluesky soon reopens its doors. But even if not, its spirit will continue to haunt those of us who remember that we are always just a few ill-advised keystrokes away from immortalizing ourselves in infamy.