There's a bunch of right wing trolls who filmed themselves signing up & posting really shitty mean things. These are not well intended people; this is boundary pushing. You either lose by becoming a Nazi bar, or if you listen to them you lose by having their snivelling crocodile tears to deal with forever.

These folks can go run their own PDS! But generally I think nothing of value was lost, that the network has rightly refused to let itself be degraded.

Also, I suspect there was something else going on there, because there are lots of bigots on Bluesky. The “Very British Bigotry” blocklist (for fancy modern/Rowling—style transphobes), say, has literally thousands of people, completely unbanned, on it; Bluesky is really fairly small-l liberal about post content. One thing that they’re somewhat strict on is profile content, and I would speculate that those performatively getting banned are doing so on the strength of putting shit in their profile.

People can have abhorrent opinions and be civil about it. They typically, aren't.

Trolls feed off engagement and bluesky makes it easy to nuclear block so trolls don't like that very much.

That's honestly the nice thing about BlueSky, you can't ban anyone from the network entirely and filtering / moderation tools are put in the hands of users to do with as they please.

If you get no engagement because you're on everyone's blocklist well that can't be on anyone except you since every user opts in to them.

While I prefer Mastodon to Bluesky, it’s for the same reason. Anyone can spin up a Mastodon server. Anyone else is free to say, nah, I don’t want to talk to them. That doesn’t prevent that server from existing and peering with like-minded instances.