Cyd for Mobile: Delete your old Bluesky posts, except for what you want to keep

We're excited to announce the release of Cyd for Android and (soon, we hope) for iPhone. This brand new app helps you automatically, and on a regular basis, clean up your Bluesky account. It backs up and deletes your old posts, likes, and other data, while leaving what you actually want people to see when they look up your account.

If you want to get started right away, download Cyd for Android, and check out the documentation. Cyd for iPhone is currently stuck in App Store review – more on that below.

Until now, Cyd – short for Clawback Your Data – has been a desktop app that helps users delete their data from X, Elon Musk's personal cesspool. Since we launched Cyd in late 2024, 14,000 users have deleted 78 million tweets, 23 million retweets, and 14 million likes. They've migrated a quarter million tweets from X to Bluesky. Most of these people, we expect, are cleaning up their old data before saying good riddance and quitting X for good.

Escaping X is great. But Cyd is so much more useful when you use it to clean up a social media site that you actually want to use, like Bluesky.

If you've been using Bluesky for years, it's likely that your account has thousands of posts, reposts, and likes. Years of data like this can be incredibly revealing. Chances are, you only actually care about what you've posted in the last few weeks, except for some stuff that might have gone viral in the past. Why should everything you post to social media stay online, and public, forever?

Are you planning on applying for a US visa? US officials require that you make your social media accounts public, and they'll be reading your old posts to make their decision. We don't know what technology they use to investigate social media accounts (maybe they're scraping everything as you post it, or maybe they're just looking at your current profile), but it can't hurt to clean up your old Bluesky data with Cyd.

Cyd's Business Model

Cyd is developed by Lockdown Systems, an international worker-owned collective. Both the desktop app that supports X and the mobile app that supports Bluesky are open source, with the code published on GitHub. Cyd runs directly on your computer or phone, not on our servers. We don't have access to any of your accounts, or to any of the data in them.

While Cyd is open source, we also sell premium accounts for $36 USD a year that unlock the best functionality. See Pricing for more information.

In Cyd for Mobile, you can backup all of your Bluesky data for free, but deleting data requires a premium account. If you run a business or an organization and would like to give your employees privacy, peace of mind, and protection from doxing and harassment (ahem, newsrooms and non-profits, I'm looking at you), then you should check out Cyd for Teams.

Thanks to our fiscal sponsor Lucy Parsons Labs, we can now accept tax-deductible donations in the US.

Apple Rejected Cyd for iOS Because They Suck

We've submitted Cyd for Mobile to the iOS App Store for review. Apple rejected it, saying:

We noticed that the app includes or accesses paid digital content, services, or functionality by means other than In-App Purchase, which is not appropriate for the App Store.

Apple, an American corporation with close ties to the US government, retains a near-monopoly on what software iPhone users are allowed to run on their own devices. (Apple allows third-party app stores in the EU, only after being forced to.) Apple has abused this monopoly in the past.

It’s good that apps get screened for malware, but Apple shouldn’t reject apps for anticompetitive or government censorship reasons. Every time an app is rejected because the developer picks a payment processor with fees of about 3%, as opposed to Apple's In-App Purchase fees of about 30% – like our app – Apple is rejecting the app for anticompetitive reasons.

In the meantime, we're working on complying with Apple's ransom.

We need to build support for paying for premium accounts with In-App Purchases in addition to our current payment processor. We're not allowed to ask people to use our normal payment processor within the iOS app, but we'll get paid more if our users don't use In-App Purchases.

We're also looking into releasing a version of our app in AltStore PAL, an alternative iOS app store for Europeans, thanks to the EU's Digital Markets Act.

If you're an iPhone user, this will take a bit of time, but we'll keep you updated.