Bluesky bot experiment finds quote posts drive highest follow-back rate at 13.3%

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A developer-run Bluesky account, managed by a GitHub Actions bot and Claude AI, tested three engagement tactics — quote posts, reply-plus-like, and likes alone — to measure which best converted strangers into followers. Quote posts yielded the highest follow-back rate at 13.3%, followed by reply-plus-like at 10.1%, and likes alone at just 2.6%. A fourth tactic, plain reposts, was abandoned after two days when it produced no measurable follow-back cohort whatsoever, and the code generating it was permanently deleted. The team also rebuilt their measurement system to exclude accounts that already followed them before being engaged, a correction that significantly changed the like-only rate and would have otherwise inflated results. All engagement data is stored in append-only logs, allowing past results to be recomputed at any time without altering the underlying records.

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