If you don't have a Bluesky account yet, you may be behind the curve à la non-Twitter users circa 2009, as the app has blown up and gained a significant following in the last six weeks since the election. But with that rapid growth, and without a robust content moderation system, it's already entering an era of bots and misinformation.Bluesky has seen a massive, nearly 300% bump in its user base since early November, as Xitter users flee from the enervating, asinine reign of Elon Musk and his (probably temporary) obsession being Donald Trump's best friend. But the team running the platform, founded by former Twitter CEO and co-founder Jack Dorsey, remains small was likely caught flatfooted by the deluge of new users, and the bad actors who have followed apace."We received more reports in two days than in all of last year," the company said in a recent post regarding this user growth and the accompanying uptick in reports of spam, copycats, and bots.“People had this idea that it was going to be a different type of social network,” says Claire Wardle, a professor at Cornell University and an expert in online misinformation, speaking to the Associated Press this week. “But the truth is, when you get lots of people in a place and there are eyeballs, it means that it’s in other people’s interests to use bots to create, you know, information that aligns with their perspective.”Users are reporting a flood of apparently bot-fueled comments on posts that appear designed to spark controversy or sow division, as well as spam posts with links to shady websites, and much more that we're all fairly familiar with from the heydays of both Facebook and Twitter.Bluesky's user base is now hovering around 25 million and counting, and research firm Similarweb recorded 7.6 million new monthly active app users in November  — Bluesky itself says it has added 12 million new users "in the past two months." And this is an app that only opened fully to the public in February, having taken its time (nearly a year) in beta to build up some content moderation infrastructure.It's not clear how big the staff at Bluesky is or how fast they may be trying to hire, but it seems clear that this very familiar growing pain for social media apps will strike this new platform more fast and furious, given how bad actors have learned better to ply their trade in the last decade.These include both bot networks — which are likely establishing themselves to be deployed by a foreign government, like Russia, when needed — and copycat accounts. The AP reports that Alexios Mantzarlis, director of the Security, Trust and Safety Initiative at Cornell Tech, did some research in November showing that of the top 100 most-followed accounts on Bluesky, 44% had at least one copycat account already posing as them.Last week, Bluesky said it was addressing this problem. "We recently introduced a new system to detect impersonation," the company said in a post. "This tool automatically flagged some accounts that were taken down, then reinstated. Other prominent impersonation accounts were quickly removed, contributing to a false perception that we take action based on behavior outside of Bluesky."The company also said that it had "quadrupled" its moderation team in recent weeks. But does that mean it went from like two to eight people, or...?Previously: A Year Later and After Launching Open-Source Twitter Alternative, Jack Dorsey Says Elon Musk's Takeover Was a Mistake