There’s been much talk about Bluesky this past week, mostly because of a big exodus of people from Twitter following the US presidential election result. It seems many of them have chosen Bluesky as their new social media homebase. I’ve had an account for a while, and though I quite like it as a product, I currently only really post promos for the newsletter there.
There’s been quite a lot of folks writting about the whole thing, for example Gavin Anderegg has a piece that goes into a bit of detail about the Bluesky architecture. It’s kind of interesting. I previously wrote about my signup experience and the AT protocol that underpins the service. I didn’t end up getting that engaged over in Bluesky because it felt like most people and topics I liked where still mostly on Twitter.
The recent migrations to Bluesky have me wondering, what exactly would you need to do in order to integrate an existing website with Bluesky? What would that even look like?
I did a quick online search for blog posts and tutorials, but to my dismay there wasn’t much out there in the wild, only the official developer docs & tutorials. Figured I’d jot down a few notes on what such an integration might look like. I guess you could do a bunch of complicated things, but in it’s simplest form I think a Bluesky integration would have the following features:
- Ability to mark a website post to be syndicated to Bluesky, with ability to use the various Bluesky publish settings from within your post’s markdown frontmatter.
- Some sort of counter next to each post on the website that shows number of replies on Bluesky, and links to the thread on Bluesky.
- An engagement section on post pages that displays any replies from Bluesky users.
- Ability to publish to Bluesky via an RSS feed
These were the first things that sprung to mind. I’m super curious to hear how others are thinking to integrate their websites with Bluesky.