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I joined Bluesky (well ok, I did in early 2023, but I’ve been way more active as of late)! As a social media platform, it is growing in size, and I think now is a very good time to join considering the deteroration of Twitter.
I’ve been thinking about ways to integrate it with my website for a while, and I finally got around to it. There are a few interesting challenges about this website:
- The website is fully static, and I have no plans to change that! SO anything that posts to Bluesky has to push to source control.
- Date management is handled by Git, so any logic will have to handle differences in that.
- I really want to keep this simple. Vercel is my deployment platform, and I don’t want to have to use GitHub Actions for deploying to Vercel.
- I really do not want to manage users or moderation within the site itself. I want to be able to edit on a phone as needed.
Keeping it simple
Since the main goal of this is to keep it simple, if it is too complicated to implement, it gets in the way of this blog. Inspired by this post, I went ahead and implemented the following flow with GitHub Actions, Astro, and Bluesky:
- When a post is created, a GitHub Actions workflow is triggered. It goes through, finds all edited md files, and checks if they have a “bluesky” key in the frontmatter. If they do, the job is done here since the Bluesky post was already created.
- If the Bluesky post is not found, it will create the post on Bluesky. A object of type
{cid: string, uri: string}is then put into the frontmatter of the post. - If there are any changes, they are then pushed to source control. This means that the static site will have access to the Bluesky URI during the build.
- The Astro layout then checks for the bluesky object, and if it exists, renders both the
BlueskyCommentsandBlueskyInteractionscomponents. You can find them open source here. - A simple Astro action is used to act as a proxy to get the Bluesky post.
One downside of this is that it is async. Not everything is immediately available on the blog page, but it will generally settle within a couple of minutes, so I think this is an acceptable tradeoff.
Other Bluesky stuff
Another thing I wrote for Bluesky is Bluehook! This tool allows you to get a webhook delivered to you whenever a post event occurs that is within the filters you specify, allowing for serverless deployments of Bluesky apps. This works by connecting to the firehose from a Rust microservice and then delivering the events to you from that with a HTTP client. I am really trying to make a nice bot community around Bluesky, and this is a step in that direction! I think there is a lot of potential in this platform.
Overall, whilst this platform has its problems, I really love the platform so far and honestly I plan to deactivate my Twitter account! The community on Bluesky is way more active and friendly (as well as being blog friendly), and I think that is a great thing for the future of social media.