This is a simplified overview of Bluesky’s operation, focusing on the essential components for a basic understanding of atproto.
The thing is, ATproto/Bluesky have been growing a lot lately, and things have moved on very fast. Everything in that previous post still holds up and works, but there have been some interesting developments that warrant an update, namely: you can now host your own data. It’s pretty straightforward too. It does have some implications for working with the APIs, which I’ll get to shortly.
I’ve documented my baby steps with the protocol below with a few examples - essentially: authenticate, post a “Hello World!” skeet, then reply to that skeet (no, I don’t know why they’re referred to as “skeets”), and get some author information. I’ve done these initial experiments with Postman/cURL, so that I didn’t have to faff around with setting up any sort of language or framework tooling. After all, it is just HTTPS. Hopefully you can translate them into your tool of choice.
Bluesky is a decentralized social network based on the AT Protocol that has recently gained attention as an alternative to the former Twitter (now X). Due to its decentralized nature, user servers vary, making it technically challenging to create a universal sharing link. For this reason, Bluesky share links are not natively implemented in PaperMod1.
However, Bluesky’s web client, bsky.app, provides a mechanism via its Web API to dynamically select the appropriate server based on the login state of the user clicking the share link (e.g., the official server bsky.social). By leveraging this mechanism, articles can be shared without encountering the challenges posed by decentralization.
Integrate Bluesky replies as your blog’s comment section in gohugo.io framework
For further reading.
Rafael Eyng’s tech blog
Setting up a Bluesky Personal Data Server without dedicating an entire VPS to it.
Bluesky PDS (Personal Data Server) container image, compose file, and documentation.