bluesky-research

Bluesky research

Look up public Bluesky profiles, author feeds, post threads, follower/follows graphs, account search, and trending topics — all as normalized JSON from the Crawlora API, no app scraping or direct AT Protocol client needed.

When to use this skill

• "What's 's profile / follower count on Bluesky?"
• "Pull 's recent posts on Bluesky."
• "Show this Bluesky post's replies / thread."
• "Who follows on Bluesky?" / "Who does follow?"
• "Search Bluesky for accounts about ."
• "What's trending on Bluesky right now?"

Setup (one-time)

• Get a free Crawlora API key (2,000 credits/mo, no card) at https://crawlora.net.
• Set CRAWLORA_API_KEY in the environment before running the helper.
• The helper reads CRAWLORA_API_KEY from the environment and sends requests to https://api.crawlora.net/api/v1. Missing/invalid key → 401.

How it works

Pick the job:

1. Profile — /bluesky/profile (actor = handle or DID). Display name, description, avatar/banner, follower/follows/posts counts.
2. Author feed — /bluesky/author-feed (actor, optional cursor, limit). A page of an account's posts, newest first, with engagement counts and any attached images/link card/quoted post.
3. Post thread — /bluesky/post-thread (uri = the post's at:// URI, optional depth). The post plus its nested replies and, if it's a reply, its parent chain.
4. Followers / follows graph — /bluesky/followers and /bluesky/follows (actor, optional cursor, limit). Page through an account's followers or the accounts it follows.
5. Search accounts — /bluesky/search-actors (q, optional cursor, limit). Accounts matching a query against display name, handle, and profile description.
6. Trending — /bluesky/trending-topics (no params). Bluesky's current trending topics and suggested feeds.

Full endpoint list, methods, and params: reference/endpoints.md.

Calling the API

# Profile + author feed:
scripts/crawlora.sh /bluesky/profile actor=bsky.app | jq '.'
scripts/crawlora.sh /bluesky/author-feed actor=bsky.app limit=20 | jq '.'

# Search + trending:
scripts/crawlora.sh /bluesky/search-actors q="web scraping" | jq '.'
scripts/crawlora.sh /bluesky/trending-topics | jq '.'

Use scripts/crawlora.sh for all requests; it keeps the API key out of command-line arguments.

Endpoint reference

See reference/endpoints.md for every Bluesky endpoint this skill uses.

Examples

• Account audit: /bluesky/profile + /bluesky/author-feed for a handle to check follower count, posting cadence, and recent engagement.
• Thread pull: grab a post's at:// URI from an author-feed or search-actors result, then /bluesky/post-thread to read the full reply tree (and parent chain if it's itself a reply).
• Network mapping: page /bluesky/followers and /bluesky/follows for an account to build its follower/following graph.

Notes & limits

• Credits / pay-on-success: billed only on 2xx; free tier 2,000 credits/mo. Key at https://crawlora.net.
• Public data only — public profiles/posts, sourced from the AT Protocol's public, credential-free AppView API; no login, no private content.
• Security: key lives in CRAWLORA_API_KEY only — never hardcode, query-param, or commit it.
• List endpoints (author-feed, followers, follows, search-actors) are cursor-paginated — follow the returned cursor to walk beyond the first page.
• post-thread needs a full at:// post URI, not a bsky.app URL — get it from an author-feed or search-actors result's post uri field.
• trending-topics has no params and is explicitly the least stable surface in this family — Bluesky may change its shape without notice.