Ever since I started using Bluesky, I wanted to also integrate replies to my post into this website. I have done the same with Mastodon using retoots and so I started working on something similar for Bluesky: Samara.
One of the great things about the Bluesky API is that posts etc. are accessible without any kind of authentication. Many folks have gone out and just used that for integrating posts into their static websites. While that’s definitely a viable approach, I wanted to have a layer between my website and Bluesky that is under my control.
In the current implementation this offers the following advantages:
- If you go to zerokspot.com and read a post, your IP is not leaked to Bluesky. The actual API requests are done through my server. This also includes avatars as they are also proxied.
- There is server-side caching happening. Right now this is only there to prevent the server from hammering the Bluesky servers. In the future I also want to use that as fallback if upstream is down so that you can still read the comments on my site even if Bluesky itself has issues.
To make integrations easier, Samara also supports HTMX so that you don’t have to write your own JavaScript frontend. You can find a complete example setup inside the examples/simple-htmx folder 🙂
Eventually, I want to remove the caching and telemetry features of Samara into retoots and also expose things like “favorites” and “reposts” within Samara.
For now I hope that this is also useful for someone else 🙂
Do you want to give me feedback about this article in private? Please send it to comments@zerokspot.com.
Alternatively, this website also supports Webmentions. If you write a post on a blog that supports this technique, I should get notified about your link 🙂