Blue Feeds

Make your own Bluesky feeds, and host them for free.

Gather posts by keyword, people, lists or likes. Filter out the noise. Watch the feed come together live, then publish it to your Bluesky profile with one click. No firehose, no always-on server, no monthly bill.

Why Blue Feeds

• A real editor, with a live preview. Pick sources, add filters, choose an order, and see the exact posts your feed would show before anyone else does. No query language to learn.
• Free to run. Feeds are built on demand from Bluesky's own API and cached, so the whole thing fits in Vercel's or Render's free tier with a free Turso database. Most feed generators need a server reading the entire network around the clock.
• Mix anything. Combine searches, accounts, lists, your likes, hand-picked posts and other people's feeds in one feed. Keep or drop replies, reposts, quotes, languages, links, media and moderation labels.
• Your feeds stay yours. They're published from your own Bluesky account. Sign-in goes through Bluesky's own approval page, so the app never sees your password, and it can't post, follow or read your messages.
• Hard to lose. Every published feed carries a backup of its settings in its own Bluesky record. If the database is ever wiped, feeds rebuild themselves on the next request.
• Moving from SkyFeed? Import a feed in a click. It keeps its link, its likes and its pins.
• Bring friends. Invite other accounts to build and publish their own feeds on your deployment.
• Or write code. Prefer TypeScript? Define feeds in a few typed lines, with custom filter functions.

What a feed looks like

In the dashboard, a feed is a form. In code, it's a few lines:

// feeds/cat-pics.ts
export default defineFeed({
  id: 'cat-pics',
  displayName: 'Cat Pics',
  sources: [{ type: 'search', query: 'cat', sort: 'top' }],
  filters: { media: 'images', includeKeywords: ['cat*', 'kitten*'], maxAgeHours: 48 },
  sort: 'hot',
})

There are two ways to manage feeds, and you can mix them:

• Dashboard (recommended): sign in with Bluesky, then create, edit, preview and publish feeds in the browser. Needs a free Turso database to store your feeds and sign-in.
• Code: feed files in feeds/, deployed with the app and published with a command. Supports custom filter functions. Needs no database.

Quick start

Requires Node 20.12 or newer.

npm install
cp .env.example .env              # set BSKY_IDENTIFIER to your handle
npm run preview -- bsky-team      # print a feed in the terminal
npm run dev                       # dashboard at http://127.0.0.1:3000

To try the dashboard editor locally, add TURSO_DATABASE_URL=file:local.db to .env. That stores everything in a local SQLite file, no Turso account needed. Then open http://127.0.0.1:3000 (not localhost: Bluesky's sign-in for local apps only returns to 127.0.0.1) and sign in with your handle. You can create and preview feeds locally, but publishing has to happen from your deployed dashboard, since Bluesky must be able to reach the service.

Deploying

Deploy first, then publish. Publishing tells Bluesky where your feeds are hosted, so the host has to exist.

1. Create a Turso database (for the dashboard)

Skip this if you only want feeds defined in code.

• On Vercel: after importing the project (step 2a), open its Storage tab, or the Turso Cloud integration in the Vercel Marketplace, create a database and connect it to the project. That sets TURSO_DATABASE_URL and TURSO_AUTH_TOKEN for you. Untick Production under "Create Database Branch for Deployment" in the connection's settings. Otherwise every production deploy gets its own fresh copy of the database, and your sign-in and saved feeds seem to vanish after each deploy. (Published feeds restore themselves from their backups, but nothing else does.) The dashboard footer shows which database the app is using.
• Elsewhere: sign up at turso.tech (the free plan is plenty) and create a database. Copy its URL (libsql://<name>-<org>.turso.io) and create an auth token for it. With the Turso CLI: turso db show <name> --url and turso db tokens create <name>.

The app creates its tables on first use. It also generates the private key it uses to sign its requests to Bluesky, which keeps you signed in much longer, and stores it in the database alongside your session. To manage that key yourself instead, run npm run oauth-key and set the printed OAUTH_PRIVATE_KEY, ideally before you first sign in; changing the key later means signing in again.

2a. Vercel (recommended)

Vercel's free Hobby plan suits this best: there are no cold starts long enough to time out Bluesky's request. Note that Hobby is for non-commercial use.

This is the beginning of the README. Read the rest at the original. Read the full README ↗