Bluesky Scraper — Feed Posts

What this Actor scrapes

Two operating modes, controlled by which input field you set:

1. Single-feed mode — provide a feed URI (AT URI or bsky.app/profile/.../feed/... web URL) and the Actor exports every post in that feed up to the per-feed cap. 2. Creator-discovery mode — provide a creator's Bluesky handle (e.g. bsky.app) and the Actor calls app.bsky.feed.getActorFeeds to enumerate every feed that creator publishes, then scrapes each one in turn.

What we handle for you

• What we handle for you: fingerprint rotation (curl-cffi browser impersonation — Chrome / Firefox profiles), exponential back-off on 408 / 429 / 503 with Retry-After honoured, up to 5 retries per failed request, proxy routing via Apify Proxy on demand, and Pydantic v2-validated rows. You get the clean CSV; we get the error logs.
• Two operating modes: single feed URI or discover-all-feeds-by-creator via getActorFeeds.
• Accepts either AT URIs (at://did:plc:.../app.bsky.feed.generator/whats-hot) or bsky.app web URLs — the Actor rewrites web URLs to AT URI form automatically.
• Denormalised output — feed metadata (name, description, creator handle) on every post row, no joins needed for downstream analytics or CSV exports.
• Cursor-based pagination with a client-side per-feed cap so you only pay for what you need.
• Pure HTTP scraping with browser fingerprint impersonation — no browser automation overhead.
• Pydantic v2 input validation with XOR guard: exactly one of feedUri or creatorHandle must be set.
• Pairs with the companion bluesky-starter-pack Actor as the Bluesky Intel Suite.
• Pay only for results that land — no data written means no result-row charges (only the small actor-start warm-up fee).

Use cases

• Algorithm research — sample what posts the "Discover" / "What's Hot" algorithmic feeds actually surface across days or weeks; analyse topic drift and amplification patterns.
• Newsroom monitoring — subscribe to curated topic feeds for breaking-news posts on specific beats, then pipe to Slack or a Google Sheet via Apify integrations.
• Marketing intelligence — see which posts are amplified by community feeds in your niche; measure which content formats dominate each feed's engagement distribution.
• Creator analytics — pull every post a niche feed generator surfaces and rank by like / repost / quote ratios to benchmark your own posts against feed peers.
• Dataset bootstrap — collect labelled training data from topic-curated feeds for downstream NLP or sentiment models without manual tagging of raw timelines.
• Competitive monitoring — track community-curated feeds that aggregate competitor announcements, support complaints, or product mentions.
• Academic social-media research — Bluesky's public AT Protocol data is significantly more research-accessible than the current Twitter / X API; this Actor is a low-cost entry point for longitudinal feed studies.

Input

Paste this into the Apify Console, or send it as the run input over the API. Proxy settings are on by default; you rarely need to touch them.

{
  "feedUri": "at://did:plc:z72i7hdynmk6r22z27h6tvur/app.bsky.feed.generator/whats-hot",
  "maxPostsPerFeed": 100,
  "useProxy": false
}

Output

One row per result, schema-validated before it is written. Export JSON, CSV, Excel or XML from the run, or read it over the API.

feed_urifeed_display_namefeed_creator_handlefeed_descriptionpost_uripost_cidpost_indexed_atpost_textpost_langpost_reply_countpost_repost_countpost_like_countpost_quote_countauthor_didauthor_handleauthor_display_name

{
  "feed_uri": "at://did:plc:z72i7hdynmk6r22z27h6tvur/app.bsky.feed.generator/whats-hot",
  "feed_display_name": "Discover",
  "feed_creator_handle": "bsky.app",
  "feed_description": "Trending content from your personal network",
  "post_uri": "at://did:plc:sj5wj7libgr7omqiotenxadx/app.bsky.feed.post/3mlxmr4jyfs2s",
  "post_cid": "bafyreidgimgd7v3g3pazsp5oq7ur6bvedpnwohul26mss7cbffg6bdqjkm",
  "post_indexed_at": "2026-05-16T10:20:40.467Z",
  "post_text": "If you never read the book or saw the movie, you missed one of the greatest Pulitzer Prize winning sagas ever written.",
  "post_lang": "en",
  "post_reply_count": 89,
  "post_repost_count": 414,
  "post_like_count": 1288,
  "post_quote_count": 27,
  "author_did": "did:plc:sj5wj7libgr7omqiotenxadx",
  "author_handle": "louiseplease.bsky.social",
  "author_display_name": "Louise",
  "scraped_at": "2026-05-16T12:00:00+00:00"
}

Pricing

You pay only for results that land. Cap any run with maxTotalChargeUsd. See pricing & billing for worked examples.

Limitations

• Private or access-restricted feeds are not exposed by the public AppView API — only feeds whose data is visible at public.api.bsky.app can be scraped.
• Global feed discovery by keyword is not supported — Bluesky's getPopularFeedGenerators endpoint returns MethodNotImplemented on the public AppView. Use creator-discovery mode (creatorHandle) to enumerate one creator's feeds at a time.
• Post images, embeds, and quoted-post bodies are not extracted — only the plain-text body (post_text) is captured. Image ALT text, external link cards, and quoted-post content are outside the current schema.
• Reply thread expansion is out of scope — only the top-level post row is emitted. Threaded context (parent / root posts) would require additional getPostThread calls and is not wired in this version.
• The maxPostsPerFeed cap is client-side — the Actor paginates until it has collected the cap or the API cursor is exhausted. If a feed has fewer posts than the cap, fewer rows are returned. This is expected behaviour, not a failure.
• Storage retention on FREE Apify plans — run-scoped storage is retained for 7 days. Export your dataset immediately after the run or upgrade to a paid plan for longer retention.
• Rate limiting — the Actor retries on 429 with exponential back-off and honours Retry-After, but very large scrapes (tens of thousands of rows) may require splitting into multiple runs to stay within per-window limits.
• AT Protocol is pre-1.0 — Bluesky's endpoint surface has changed without warning in the past. We monitor the AT Protocol Discord #breaking-changes channel and ship patches within days of validated breakage reports.