I finally got around to importing all of my Bluesky posts this weekend.

Bluesky was built by a bunch of crypto bros, so its whole stack is… weird. I ended up resorting to using this site to convert the CAR file containing all of my posts (download yours here) into something easier to deal with—a tarball full of JSON.

After that, the importer was pretty straightforward to write, at least for basic content. Here’s an example of a somewhat complicated case (mostly) working.

Unfortunately, the JSON inside Bluesky archives isn’t terribly scrutable, because it assumes your software stack speaks ATProto and can handle its CIDs and DIDs and such. But my importer is just boring old JavaScript designed to run offline and spit out static files with just the content of the archive tarball to go on. So some things, like replies and quote boosts, don’t end up looking quite right, images are broken, and at-mentions are a bit of a hack.

Not great,but good enough for now. Fixing those issues will have to wait for another weekend.