Turn your Bluesky archive into a readable, hostable static site with fossilphant

A couple of years ago, I wrote fossilphant, a utility for converting archives exported from Mastodon accounts into readable, self-hostable static sites. You can see what those look like here or here or here. (I've wandered across three “instances” on Mastodon!)

Now you can turn your Bluesky repo.car file into a static site as well. It supports embedded images, links, and quote-tweets too!

1. Install scala-cli. It's very easy!

2. Download two scripts, download-bluesky-images and fossilphant-bluesky. (To be sure you are using the latest version, you can download them directly from github.)

   Make the scripts executable:

   % chmod +x download-bluesky-images
   % chmod +x fossilphant-bluesky

   Try ./download-bluesky-images --help and ./fossilphant-bluesky --help to get a sense of the many options you won't need to use.

   Note: The first time you hit these scripts, they will download a bunch of stuff. That will only happen once.

3. Download your repo.car file. In Bluesky go to Settings > Account > Export my data.

4. Download you images into an images directory:

   % ./download-bluesky-images --repo repo.car --output images

   That may take a minute. When its done, you'll have a lot of images. Check out:

   % ls images

5. Now, build your static site!

   % ./fossilphant-bluesky --handle=interfluidity.com --images=images repo.car

   Note that you have to provide the DNS handle that you use for your Bluesky account. Your archive does not include this, just your AT-proto "did" ("decentralized identifier").

6. You'll find a directory called public has now appeared. Open its index.html file and behold!

You can take a peek at my archive here. That's it!