Bluesky

Skeeters, rejoice! Buttondown lets you connect your Bluesky account to your newsletter in Buttondown. This lets you automatically cross-post your newsletter emails to Bluesky. This function is powered by our automations feature.

To automatically cross-post your newsletter emails to Bluesky, you have to complete two steps:

1. Connect your Bluesky and Buttondown accounts
2. Posting newsletters to Bluesky

First, you must connect your Bluesky and Buttondown accounts. This requires two steps:

1. Generating an app-specific password in Bluesky
2. Connecting your Bluesky account to Buttondown

Bluesky requires you to generate an app-specific password for each app/integration that you connect to your account. This is different than your account password.

To generate this app-specific password:

1. Log into your Bluesky account
2. Navigate to Settings → App Passwords
3. Click Add app password and follow the prompts to create a new password.
4. Copy the newly generated app password and save it somewhere secure.

Now you can use the app-specific password you created to connect to your Buttondown newsletter. Here's how:

1. Log into your Buttondown account
2. Navigate to Settings → Integrations.
3. Find the "Bluesky" integration option and click Configure. The Bluesky configuration panel opens.
4. Enter your Bluesky username in the appropriate field.
5. Paste your generated App-specific password in the appropriate field.
6. Click Save changes.

To share your newsletters to Bluesky, you can create an automation that posts your newsletters to Bluesky whenever you send them. To do this, create a new Automation, or just click the Automation banner below:

The simplest and most common use case is to create an automation that posts your newsletters to Bluesky whenever you send them. Here's how:

1. Navigate to the Automations page and click New. The "New automation" panel opens.
2. (Optional) Give your automation a human-readable "Name."
3. Set the Trigger to when an email is sent.
4. Set the Action to Create a Bluesky post.
5. (Optional) Configure any other fields to customize the automation. If you leave these fields blank, the automation will post to your Bluesky account as soon as you send a new newsletter email.
6. Click Save changes.

To enable the new automation, either click Unpause in the automation panel, or click to enable the automation's toggle in the Automations page.

By default, a Buttondown archive link posted to Bluesky shows up as a plain link card. Buttondown can upgrade these to enhanced link cards — a richer format that shows your publication's name, avatar, and a themed cover.

These cards are powered by standard.site, a community-built way of describing publications on Bluesky. Once you turn them on, they apply both to links Buttondown posts automatically and to archive links you (or your readers) paste in by hand.

• Your Bluesky account is connected to Buttondown.
• Your newsletter's archive is public. An email only gets an enhanced card while it's publicly archived.

1. Navigate to Settings → Integrations and open the Bluesky integration.
2. Under Enhanced link cards, click Create publication.

Buttondown then adds a small entry to your Bluesky account describing your publication, plus one for each publicly-archived email. From then on, new posts and freshly-shared links show up as enhanced cards.

If your newsletter's name, description, or icon changes, the Bluesky integration flags that your details have drifted since the last sync. Click Sync now to update your publication record. Already-posted cards don't change — this only affects future posts and shares.

If your archive's web address changes — for example, when you add and verify a custom domain — Buttondown re-syncs automatically once the new domain is verified, so future cards keep working.

Click Disconnect under Enhanced link cards to stop managing your standard.site publication. Buttondown leaves the records already in your Bluesky account in place, so cards you've already posted keep working; it simply stops creating and updating them.