← Home

Closing the Loop: Bluesky Reactions as Webmentions

Indieweb Bluesky

POSSE gets your content onto Bluesky. But what happens when someone likes or replies to the Bluesky copy? Without a backfeed, those interactions stay on Bluesky and never reach the original post. Bridgy closes that loop.

What Bridgy does

Bridgy is a service that polls social platforms for interactions on posts that link back to your site. When it finds a like, repost, or reply, it sends a webmention to your webmention endpoint on your behalf. webmention.io receives it, stores it, and makes it available via the API.

The flow end to end:

  1. Article published at adrian-altner.de/articles/...
  2. Bluesky post created with the article URL as the embed link
  3. Someone likes the Bluesky post
  4. Bridgy polls Bluesky, finds the like, sends a webmention to webmention.io/adrian-altner.de/webmention
  5. Next deploy: WebMentions component fetches from webmention.io, like appears on the article

Setup

Bridgy supports login via your domain — the same IndieLogin flow used by webmention.io. Once logged in, connecting Bluesky takes one click. Bridgy reads your Bluesky profile, finds posts that contain links to your domain, and starts polling.

The default poll interval is 30 minutes. A “Poll now” button triggers an immediate scan, useful for testing.

What gets backfed

Bridgy sends webmentions for:

  • Likes — show as like-of in the webmention data
  • Reposts — show as repost-of
  • Replies — show as in-reply-to

The WebMentions component already handles all three types, grouping them into separate sections. Likes and reposts render as avatar stacks; replies render as comment threads with author name and content.

Deletions propagate too

If a like or reply is deleted on Bluesky, Bridgy detects the deletion on the next poll and sends an updated webmention. webmention.io removes the entry. The next deploy reflects the removal — the avatar disappears from the like stack.

Notes get the same treatment

Notes are syndicated to Bluesky with the same embed structure as articles — the note URL as uri, description as post text. Bridgy picks up interactions on note posts the same way. Any like or reply on a note’s Bluesky copy comes back as a webmention to the original note URL.

The complete IndieWeb loop

With all pieces in place, the full cycle looks like this:

Write on your site
  → deploy syndicates to Bluesky (AT Protocol)
  → Bluesky followers interact
  → Bridgy backfeeds interactions as webmentions
  → webmention.io stores them
  → next deploy renders them on the original post

The canonical URL is always yours. The interactions — wherever they happen — find their way back.

← Home