Every big social network locks audience data behind auth walls and anti-bot systems. Bluesky went the other way. The AT Protocol is open by design, so public profile data (bios, follower counts, full follower and following lists) is queryable through a documented API without logging in.
The whole surface is basically two endpoints:
GET https://api.bsky.app/xrpc/app.bsky.actor.getProfile?actor=HANDLE
GET https://api.bsky.app/xrpc/app.bsky.graph.getFollowers?actor=HANDLE&limit=100
There's also getProfiles for batching 25 handles per call. Follower lists paginate with a normal cursor, which still works on the graph endpoints. Search is a different story, cursor pagination 403s there now, but that's a topic for another post.
For one-off lookups, curl is honestly all you need.
Where it gets tedious
Bulk. Thousands of profiles, follower exports that run into six figures, weekly snapshots for tracking. Pagination, rate-limit backoff, and stitching the pages together is boring code that has to run reliably.
I packaged that part as an Apify actor: , then profile those authors to see their actual reach.
Bluesky is the only major network right now where any of this is straightforward and stable. Worth using while it lasts.
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