Hello people who know how to code, could I set up a thing that texts people when I post to Bluesky? There are a bunch of nerds here who appear to really miss Twitter notifications.
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I'm no expert but bsky can generate an RSS feed, and then if you wanted a low/no code solution you can manage yourself there are services like Zapier that let you create integrations between RSS feeds and things like Twilio that handle sending emails/SMSes
Could you? Yes. Should you? Depends on how much you want this! It is very inconvenient to make this convenience.
There's a lot of steps involved to get from "new post" to "someone sees notification" and I can't even fit the tl;dr step-by-step into this post without running out of characters.
Upgrade options include:
- Appropriate GIF selection
- Implementation of up to three exclamation marks (!)
- Translation into British English
- Monthly summary posts sent via hand-addressed mail
Almost certainly. There’s likely an API of some sort you could use with twilio or something. But it does have a cost associated - monthly upkeep plus per text costs
The short answer is YES. The long answer is mostly about the hosting and I/O costs. You'd be looking at $0.0079 per SMS sent. Hosting will largely depend on throughput. With more time I can estimate it based on your past bsky activity.
Probably easier and cheaper to write it all to a publicly hosted RSS feed hosted and just use an RSS aggregator app with push notifications to follow it.
There’s a number of ways you can set something like that up, for example Vonage has a API that can send messages via SMS, RCS and even WhatsApp. But it could get costly. Depends how much traffic you send.
Lambda that runs every N minutes checks Bluesky for new messages via their API. If one is found send messages on either Twilio or AWS SMS. 1 additional Lambda to start/stop subscriptions. Free Sentry account for handling errors. Dynamo for storage.
Make sure you use a system that has a robust unsubscribe function or you could run a FOWL OF THE CAN-SPAM act. This is a similar issue to people who roll their own email blasts instead of using a service like Mailchimp, Constant Contact etc.
Hello Hank Green I have hacked something together! This spreadsheet will be updated with any of your new skeets every few mins. Anybody can go to Tools-> Notification Settings and setup their own email notification. The sheet name is your profile for easy navigation
This way Google foots the bill. Sending out mass emails/SMS is expensive and annoying these days unfortunately. One other thing someone might be able to do is use Web Push notifications to make a webpage that people could subscribe too? could be more "native", I think iOS supports it well now
Actually now that I think of it, it would be cheaper in the long term to make an app that solely subscribes you to push notifications for BlueSky... Could be worth doing!
Yes, but text services aren't free. Sometimes a decent amount depending on how many transactional texts (one-offs) you'd need to send out per skeet. They could be marketing texts (same content to everyone), but it's only slightly cheaper
It'd need to be a paid service by the subscribers if anything
Hey @hankgreen.bsky.social , @skeetsapp.com already supports user notifications (amongst many other features) as part of the Skeets Pro Upgrade. Getting notifications for 1 user is free though - that could be you :)
It's available for iOS / iPad OS / macOS.
By appending `/rss` to the end of your user name in the URL, you can fetch an RSS feed of a user's timeline. Perhaps there's a way to integrate with that?
Also I'd highly recommend just leaving a thumbs up reaction on the original GitHub issue post and not spamming with comments. It makes devs vewy sad :(
It would likely cost a lot of money per post depending on your follower count. Since it appears that blue sky’s iOS app is open source on github, it might be more cost effective to request they build out that feature
I've got this working with a python script and the free bluesky API, except texting costs money so I use discord to send the notification.
Although it's not very user friendly (you need a computer running 24/7 to run it), I was thinking about making an android app so normal people could use it
So I took a look at the n8n application, now I am back at my PC and you can use N8N cloud with an RSS Feed Trigger, which does all the filtering of new posts for you.
Most likely? Bluesky seems to have a pretty good amount of documentation + iirc alot of it IS open source, so relevant APIs could probably be merged in if the demand is high enough and PR has high enough quality?
https://docs.bsky.app/docs/api/app-bsky-feed-get-author-feed
This might be a useful API for if someone were to look into something like this? Unsure if there's a websocket or whatever to let you monitor for when an account skeets, but if not then this API is likely the best place to start
So grab a post and send an SMS blast? Sure. That’s not hard at all, the only real cost would be the sms handling through one of the big handlers. Twillio, etc.
If you can find a service that can ingest an RSS feed and notify people about new posts via email or text messages, know that your profile has its own RSS feed that you can use as the source:
This is really cool you can use ifttt or similar apps and just setup notifications there @hankgreen.bsky.social
I am testing this right now but I think that would be an easy workaround for your followers
Yes, it should be very doable, even if you have to hack things up a little bit. I'd be happy to help make something like that if you were looking for help with it (for free in case this looks like a spam bot lol)
It shouldn’t be too hard for someone to throw something together that does this. The biggest hurdle will be whatever the cost is to send the txts out. To get around cost you could do email to SMS or MMS, but that complicates things and puts a 160 character limit on the txt messages.
If you have a solution that works by sending texts based on RSS feeds (IFTTT can do RSS feeds, and send texts, but there's probably other methods), then you can use Bluesky's RSS feeds to do it.
Though I suppose if you don't a third party, maybe get an ESP32 or something, have it look for Everytime you make a post, then do whatever with the "event"
I didn’t realize how much I enjoyed the notif squad until we didn’t have it anymore. (To be clear: I’d much rather be here with no notifs than there with notifs, but it’s still weird seeing posts hours later.)
God I wish Twitter had this...been wanting something like this for it since there's still some people from there that haven't made the switch that I want to still keep up with
Hey Hank a few people mentioned the rss feed and I don’t think that’ll be the best option. You’re gunna want something that will provide a server with a ping when you tweet rather than checking an rss feed on whatever interval which is what you’d have to do with the rss feed option
Taking a quick look through the bluesky api docs though and it looks like this may be possible via that. Whether it’s a simple server client that just subscribes to your tweets, or maybe a custom feed with just you in it. Once you’ve got that it’s simple to send sms via whatever service you want
I'd probably set up some scheduled task, possibly even locally, that checks for new bsky posts from you every 5 min and blasts them to a text list using Twilio or something
I know you already saw that my husband did this, but what's funny is that last night I spent a while trying to convince him not to make a whole app that will do this for people skdkgkj. He wants to spend his weekend doing that because he thinks it would be fun
The ability to just program things and like build apps?? What a super power honestly. It's one of those things that I think would be so fun to learn but also like so unbelievably intimidating.
If you ever want to chat about how to get started, shoot me a DM!
It takes time, but it's not a secret special talent. I have a coworker that used to be an artist and only learned how to code a few years ago, and she's great!
Same!! I don't understand it at all. Also he's a programmer for his full time job so it's kind of hilarious/confusing to me that he still thinks it would be fun to spend his weekend coding too. But like, good for him???
I mean it's def a sign he's in the right field!! I can see how programing personal projects could feel like different than working on projects for like a job. Like different goals I guess. Like I do video editing as part of my work, but I do also still enjoy doing elements of that on my own time.
My husband works IT, building hardware and gaming rigs all day, and then comes home and tinkers with his own computer and keyboards all night. The tech guys are just built different lol
fr!! I intentionally don't want a job where I have to write a lot because I know it would be so hard for me to come home and write creatively if I did. idk how they do it
lol i’m a programmer and have never once written a single line of code in my off time. i don’t have any frustration tolerance to spare by the time i’m done with work.
SMS can get expensive very quickly, you'd be better off setting up a phone app that people can download from the app store which then gives them a notification when you post.
It would also be possible to set up a Telegram bot that just sends every post to every person who has DM'ed it. Yes it know Telegrams reputation and all but it's a free service at least and it does send notifications.
Very likely yes! Bluesky is just a GUI for atproto, which is an open, decentralized protocol developed by them, with thorough documentation. You just need someone to write the code, and a service that sends texts (or alternatively, an app or website that receives push notifications).
If I had to do this I’d create a moderated mailing list (listserv, mailchimp) where people can sign up with their SMS email gateway addresses - old school email to text, e.g. [email protected]. Then pipe the RSS feed to that list - sending from an address allowed by moderator. Low or no cost.
Looking like you could create a "Hankify" side app which will just display a push notification every time you post.... But a user would have to install that app on their phone...
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Otherwise just DM me 😄
Haven't actually done it myself yet but I saw that tip somewhere a few days ago and I might set it up.
https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:kqbyr4gqt6p2l57htlsa4nha/rss
You might recognise some of the channels I’m pulling from… 😅
https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:ydilzltcivcfm2i3q5hrzpi2/lists/3l5k4tq4ao623
https://github.com/vhogemann/rss2bsky
The Hank Green feed
There's a lot of steps involved to get from "new post" to "someone sees notification" and I can't even fit the tl;dr step-by-step into this post without running out of characters.
Upgrade options include:
- Appropriate GIF selection
- Implementation of up to three exclamation marks (!)
- Translation into British English
- Monthly summary posts sent via hand-addressed mail
Don't underestimate the power of the human touch!
https://bsky.app/profile/techsavvytravvy.com/post/3laf3n3cs4w2y
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/RSS
Or are you thinking of other kind of notifications?
Bsky really ought to have RSS feeds though.
https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:kqbyr4gqt6p2l57htlsa4nha/rss
It requires not coding, no account, and also works with youtube channels and most blogs like substack.
I can make a tutorial if you want. It's a great trick to now.
I freaking love bluesky!!!! 😭💙🦋
Lambda that runs every N minutes checks Bluesky for new messages via their API. If one is found send messages on either Twilio or AWS SMS. 1 additional Lambda to start/stop subscriptions. Free Sentry account for handling errors. Dynamo for storage.
https://www.fcc.gov/consumers/guides/stop-unwanted-robocalls-and-texts
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1yW-0SAGBM2TDFrKyMCiaLUZH4DuWIJScVyidP4PrScM/edit?usp=sharing
It'd need to be a paid service by the subscribers if anything
It's available for iOS / iPad OS / macOS.
Check it a few times a day.
However, this is probably a good feature request for @bsky.app to support user-level notifications
https://bsky.app/profile/dunxen.dev/post/3lagtyfyr2j25
Although it's not very user friendly (you need a computer running 24/7 to run it), I was thinking about making an android app so normal people could use it
You are amazing!!
(in all honesty, tho, I would also be interested in this)
I’ve used it to host a webhook endpoint that I then use prometheus to scrape, as a way of scraping some basic metrics from an API with little effort
This might be a useful API for if someone were to look into something like this? Unsure if there's a websocket or whatever to let you monitor for when an account skeets, but if not then this API is likely the best place to start
I’ll try to nock out a POC around lunch.
Also, Domain Verify your handle.
I guess from is always an option tho
https://bsky.app/profile/hankgreen.bsky.social/rss
@justostrich.com, this bypasses the need for any API setup for bsky, just need to send off the notification on the other end
I am testing this right now but I think that would be an easy workaround for your followers
Though I suppose if you don't a third party, maybe get an ESP32 or something, have it look for Everytime you make a post, then do whatever with the "event"
Here’s @hankgreen.bsky.social’s RSS link https://bsky.app/profile/hankgreen.bsky.social/rss
https://ifttt.com/connect/feed/sms
https://openrss.org/blog/bluesky-has-launched-rss-feeds
Shit from proto-Germanic skitiz compare Modern German Scheiße
-ification from Latin -ficatio, a suffix including facīo "to make"
en- from Latin in- "into"
"to make into shit"
There's also the documentation for posts https://docs.bsky.app/docs/advanced-guides/posts
It takes time, but it's not a secret special talent. I have a coworker that used to be an artist and only learned how to code a few years ago, and she's great!
this posts text to a bluesky account, I can't imagine it'd be hard to make it check for x account post then tag everyone
https://atproto.com/
So you may have to do some manual work.