The incredible thing about Bluesky Social is that its entirely
decentralized. For end users, this means you can gather essentially
anything that you want. Bluesky itself is organized as a series
of records, which have strict definitions described in lexicons.
bskyr provides a number of functions to help you gather
data from Bluesky Social, by querying those lexicons. The corresponding
records are described in the “Lexicon references” section of the
documentation for each function.
bskyr offers the most comprehensive set of tools for
gathering Bluesky data from R. This vignette walks through the process
of gathering data from Bluesky Social using bskyr.
Gathering data from Bluesky Social
To collect data, we first need to load the bskyr
package.
We also need to authenticate you as a user. To do that, we can use
the bs_auth() function, which communicates with Bluesky
Social, creating a list of details usable to later functions.
auth <- bs_auth(user = bs_get_user(), pass = bs_get_pass())Alternatively, each function can authenticate you on its own, but this can result in timeouts from the API.
Your data
Several lexicons allow you to gather data about yourself, but not others. These are largely useful for managing your own account.
For example, the API (reasonably) only lets you interact with your
own preferences. You can do this with
bs_get_preferences()
Other self-focused functions include blocks,
(e.g. bs_get_blocks()), mutes
(e.g. bs_get_muted_lists()), and notifications
(e.g. bs_get_notifications()).