Bluesky on any website.

Bluesky and Mastodon are often lumped together as decentralized social, but the underlying protocols are fundamentally different and that difference shows up in your embed. Mastodon runs on ActivityPub, an instance-federation model where every server is its own database and your identity is tied to the instance you signed up on. If you switch instances you lose your handle, your followers, your post history. Bluesky runs on the AT Protocol, which separates identity (DIDs, decentralized identifiers), data storage (Personal Data Servers or PDS), and indexing (AppViews). Your DID stays yours forever, your posts live on a PDS you can move at any time, and any AppView (the official Bluesky app, third-party clients, embed widgets) can read those posts. For an embed widget, this means Poper queries public PDS endpoints directly rather than negotiating with each instance separately. One protocol, one query path, every public post in the network reachable. ActivityPub embeds have to either pick one instance or maintain a multi-instance crawler. AT Protocol embeds just work.

Most social platforms give you one algorithm and one timeline. Bluesky lets anyone build a feed generator (a small service that returns a list of post URIs in any order) and lets users subscribe to as many as they want. Discover, What's Hot, Quiet Posters, Climate Sci, Indie Games, Scottish Bluesky, journalist-only feeds, paper-of-the-day feeds for specific research areas. Thousands exist, and new ones ship daily because the spec is open. For an embed, this changes the question. Instead of asking what is on this account's timeline, you can ask what is in this curated topic feed right now. A climate science blog can embed a feed of the latest peer-reviewed climate papers being shared on Bluesky. An indie games studio can embed a feed of every post their community is making about new releases. The widget handles the at:// URI lookup, calls the feed generator, hydrates the post records from the appropriate PDS, and renders. The user just pastes a URI.

Every Bluesky account has a DID, a string like did:plc:abc123xyz that uniquely identifies the account independent of any handle, server, or platform. Handles like @jay.bsky.team are human-readable aliases that resolve to a DID through DNS or HTTPS verification. This matters for embeds in two ways. First, if a user changes their handle (which Bluesky encourages because handles can be your own domain), the embed keeps working because Poper stores the DID, not the handle. Second, if a user moves their PDS, the embed keeps working because the DID resolution finds the new PDS. Compare this with X embeds, which break the moment a user changes their @handle, or Mastodon embeds, which break if a user moves instances. AT Protocol embeds are durable across the kinds of identity changes that real users actually make.

Every major change at X (the rebrand, the API paywall, the algorithmic shifts, the moderation policy reversals) has driven a measurable wave of users to Bluesky. By late 2024 the platform had 25 million accounts and was adding roughly a million per week during peak migration moments. The composition of that user base matters for who reads embeds. Tech founders and developers migrated early because Bluesky's open protocol is the kind of thing they want to build on. Journalists and media organizations migrated next because Bluesky's public-by-default timelines and weaker algorithmic suppression suit their distribution model. Researchers and academics followed because the platform's no-ads model and topic-specific custom feeds replicate the discovery experience that Twitter offered before the algorithm took over. Political commentators migrated because Bluesky's moderation policies feel more predictable. If your audience overlaps with any of those four groups, embedding your Bluesky feed gives you reach to readers who have stopped checking X.

Bluesky's stated business model is paid services on top of the open protocol (premium handles, custom moderation services, optional features) rather than ads. That has two consequences for embed widgets. First, the API will not be paywalled in the way X paywalled the Twitter API in 2023. The AT Protocol is open by design and Bluesky cannot close it without abandoning the protocol entirely. Second, posts you embed will not be algorithmically suppressed for not paying for reach, because there is no reach-paywall layer to suppress them. What your widget shows is what users actually see. This is a meaningful difference from embedding X posts or Instagram posts, where you are at the mercy of an algorithm that decides whether your content is worth showing on the platform itself, never mind on your embed. With Bluesky, public is public and the post URI fetches the post.