Bluesky Trending Topics — what's trending now, with posts

See what is trending on Bluesky right now — every current trend with its one-line summary, category, status, post count, start time and the top posts driving it. Built for social media managers, newsrooms, trend researchers and AI agents that need to know what people are talking about today.

Quick start: press Start with no configuration. You get all of Bluesky's current trends (up to 25), each with its top 3 posts. Then narrow it: categories: ["politics"], or statuses: ["hot", "trending"] for topics still rising.

Sample output

rank	topic	category	status	postCount	startedAt
1	Halloween trick-or-treating traditions	culture	trending	8,761	2026-10-26T18:54Z
2	Michigan Senate candidates' partners feud	politics	trending	657	2026-10-30T20:24Z
3	Midterm elections days away	politics	cooling	60,804	2026-10-01T20:14Z
4	Streamers host Halloween live streams	entertainment	cooling	39,431	2026-09-24T22:14Z

Read from the live API on 31 October 2026.

Each row also carries description (Bluesky's own one-line summary of the trend), trendUrl (the trend's page on bsky.app), topAccounts (handles of accounts prominent in it), retrievedAt, and topPosts — for example:

{
  "authorHandle": "kevinmkruse.bsky.social",
  "text": "Electing El-Sayed will put an end to Mike Rogers' career, and Haley Stevens' career too. It's a two-fer, Michigan!",
  "likeCount": 1096,
  "repostCount": 144,
  "url": "https://bsky.app/profile/kevinmkruse.bsky.social/post/3mz6ipwtlkk2k"
}

What you can do with it

• Spot stories early — run it hourly and catch topics while their status is still hot or trending.
• Brief an AI agent — compact rows (always under 4 KB) that say what a trend is, how big it is and which posts carry it.
• Track a beat — politics, sports, science-tech or entertainment only.
• Measure momentum — compare postCount and status across runs to see what is rising and what is cooling.

Input

Field	Default	Notes
maxTrends	25	How many trends to return, best first. Bluesky publishes up to 25 at a time.
postsPerTrend	3	Top posts per trend, 0–10. Post text is capped at 280 characters. 0 is fastest.
categories	[] (all)	e.g. politics, sports, entertainment, science-tech, culture, video-games, other. A value that is not a category name is skipped with a reason.
statuses	[] (all)	hot, trending, saturating, cooling, stale.

FAQ

Does it need a Bluesky account? No. It reads Bluesky's public API, the same data the Explore tab shows anyone. It never logs in and you never hand over a password.

How fresh is it? Live: every run reads the trends Bluesky lists at that moment. retrievedAt stamps each row.

Why did my filtered run return nothing? Trends change by the hour, and some categories have no trend at a given moment. The run still succeeds, charges nothing, and its log and SUMMARY record list the categories and statuses that were trending at the time.

Can it search Bluesky for a keyword? No. Bluesky's post search requires a login, and this Actor never logs in. To follow specific accounts, use the Bluesky Posts Scraper below.

What if Bluesky changes the trends API? These endpoints are labelled "unspecced" by Bluesky. If the detailed trends call stops working the Actor falls back to the simpler trending-topics list (topics without category, status or post count) and says so in SUMMARY; if both change, the run fails with a clear message rather than returning bad data.

Pricing

Pay per trend returned, top posts included. Trends your filters remove are not returned or charged.

Works well with

Same publisher, same output conventions, same honest-failure rules:

• google-trends-trending-now — What people are searching on Google right now, by country, with the news behind it.
• trending-now-aggregator — Google trends, Wikipedia most-read and Hacker News top stories in one call.

Disclaimer

This is an unofficial tool, not affiliated with or endorsed by Bluesky Social PBC. It uses Bluesky's public API, whose robots.txt explicitly allows crawling its public parts, with a polite rate limit. It never logs in and reads only public posts. Use the data in line with the privacy rules that apply to you.