Bluesky Community Finder: Starter Packs & Feeds

What does Bluesky Community Finder do?

Bluesky Community Finder builds a catalog of the communities on Bluesky: starter packs, custom feeds and curated lists. Search by topic or point it at specific accounts, and every starter pack, feed or list comes back as one clean row with its creator, dates, size and popularity. Starter packs carry all-time and weekly join counts and the member count. Feeds carry likes and, if you ask for it, a live check of whether the feed is still online and valid. Lists carry their purpose (curate, moderation or reference) and member count. Turn on members and every pack or list is followed by one row per account, with followers, follows, posts and verification status. It reads Bluesky's public API, needs no login or API key, and exports to JSON, CSV or Excel.

Who is it for?

• Community managers and marketers looking for the starter packs and feeds that already gather an audience around a topic, and for the people inside them.
• Creators and publishers checking where their niche lives on Bluesky and which packs are still gaining joins.
• Researchers and analysts mapping topic communities, comparing how many people join packs and like feeds.
• Developers and data teams who need a scheduled, deduplicated feed of new packs, feeds and lists for a dashboard or an alert.

Example output

A starter pack row:

{
  "type": "starterPack",
  "url": "https://bsky.app/starter-pack/emilyliu.me/3kvq2t2ctis2z",
  "name": "Bluesky for Journalists",
  "description": "Recommended feeds and users for journalists / news!",
  "creatorHandle": "emilyliu.me",
  "createdAt": "2024-06-25T05:30:27.442Z",
  "joinedAllTimeCount": 37,
  "joinedWeekCount": 0,
  "memberCount": 52,
  "feedCount": 3,
  "query": "journalists",
  "found": true
}

A member row:

{
  "type": "member",
  "handle": "dylanfreedman.nytimes.com",
  "displayName": "Dylan Freedman",
  "communityName": "Bluesky for Journalists",
  "followersCount": 12453,
  "followsCount": 334,
  "postsCount": 441,
  "isVerified": false,
  "found": true
}

The type field tells the row kinds apart, so one dataset can be filtered into packs, feeds, lists and members.

Pricing

You pay per result row: each starter pack, feed, list or member returned is one result, and the price per result is set on the Actor page and shown before you run it. The free example with empty input is not charged. There are no charges for rows that were filtered out or skipped as already seen, and a search that finds nothing returns a single status row with found: false that is not billed. Set a maximum charge per run in the Apify console to cap spending; the Actor stops cleanly when it is reached.

How to use it

1. Choose what to find: starter packs, custom feeds, or lists.
2. Add search terms (for example journalists or science) or account handles such as bsky.app. Starter packs and feeds can be searched by topic. Lists cannot be searched by topic, so use handles for them.
3. Narrow the results with the filters below, and switch on members if you want the accounts inside each pack or list.
4. Set the maximum number of communities and run the Actor.

If you leave search terms and handles empty, the Actor runs a small free example (up to 10 results, not charged) so you can see the output before you configure anything; the status message says so.

Filters

• Name or description contains: keep results matching any of your words.
• Minimum joins (starter packs): people who joined through the pack, all time.
• Minimum members (starter packs and lists): accounts inside the community.
• Minimum likes (feeds).
• Created after: packs use their creation date, feeds and lists the date Bluesky indexed them.
• List type (lists): curate, moderation or reference.
• Check feed health and Only feeds that are online (feeds): one extra request per feed to confirm it still answers and returns valid posts.
• Only communities not seen before: skip anything an earlier run with the same search terms, handles and filters already returned, so a scheduled run delivers only new packs and feeds.

A filter that does not apply to the chosen type is listed in the status message instead of failing silently.

Members

With Include members, each starter pack or list is followed by up to your chosen number of member rows. Add follower counts to members looks up followers, follows, posts and verification for every member. Member rows are separate results and are billed like any other row; the limit on communities does not cap them, so set the maximum members per community to match your budget.

Good to know

• Bluesky's public API returns member counts for starter packs only from the detail of each pack, so the Actor makes one extra request per pack. Feeds and lists carry their counts in the listing.
• The status message at the end of every run reports how many member counts, feed health checks and member profiles were actually retrieved. If Bluesky stops returning one of them for every record, the run fails instead of filling the field with zeros. Member lists that Bluesky no longer serves are skipped and counted (Member lists unavailable), and the run fails only when none can be read; the same applies to listing fields such as join, like and member counts and to member records in an unexpected shape.
• Accounts that were deactivated after being added to a list keep their member row, with follower counts set to null.
• Only public data is read. Private accounts, direct messages and anything behind a login are out of reach.

FAQ

Does it need a Bluesky account? No. It uses the public API without login.

Can I search lists by topic? Bluesky has no search for lists. Give the handles of the accounts whose lists you want.

How do I get only new packs each day? Schedule the Actor with the same input and switch on "Only communities not seen before".

Something looks wrong in the data. Open an issue on the Actor page with the input you used and the run link.

Related Actors

Use it together with other datagrit Actors that work on public creator and audience data: the Substack Newsletter Sponsorship Prospect Finder to find newsletters and sponsors in the same niche, the YouTube Transcript Scraper - Channels & Playlists to study what creators in a community talk about, and the Google News Monitor - Full Text & Real URLs to follow the news around a topic you mapped on Bluesky.