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.
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()).
Other people’s data
Most functions engage with lexicons that allow you to gather data
about other people.