DEV CommunitySunday · July 5, 2026FREE

Exporting any Bluesky profile's followers with the open API

Bluesky's AT Protocol is designed to be open, making public profile data—including bios, follower counts, and full follower/following lists—queryable through a documented API without requiring login. The key endpoints are GET https://api.bsky.app/xrpc/app.bsky.actor.getProfile?actor=HANDLE and GET https://api.bsky.app/xrpc/app.bsky.graph.getFollowers?actor=HANDLE&limit=100, with a getProfiles endpoint for batching 25 handles per call. Follower lists paginate using a normal cursor, which still works on graph endpoints, though cursor pagination on search endpoints now returns 403 errors. For one-off lookups, curl suffices, but for bulk operations—thousands of profiles, follower exports in the six figures, weekly snapshots—the developer packaged the pagination, rate-limit backoff, and stitching logic into an Apify actor called Bluesky Profile Scraper. The actor accepts handles or profile URLs, optionally exports followers/following, and returns JSON or CSV with a sourceProfile field linking back to the profile.