bluesky launched profile links on October 22

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v1.136 is live! Introducing: Profile links We want independent writers, artists, developers, and creators to be able to build and fund sustainable projects on Bluesky. Help your followers know how to support you by adding buttons for Patreon, Ko-fi, your newsletter or website, and more.

demonstrating a before & after of profile link rendering featuring @sarahmackattack.bsky.social

on a profile, they look like little pills that link out somewhere else

this post details some stats regarding adoption of this new feature!

observed use over time

e.g. we see 21,397 profiles displaying 52,064 links the next day

links per profile

most people who adopted it have 2 or 3 links in their profile now

where links point

4,882 profiles (22.8%) link to Ko-fi, Patreon, or both

methodology

  1. 1.

    profile links live in PDS records: app.bsky.actor.link. profile’s self.links array selects those displayed.

  2. 2.

    discovered 21,645 accounts via stream.waow.tech: 246 archive blocks plus 36-hour replay, deduplicated by DID, record key, witnessed time, and operation.

  3. 3.

    checked candidates with app.bsky.actor.getProfiles: 21,397 display links, 199 do not, and 49 are unavailable.

  4. 4.

    counted each profile once per hostname. lowercase hosts; strip leading www.; preserve other subdomains. Redirects are not resolved. Co-linked shares use the selected host’s profiles as denominator.

scope and caveat

this is one observation, not a set of Official Statistics. missing repositories and archive compaction may omit accounts or earlier writes. witnessed time is not first-use time; collection lagged about ten minutes. profile verification followed discovery, so this is not an atomic snapshot