Connect a Bluesky account

How to connect a Bluesky account to Papera and publish to it. Bluesky is connected with an app password — a scoped credential you create in your Bluesky account, separate from your main password. Papera exchanges it for a session server-side and stores only the session; your app password and your main password never reach Papera's client and the app password itself is never saved.

1. Create a Bluesky app password

Do this in Bluesky, not in Papera:

1. Open Bluesky and go to Settings → Privacy and Security → App Passwords (on the web, https://bsky.app/settings/app-passwords).
2. Choose Add App Password, give it a name you'll recognize (e.g. Papera), and create it.
3. Copy the generated password — it looks like xxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxx. Bluesky shows it once, so copy it now.

Use an app password, not your main account password. An app password is scoped and can be revoked on its own from the same screen, without changing your real password or signing you out elsewhere.

2. Connect it in Papera

1. In Papera, open Settings → Social accounts and choose Connect → Bluesky.
2. Enter your handle or email (e.g. you.bsky.social) and paste the app password you just created.
3. If your account lives on a different PDS (Personal Data Server), open Advanced and set the Service URL. Most accounts leave this at the default, https://bsky.social.
4. Choose Connect.

Papera signs in with those details on the server, stores the resulting session, and shows the connected account. It never keeps the app password. To revoke access later, disconnect the account in Papera and/or delete the app password in Bluesky — either one invalidates it.

Connected accounts are global to your Papera account: connect once here, then add the account to any project on its flow canvas.

3. Publish a post to Bluesky

Publishing is modeled on the flow canvas, not a single button:

1. On a project's canvas, attach a Bluesky renderer to a content node to get an editable, approximate post preview.
2. Add your connected Bluesky account to the canvas as an account node.
3. Link the post to the account node (a post can fan out to more than one account).
4. Add a publish trigger and fire it. Papera publishes the post to Bluesky over the AT Protocol — uploading any images, then creating the post.

Bluesky posts are limited to 300 characters and up to 4 images; Papera's preview enforces these before publishing. Publishing is idempotent — firing a trigger again for an unchanged post does not create a duplicate.

Troubleshooting

• "Bluesky sign-in expired. Reconnect the account and retry." — App-password sessions expire. Reconnect the account in Settings → Social accounts (paste the app password again, or create a fresh one) and re-fire the trigger.
• Connect fails immediately — double-check the handle/email and that you pasted the app password (xxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxx), not your main password. If your account is on a custom PDS, set the Service URL under Advanced.
• Images don't appear — Bluesky allows at most 4 images per post; extra images are dropped by the constraint check.