Your writing, now native to Bluesky

Building an open standard only works if others build on it too. When we started Standard.site (@standard.site) alongside the teams at Leaflet (@leaflet.pub) and Pckt.blog (@pckt.blog), that felt like a bet worth making.

Today, Bluesky is officially integrating the site.standard.* lexicons. We are glad the bet paid off.

A bit of history

When we started building Offprint on the AT Protocol, we were not the only ones. The teams behind Leaflet and Pckt.blog were working toward the same thing independently. Each of us had arrived at similar schemas on our own, which was encouraging, but it also meant we were headed toward a fragmented ecosystem where content on one platform would be invisible to another.

We got together and decided to align. Some approaches were combined, some were set aside. The result was Standard.site, a shared set of open lexicons that define what a publication is, what a document contains, and how readers connect to both.

The idea was that any platform could implement it without being constrained by it. We just had to build something worth implementing.

What does this mean?

When you share an Offprint article on Bluesky, you will now get an enhanced link card. Not a plain URL preview. A card that shows your publication name, your icon, your article title, an estimated reading time pulled directly from the content, and themed call to action button based on your publication theme.

Your publication is recognized as a publication. Your writing shows up in the feed looking like the work you put into it.

This is what the protocol is supposed to feel like. Your content living in your repository, recognized natively across the network, without any extra steps on your part.

What you need to know

This rolls out in phases. The first phase, landing now, detects Standard.site records on shared links and uses them to render enhanced previews in the Bluesky post composer and feed.

For Offprint writers, nothing changes on your end. Your publications and documents already sync to the protocol. Offprint handles the verification tags and record references automatically. Share your work the same way you always have.

Under the hood

For those curious about what is actually happening, here is the short version.

Bluesky has added a new field called associatedRefs to their external post embed record. When you share an Offprint article, the embed includes two references: one pointing to your site.standard.document record and one pointing to your site.standard.publication record. When Bluesky hydrates that post in the feed, it fetches those records and uses them to construct the enhanced link card.

{
  "$type": "app.bsky.embed.external",
  "external": {
    "uri": "https://yourname.offprint.app/a/your-article",
    "title": "Your Article Title",
    "associatedRefs": [
      {
        "uri": "at://did:plc:xxx/site.standard.document/abc",
        "cid": "bafyrei..."
      },
      {
        "uri": "at://did:plc:xxx/site.standard.publication/xyz",
        "cid": "bafyrei..."
      }
    ]
  }
}

Verification works through <link /> tags embedded in the page head. Bluesky fetches the URL being shared, finds the tags referencing your AT Protocol records, and confirms they match. Offprint handles all of this automatically.

This is one of those moments where the open web actually delivers on what it promises. We are glad to have been part of building the foundation that made it possible.

If you are not on Offprint yet, now is a good time.