a first look at bluesky profile links
October 23, 2026
luesky launched profile links on October 22
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
- profile links live in PDS records:
app.bsky.actor.link. profile’sself.linksarray selects those displayed. - discovered 21,645 accounts via stream.waow.tech: 246 archive blocks plus 36-hour replay, deduplicated by DID, record key, witnessed time, and operation.
- checked candidates with
app.bsky.actor.getProfiles: 21,397 display links, 199 do not, and 49 are unavailable. - 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
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