This Free Browser Extension Lets You Bookmark Bluesky Posts

Bluesky has steadily been replacing X (formerly Twitter) for me, but I've really missed the ability to bookmark posts for future reference. While X still has Twitter's old bookmarks feature, the only way to save a Bluesky post is to like it, since you can access a list of your liked posts on your profile page.

That's not always convenient—what if you dislike something, but want to be able to find it again later, say if it's an article about bad but important news? That's where Kyst comes in. It's a browser extension for Chrome and Firefox that lets you save Bluesky posts in one click.

Installing Kyst and signing in

Credit: Pranay Parab

I've previously written about Bluesky's app passwords feature, which allow you to authorize third-party apps to access your account without having to give them your real password. Kyst doesn't use app passwords, preferring OAuth (short for open authorization) for authentication instead. OAuth is how most social networks allow you to connect third-party apps. The app requests access to your Bluesky account, and when you authorize it, it still cannot see your username or password. In theory, this is a great move, as Bluesky plans to get rid of app passwords eventually. In practice, though, things are a little complicated.

At time of writing, Bluesky doesn't yet allow you to view which apps you've authorized using OAuth, and that means you can't quickly revoke access to apps you don't want to use. This is expected to change over the coming months, as Bluesky rolls out OAuth more broadly. For the time being, if you want to stop using Kyst, you'll have to sign out of Bluesky and delete the browser extension. The developer told me in an email that they're also working on allowing people to delete their Kyst accounts in the future.

Once you've installed Kyst on Chrome or Firefox and authorized the extension, you can start using it via the official Bluesky website. It adds a small bookmark button below each post and shows one button on the right side of the screen that displays or hides a sidebar.

Using bookmarks on Bluesky

Credit: Pranay Parab

Once Kyst is set up, Bluesky posts on your browser will show a bookmark button next to the like button. Click once to bookmark the post and click again to undo. The Kyst button on the right side of the page opens up a sidebar to let you view your bookmarks.

The extension is as simple as that, and it works fairly well. If you're away from your browser, you can also visit https://kyst.app/bookmarks to see and organize your bookmarked posts. For that organization, both the Kyst sidebar and Kyst's website allow you to add tags to your bookmarks, which makes it easy to categorize saved posts and find what you're looking for. The extension also lets you filter saved posts by date, type of post (regular posts vs threads), or by the media attached to the post. 

As a writer, I love using Kyst to save posts that give me story ideas, but there are a few rough edges. On both Chrome and Firefox, the extension has a bug that makes it show massive thumbnails for saved posts. On Firefox, I noticed the sidebar also wasn't displaying any posts, so I had to switch to the bookmarks page to see the posts I'd saved.

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