Editing your Bluesky posts with PDSls

I made a mistake in taking a nap just after dinner so now it's 1:30 AM and here I am writing a blog post 😐.

This'll be a quick one, I got a spark of motiviation to write up a how-to on editing Bluesky posts using PDSls, since the Bluesky app doesn't let you do that directly today!

Background

PDSls is a site that lets you browse ATProtocol (or ATProto) data. That's the protocol behind Bluesky, and a bunch of other really cool sites and apps (perhaps I should go over some of my favorites in a future blog post)!

Records

An important part of ATProto is the concept of a record. These are text files that keep track of various actions you might take on Bluesky or any other ATProto app, such as creating a post, liking posts, reposting, etc.

One neat thing that PDSls can do is let you edit your own records, functionally serving as a way to edit posts!

Editing records

Within PDSls, you'll want to log-in with your ATProto account. For most people, this means logging in with your Bluesky handle. This will take you to Bluesky which will manage the log in process.

Once you're logged in, find the post you'd like to edit and copy the URL. For this tutorial, I'll be using this post, which at the time of writing, looks like this:

Let's say I'd like to edit this post to make the language a bit more kid-friendly (not really sure why I'd do that, but let's roll with it!)

After pasting the URL to my post in PDSls, I can see the exact record on ATProto that represents my post.

Clicking the edit icon opens up a small editor window where I can change the text of the record, and click the "Recreate record" checkbox (important, your edit won't show up without this!) to republish it with the edited text

After clicking the edit button and refreshing the post in Bluesky, my post now shows up with the edited text!

Notice that editing the record also updated the timestamp on the post.

Wrap-up

Fear not if you accidentally made a typo or want to reword your Bluesky post. You should now be well equipped to edit your posts, and also to explore other parts of ATProto (it's fun, I promise!) Hopefully the Bluesky devs support editing records directly within the app, but until then have fun exploring the ATMosphere with PDSls!