Connecting Bluesky to Social Quack
The easy one: no developer app, no review, no waiting — create one app password and you are posting.
Bluesky is the quickest account to connect. There is no developer app to create and nothing to submit for review. You make an app password inside Bluesky itself, paste it into Social Quack, and that is the whole job — under two minutes.
An app password is a spare password you hand to an app instead of the one you log in with, so you can take it back later without changing your own. Social Quack stores it encrypted on your Mac and never sends it anywhere except to Bluesky when it signs in as you. Because it posts as your own account rather than through some shared service, the posting limits are yours alone — there is no pool of other people's apps to get you rate-limited.
1. Create an app password in Bluesky
In Bluesky — the phone app or the website, whichever you already use — go to Settings → Privacy and Security → App Passwords and create one.
It looks like four short blocks joined by dashes: xxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxx. Copy it before you leave that screen.
Never use your main Bluesky password. The app password is the one that belongs in Social Quack.
2. Paste it into Social Quack
Open Channels, find Bluesky under Add a channel, and click Connect. Three boxes:
| Field | What to put in it |
|---|---|
| Handle or email | Your handle without the @ — for example you.bsky.social — or the email address on the account. Either works. |
| App password | The xxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxx you just copied, dashes included. Not your login password. |
| PDS / service URL (optional) | Leave it empty. Social Quack uses https://bsky.social, which is right for every ordinary Bluesky account. Fill it in only if your account lives on a different Bluesky server — if you have never heard of that, you do not have one. |
Click Connect. Social Quack signs in, reads your display name, handle and avatar, and the account appears under Connected.
That is the end of the setup. Nothing has to be pasted back into Bluesky, there is no address to register and no key to approve.
3. What a Bluesky post can hold
- 300 characters per post. Compose shows that limit while a Bluesky channel is ticked. Its counter can be a shade stricter than Bluesky's own, which treats an emoji or a flag as a single character.
- Threads. Write several parts and they go out as a chain of replies under the first one.
- Up to 4 images, attached to the first part of a thread only — later parts go out as text.
- Alt text you typed on an image travels with it.
- Links and @mentions become working links by themselves; just type them in plain text.
- Images upload straight from your Mac. There is no media hosting to set up for Bluesky. Anything that is not an image — a video, say — is left off the post.
- Large photos are fine. Bluesky only accepts small image files, so Social Quack re-saves every picture as a JPEG and shrinks it until it fits, keeping its proportions — you never have to resize anything yourself. That happens to every picture, so two things to expect: a PNG with a transparent background comes out with a solid one, and an animated GIF posts as its first frame.
Published posts link back to your profile on bsky.app, so the view link in the Queue opens the real post.
If something goes wrong
| What you see | What it means | What to do |
|---|---|---|
| Connecting fails straight away | The handle or the app password was not accepted | Type the handle with no leading @ — Bluesky displays @you.bsky.social, but the box wants you.bsky.social. Or use the account's email instead. Paste the app password whole, dashes included — no spaces at either end. |
| It connected before, and now posts fail to publish | Social Quack signs in to Bluesky at every publish, so an app password that has been deleted or regenerated in Bluesky stops working | Create a fresh app password in Settings → Privacy and Security → App Passwords, then in Social Quack open Channels and click Connect on Bluesky under Add a channel again. It is the same account, so it updates the channel you already have and your posts stay where they are — do not use Remove, which deletes the channel and all its posts. |
| Bluesky post 2 is 340 characters (max 300) | One part of a thread is over the limit — the number tells you which part | Shorten that part and reschedule the post. |
| Your images did not appear | Either the attachment was not an image, or it was on a later part of a thread | Attach images to the first part, and use pictures rather than video. Only the first four are used. |
| Connecting fails and you filled in the service box | The PDS / service URL (optional) field points somewhere that is not your account's server | Clear the field so Social Quack uses https://bsky.social, and try again. |
Still stuck? [email protected].