This Free Browser Extension Allows You to Bookmark Bluesky Messages
Bluesky is slowly replacing X (formerly Twitter) for me , but I really miss the ability to bookmark messages for later use. While X still has Twitter’s old bookmarking feature, the only way to save a Bluesky post is to like it, as you can access a list of posts you’ve liked on your profile page.
This isn’t always convenient – what if you don’t like something but want to be able to find it later, say if it’s an article about bad but important news? This is where Kyst comes in. This is a browser extension for Chrome and Firefox that allows you to save Bluesky messages with one click.
Cyst installation and login
I previously wrote about Bluesky’s app password feature, which allows you to allow third-party apps to access your account without having to tell them your real password. Kyst doesn’t use application passwords, preferring instead OAuth (short for Open Authorization) for authentication. OAuth is how most social networks allow you to connect third-party applications. The app asks for access to your Bluesky account and when you authorize it, it still doesn’t see your username and password. In theory, this is a great move since Bluesky plans to eventually get rid of app passwords . However, in practice everything is a little more complicated.
At the time of writing, Bluesky doesn’t yet allow you to view which apps you’ve authorized using OAuth, meaning you can’t quickly revoke access to apps you don’t want to use. This is expected to change in the coming months as Bluesky begins to implement OAuth more widely. For now, if you want to stop using Kyst, you will have to log out of Bluesky and uninstall the browser extension. The developer told me via email that they are also working on allowing people to delete their Kyst accounts in the future.
Once you have installed Kyst in Chrome or Firefox and authorized the extension, you can start using it through the official Bluesky website. It adds a small bookmark button under each post and shows one button on the right side of the screen that shows or hides the sidebar.
Using bookmarks in Bluesky
Once you set up Kyst, Bluesky’s posts will display a bookmark button next to the Like button in your browser. Click once to bookmark the post and click again to cancel it. The Kist button on the right side of the page opens a sidebar where you can view your bookmarks.
The extension is very simple and works quite well. If you’re not using a browser, you can also visit https://kyst.app/bookmarks to view and organize your bookmarked posts. For this organization, both the Kyst sidebar and the Kyst website allow you to add tags to your bookmarks, making it easy to categorize your saved posts and find what you’re looking for. The extension also allows you to filter saved messages by date, message type (regular messages or threads), or media files attached to the message.
As a writer, I love using Kyst to save posts that give me story ideas, but there are a few rough edges. In both Chrome and Firefox, the extension has a bug that causes it to show huge thumbnails of saved messages. In Firefox, I noticed that the sidebar wasn’t showing messages either, so I had to switch to the bookmarks page to view my saved messages.