Bluesky Mention Monitor

Bluesky filled up with the people who argue about tools in public: maintainers, designers, reporters, whole teams that crossed over together and brought their support questions with them. This agent sweeps your terms every hour, reads the thread each hit came out of and the account behind it, and sends the few that clear your bar into Slack with that context attached. It cannot post, like or follow, which on a network this small is the difference between being present and being noticed.

What people use it for

• Who is talking, not how many - A maintainer with four hundred followers can decide whether a whole engineering team tries you. Every message names the account and what it is inferred from, so seniority is visible before anyone answers.
• Custom feeds carry it further - A post here travels through the feeds people subscribe to, not just to followers. Knowing which feed picked something up tells you whether your field is reading it or only one office is.
• Migrated teams ask in public - Communities that moved across kept the habit of debugging in public rather than opening a ticket. Those posts are support requests wearing a different hat, and they reach you the same hour.
• Nothing gets followed or liked - Follows and likes are public gestures here and they are read as endorsement. Restraint costs nothing and keeps every visible action on the account something a person chose to make.

Before you fork

What do we connect for this to work?

A Bluesky account with an app password, plus the Slack channel. Be aware an app password does grant posting rights at the protocol level; the protection here is that no writing operation is wired into the workflow at all, and the instructions rule out posting, liking and following in plain words. Search and notifications are the only things it touches.

Our product name is also a common word. Is this usable?

That is the ordinary case rather than a corner case, and collisions are discarded before anything is counted or sent. If the first week still feels heavy, cut the list back to the handle and the domain you own, which on this network is usually enough because people tag accounts far more than they type names. The dropped hits never reach Slack either way.

Is an hourly schedule overkill for a smaller network?

Volume is lower here than on the older platforms, so most sweeps genuinely find nothing and cost very little. Speed still matters because a post moves through feeds within a couple of hours and then stops, so a three hourly schedule saves a little and misses the window where a reply from a human still shapes the thread.