Bluesky outbound RSS and images

[scripting]

There are two issues I'd like to report here.

Use enclosure element for image

An example of a Bluesky user who publishes great cartoons that totally belong everywhere. I want to include them in one of my projects but it doesn't work because the images don't come through in the feed. Some pointers.

1. Example of a post containing an image.
2. The RSS feed for that user's posts.
3. Some browsers make it hard to view the source of a feed, so here's a link that gets through that.

You won't break anything if you add an enclosure element for each item with an image (only one enclosure per item btw) with the type and size of the image.

<enclosure url="https://url.of/image" type="img/png" length="82286"/>

Most feed readers will understand and do something nice with the image. And the ones who don't should ignore the enclosure. Lots of feed sources out there do it this way.

Confusing text in description

Not sure how this happens, but some item-level descriptions have mysterious text in them.

[contains quote post or other embedded content]

Here's an example.

<item>
   <link>https://bsky.app/profile/mariopro.bsky.social/post/3lmhnycmqwc2t</link>
   <description> [contains quote post or other embedded content]</description>
   <pubDate>10 Apr 2025 13:58 +0000</pubDate>
   <guid isPermaLink="false">at://did:plc:jrhiazkqht2txt7xiixad5v7/app.bsky.feed.post/3lmhnycmqwc2t</guid>
   </item>

In most feed readers the description element is displayed, and no one is looking for helpful software messages there. Users will have no idea how to interpret this. It should not be there.

[bnewbold]

The "[contains quote post or other embedded content]" text is included to reduce confusion. Often people make a post which is a comment on another post, and their post text could easily be misinterpreted if there is not some indication that there is "other context" not coming through.

Definitely open to linking to images! I think we need a solution/schema which works for multiple images though. If there can only be a single <enclosure> per item, we could use that for single-image posts and possibly video posts. But including just one of multiple images can cause more confusion than not including any image at all.

Both of the above are driven from experience and user feedback on social cards, what are similar to RSS in some ways.

[scripting]

@bnewbold -- i think we found the answer in the thread over on the atproto repo.

bluesky-social/atproto#3736 (comment)

basically the Media RSS namespace gives you a way to include multiple images in a post. it's a widely supported namespace, so it's the best fit we have.