project: sonasky ref

SonaSky REF

Furry ref-sheet hosting using your Bluesky account (AT Protocol)

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about

My previous project was SonaSky, a Bluesky Labeler providing fursona species account labels for furry users on the platform. Folks seem to like that, with over 20,000 furries applying various species labels to their profiles. You can read more about that here, if you want

A screenshot of the SonaSky website, with text reading: "Woah! 20,059 users are using SonaSky, with 39,688 labels assigned! That's an average of 1.98 labels per user."

With this large of an audience comes many, many requests for new label definitions (“The species xyz is not listed, can you create a label for it?”) But Bluesky has a cap on the payload size for labeller definitions, and SonaSky hit it… several times.

After months of trying to figure out how to accomodate for a near-infinite number of species possibilities, I was hitting a wall. How could I remove myself from a position where I have to decide what labels get to exist and which don’t because of an arbitrary data size restriction?

Well, after months and months of planning, brainstorming, and learning, I am very happy to present: SonaSky Ref!

A screenshot of the SonaSky Ref homepage, showing a text input box asking for a Bluesky handle.

The goal for SonaSky Ref is to provide a way for furries to store information about their characters that isn’t limited by which labels are available on SonaSky. It allows for more specificity (text input for species name, text input for description), AND it provides a way for furries to host their ref sheet information.

The best part? It’s all a part of your Bluesky account. Like, the data literally lives in the same place as your Bluesky profile. AT Protocol, baybeeeeeee~

You can build a ref sheet that contains:

  • Name
  • Pronouns
  • Species
  • Description
  • Colors
  • Ref Sheet Image
  • Alternate Ref Sheet Image
  • A few miscellaneous tags (like “NSFW”, or “OK to draw without asking”)

how to use it

  1. visit the website and sign in with your Bluesky account
  2. on the dashboard, click “Add Character”
  3. fill out the form and click “save”
    • to include a ref sheet image, have a post on Bluesky where the first (or only) image in the post is your ref sheet. Then, paste the URL to the post in the box (it’ll auto-format the link as the at:// format for you)
    • to add colors, click the “add color” button, enter a hex code or select a color, and optionally add a label for what the color is used for.
  4. click “Characters” on the dashboard to manage (update/delete) existing characters saved to your account

how to see other people’s characters/ref sheets

When you’re on a user’s Bluesky profile page, and the url looks like:

https://bsky.app/profile/astra.bunnys.ky

Change the “b” in “bsky” to “s”, so the url looks like:

https://ssky.app/profile/astra.bunnys.ky

And you will be redirected to the appropriate page on ref.sonasky.app.

Example: My ref sheet!

You can also type a Bluesky user handle into the homepage on https://ref.sonasky.app/ to view if they have any characters in their repo.

wrapping up

Not too much more to say! I may continue to add other little checkbox/label properties that you can add to the sheet. But for now, please enjoy!

Further Reading
Source Code

Git repo: coming soon