Trouble getting Bluesky to recognize link thumbnails

Hosting on Micro.blog
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I moved my website over to Micro.blog a few days ago and am running into a problem when sharing links to Bluesky that I can’t figure out. This isn’t an issue with cross-posting, which I don’t have turned on at the moment, but instead when I manually paste a link to an article on my Micro.blog website into the compose box on bsky.app. Namely, the link preview that results shows the title and summary, but it doesn’t pull in an image. I do have an image set up in the tag of my theme, and if I try to post instead from somewhere else (Buffer, Croissant, etc.) the image gets pulled in correctly. It’s just on Bluesky that it doesn’t.

I asked about this on Bluesky itself, thinking maybe it was a problem on their end, and someone pointed to this as maybe the issue:

Digging a little deeper, looks like your micro.blog site has the CDN enabled, and your og:image redirects to a cdn.uploads.micro.blog hosted url (which loads fine in my browser) but cardyb.bsky.app/v1/image?url… returns an error “Unable to serve image from URL”.

A bit of poking around says maybe having IPV6 enabled is causing your site an issue (I doubt this), or disabling the CDN for image hosting might fix it (but that’s not optimal). I think someone from micro.blog is the best bet to figure out what is going on.

Does that make sense? If so, is there a way to fix it? (My Micro.blog website is at www.aaronrosspowell.com)

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Thanks for sharing this and the reply you got. I’m testing and another idea I had is that the CDN doesn’t always include a content type for the returned file. I tested with your og:image URL and it’s not showing a content type for me in the response. I wonder if that is tripping up Bluesky.

I’m going to try to fix this on the Micro.blog CDN side. If that doesn’t work, another thing to try would be to remove the redirect by using the full CDN URL directly in the og:image tag. But I don’t think the redirect is really the problem.

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That seems to have fixed it! I’ve manually updated the content-type for your image, and I’ll be applying the fix for future uploads soon.

I tested by pasting one of your URLs into Bluesky and it got the image. I think Bluesky caches this information for previous URLs that were used, though, so for other posts that have already been linked on Bluesky it might not get the image yet.

1 Like
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Thank you so much for fixing this!