Bluesky vs Lanyard

Bluesky is the decentralized social network built on the AT Protocol, where posts, follows, and identity live on portable Personal Data Servers instead of one company's database. Its public AppView at public.api.bsky.app exposes keyless, read-only XRPC methods such as app.bsky.actor.getProfile and app.bsky.feed.getAuthorFeed, so any client can pull public profiles and feeds without registering an app. Posting, following, or reading a signed-in user's private data instead requires an authenticated session against a Personal Data Server via an app password or OAuth, not a single global API key.

Lanyard exposes a Discord user's live presence — online status, current activities (games, Spotify listening data), and any custom key-value data set via their Discord bio — over a free public REST endpoint or a subscribable WebSocket feed, with no authentication required. The catch is that both the requester and the target user must share a Discord server with Lanyard's bot, since Discord's gateway only surfaces presence data for mutual-guild members.