How to open your Bluesky export file

CAR stands for Content Addressable aRchive. It is a container format borrowed from the IPLD ecosystem — closer to a Git packfile than to a zip. Inside it, every post, like, follow and block you have ever made is stored as a binary CBOR block, arranged in a Merkle Search Tree.

That structure is excellent for machines: it lets any server verify that your repository has not been altered. It is useless for humans. There is no app on Windows, macOS, Linux, iOS or Android that opens a .car file and shows you your posts, because the format was never meant for reading — it was meant for syncing.

1. 1Drag the .car file into the box above (or click it and pick the file).
2. 2Your browser reads it locally — the file never leaves your device and is never uploaded anywhere.
3. 3Within a second or two you will see every post, thread, image reference, like and follow, searchable and sorted by date.
4. 4From there, pick where you want it: Markdown, Obsidian, Notion, Google Docs, WordPress, PDF, CSV or plain JSON.

Bluesky repositories are public and require no authentication to read. That means you can skip the export entirely: type your handle in the box above and your archive is fetched straight from the server that hosts it.

The file route exists for people who prefer that nothing touches the network at all, or who are reading an export they saved months ago.

Your .car file does not contain your photos and videos. Media is stored separately as "blobs", and the repository only holds references to them. A ten-thousand-post account can produce a 75 MB export file while the actual images add up to several hundred megabytes that are simply not in there.

This tool spots those references, tells you how many files and how many megabytes are missing, and can fetch them all for you into a folder that matches your posts.