If you tried SkyPress before this week, you ran into the same thing I kept running into: before you could type a single word, you had to sign in. The editor was locked behind your Bluesky account, and the home page was a landing page asking you to log in first.
That works fine, but ideally I would like writing to be the first thing you do, not the reward for getting through an auth flow. So I flipped it around.
The new /write flow
You can now land on /write and just… start writing. Nothing gets in the way.
Sign-in only shows up when you actually want to publish. At that point SkyPress saves your draft, sends you through the Bluesky OAuth round-trip, and brings you right back to where you were so the publish flow picks up where you left off. Your draft survives the redirect (text in localStorage, image bytes in IndexedDB), so nothing gets lost on the way.
Images work the same way. You can drop a photo into a post while you're still signed out; it's held locally and previewed inline, then only uploaded to your PDS when you publish. One path, whether you're signed in or not.
This tested well enough I switched the home page to use that flow. The hero's main button is just "Start writing →".
Mentioning people in your articles
The other thing that landed recently: you can now @-mention atproto users inside an article, and they'll actually get notified.
The tricky part is that Bluesky only generates a mention notification from an app.bsky.feed.post it indexes; it never scans a custom document record for mentions. So when you publish, SkyPress adds a cc @name line to the companion Bluesky post and attaches a proper mention facet for each person. The mention also lives inline in your article, linking out to their Bluesky profile.
Because that post body can get close to Bluesky's 300-character limit, there's now a live counter in the publish panel that stops you before an over-limit post can leave your article half-published.
Give it a try
That's the gist of the last few days. The writing-first flow is the part I'm most curious about — it changes the whole feel of starting a post, and I'd love to know whether it lands for you the way it does for me. :)
Give /write a spin and let me know what you think!