There’s a lot of change in the social media landscape as TikTok prepares to go dark, Mark Zuckerberg loosens content restrictions on Meta apps, and Elon Musk continues to tinker with the X algorithm to suit his tastes.
Thankfully, despite the volatile nature of the app’s many users, Bluesky seems to have managed to break through into a really promising alternative. And because of the basic nature of its open protocol, anyone can build their own applications that run back on Bluesky’s public graph.
For example, an engineer named Sebastian Vogelsang is building an app that will be a new version of Instagram in addition to Bluesky’s AT Protocol. Because it uses Bluesky’s public graph, posts added to Flashes will also appear in the main Bluesky client, and vice versa—images posted to Bluesky will appear in Flashes. The app simply filters posts based on text and only displays images or videos. Through the app, users can share photo galleries with up to four photos, or videos up to one minute long.
Vogelsang says Flashes isn’t meant to be a complete rip off of Instagram and won’t get many of the features Instagram has. That makes sense, since the app is a reskin of the Bluesky app. Many people have lamented that they long for the days when Instagram was simple, not filled with AI-generated content or weird recommendations. Lightning can help fill that hole.
Bluesky got a big boost from Elon Musk’s purchase of iX, then Twitter, although its growth has slowed in recent months. It is estimated that Bluesky has around 27 million active users. That’s nowhere near the size of apps like Instagram and TikTok, and it’s still a lot smaller than the X too. Reaching a critical mass on any social media platform is incredibly difficult, and X is only seeing its influence grow as Musk begins to serve as President-elect Trump’s right-hand man.
But Bluesky has a promising future if it can continue to grow at a moderate pace. The company returned a $15 million investment round in October with plans to launch paid subscriptions so the company doesn’t rely on advertising or collecting user data. Most of the big social networks these days have connected their APIs and do not allow third-party clients because they make it difficult to display and target advertising, and the data itself is used to train AI.
Vogelsang said TechCrunch that the Flashes should launch in the coming weeks. Anyone interested in checking it out can follow Flashes account on Bluesky for updates.