Social network Bluesky launched support for group chats on Thursday, one other feature designed to make the app more competitive with its larger competitor, X.
While Elon Musk-owned X recently doubled down on chats with the launch of a standalone XChat app, Bluesky is barely now catching up by offering a way for groups to interact more privately on its platform.
The feature, which is arriving in the most recent version of the social app (v1.124), is considered one of the primary to deliver on Bluesky’s plan to focus more on communities, moderately than attempting to be a social network where people post solely to succeed in a wider public audience.
That’s a notable shift in strategy, and one which arrives as Bluesky’s overall growth has slowed. Today, the network reaches some 44.8 million registered users, compared with X’s 600 million monthly energetic users. If Bluesky can’t reach the dimensions of competitors like X or Meta’s Threads, it might have to search out latest ways to make its app attractive to would-be users, including by offering different types of social connection.
The startup added support for messaging in 2024, but it surely only more recently began offering encrypted chats, and only by integrating the third-party messaging service Germ. Now, Bluesky is offering support for group chats of as much as 50 people, its announcement states.
That’s smaller than X’s support for 1,000 members, but it surely’s a start. And the corporate says it could increase this limit in the long run.
Group chat creators can manage their chats nonetheless they like and might determine who’s allowed to participate, the corporate noted. They’ll generate an invitation link that could be shared across the online, including in Bluesky posts where it’s displayed as an embedded card.
Chat participants, meanwhile, can control who’s allowed to ask them to chats — everyone, only people they follow, or nobody. The default setting can be either “only people you follow,” unless users select a special selection for DMs.
Sharing media in group chats isn’t yet supported, as it would require additional safety and moderation systems, Bluesky says.
In a series of recent posts from Bluesky’s head of product, Alex Benzer, spoke about how Bluesky can be working to make its app more community-focused in the times ahead.
“Today, Bluesky is one big space. Communities can be smaller spaces inside that where you possibly can go deeper and hang around with individuals who care concerning the same stuff,” he wrote. Benzer also explained that the goal was to construct more community features on the underlying protocol (AT Proto) with support from the broader developer ecosystem.
“On Bluesky, you’ll find a way to create communities, join them, post in them, and get updates,” Benzer added.
The timing is especially notable on condition that X announced in April that it was shutting down its Communities feature due to low usage and an excessive amount of spam. Bluesky, seemingly, is trying to choose up where X left off by catering to those that want more control and ownership over their online community experience.
As an example, Benzer noted that communities on Bluesky will get their very own handle that doubles as a URL, like community-name.bsky.social or community-name.bsky.space. They’ll also find a way to be set as either public, invite-only, or private, much like the choices available on Facebook Groups or Reddit.
With communities, Bluesky is ultimately betting that individuals are on the lookout for an exit from platforms operated by Big Tech players, and may very well be enticed to explore more open technologies where they feel they’ve more control over the experience (and won’t have their account disabled by rogue AI moderation systems!).
Together with group chats, the updated version of Bluesky can be offering a brand new solution to share profiles via a personalised QR code, much like other social apps.
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