Bluesky will soon have a feature called communities, which will allow users to publish narrow content intended to be seen by other receiving users in a specific niche. Alex Benzer, head of Bluesky Product, admits that the idea is there a bit like subreddits.
The announcement of the communities came in a row Bluesky posts from Benzerstating that communities will be coming to Bluesky at some point this year.
Communities will come in three privacy options: public, invite-only, and private. Any Bluesky community “gets a handle that acts as a URL,” which will lead to a “community-specific home page,” Benza writes. I’m picking a clear sebreddit-like vibe out of all these attributes so far. Benzer adds that community creators can choose to build “a completely custom experience there instead.”
It should be noted that Twitter In 2021, it introduced the communities featureand it happened Revised and promoted in 2024Long after Elon Musk took over. But this feature never caught on and closed last month.
Communities may not be better in Bluesky, but for what it’s worth, I think Bluesky is one place where community features can be incredibly useful. As I have written in the past, in its current form, account discovery on Bluesky tends to uncover very similar posts that attract a cross section of Bluesky users. This is a way around the problem.
Currently, the Discover feed on Bluesky is known for its moderation, but activity in the communities you join will appear as posts in your Discover feed. Not only does this dramatically improve the Discover feed, but it also means communities can feel less like closed rooms and more like an elegant and easy way to meet users you might find interesting. Alternatively, users “can also turn on activity notifications and get updates from the communities you join,” Benzer writes.
If you think of Bluesky as a Twitter clone, mainly used as a social media haven for those who don’t like X owner Elon Musk and want to be surrounded by leftists, progressives, liberals, and even centrists—everybody but right-wingers – you’d be right. Here it isand in a way that can be frustrating even if you agree politically. But it’s also a pleasantly off-the-beaten-track social media platform where a lot of things happen besides politics, and its masters have aspirations. strangely ambitiousand sometimes it is ill-advisedR&D.
Bluesky has relatively a small but dedicated developer communityand he federationthat is, it is decentralized and theoretically your Bluesky identity and posts can be transferred to other social networks. Bluesky’s decentralized protocol, the AT Protocol, is designed to be the standard for “fediverse” platforms and even has its own developer conference It’s called ATmosphere – which is also the term for the wider AT Protocol-related developer community.
This applies to this new communities feature. Benzer notes that Bluesky “openly builds on this protocol and with a development ecosystem.” So the communities feature isn’t just a new feature for Bluesky, it’s “a new feature for everyone building on Atmosphere.”
