With TikTok’s future in limbo, rivals X (formerly Twitter) and Bluesky have introduced vertical video feeds similar to those popularized by the China-based platform.
The announcements were made late on Jan. 19 ahead of the short-lived US TikTok ban. “We had to get in on the video action, too,” said Bluesky. The decentralized platform’s video feed is accessible from the Search tab on its mobile app. Here, users will find a new “Trending Videos” section, which they can pin to make it appear on the home screen or add to their list of feeds.
Since this is a custom video feed, standard feeds and posts “that contain video don’t automatically enter you into a video timeline,” Bluesky says.
On Bluesky’s video feed, you can swipe up to move on to the next video and use a single tap to pause it. Alongside the regular buttons to like, share, comment on, and repost a video, you get a three-dot menu that opens up options to copy or translate the caption, mute the thread, words, or tags, or just tell Bluesky if you want to see more or less of what you just saw.
If you don’t see the new video feed, Bluesky recommends “restarting your app once or twice to let the latest changes take effect.”
X introduced its own video feed an hour before Bluesky, calling it “an immersive new home for videos.” However, unlike Bluesky, X’s release is limited to users in the US.
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The Elon Musk-owned platform has created a dedicated tab on the home page for its vertical video feed. To access it, users can tap on the play button-like icon next to the Grok icon. This opens a familiar interface, and based on the video attached to the announcement, the platform seems to have options to cast the video to a bigger screen or minimize it.
Instagram also attempted to take advantage of the TikTok ban. It launched a new tall grid on profiles this week “because most photos and videos that are uploaded to Instagram at this point are vertical and rectangles do a better job showing off those photos and videos,” said IG Head Adam Mosseri.
He later acknowledged that some of the feedback on the change was “quite negative,” in part because “some of you spend a lot of time tweaking your grids and this blew all of that up.” As a result, Instagram is “going to improve the ability to customize those thumbnails to make it easier to get back to a place you’re happy with.” That includes “the ability to post directly to your grid, in case you want to bypass feed entirely.”
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Over the weekend, Mosseri also announced a video-editing app called Edits, which aims to provide people creating videos on their phones with “a full suite of creative tools.”
Mosseri’s announcement came just hours after Apple and Google removed ByteDance’s apps, including CapCut, from their respective app stores to comply with a US law requiring ByteDance to sell its US business to a non-foreign owner.
While TikTok was quickly reinstated in the US, thanks to “President Trump’s efforts,” the future of other ByteDance-owned apps remains uncertain.
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About Jibin Joseph
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