While Bluesky has provided refuge for those seeing asylum from Elon Musk’s X, the company might be about to provide the same service for those those fleeing Instagram for similar reasons.
New reports reveal Bluesky – the decentralised and algorithm-free social media platform – will soon have its own third-party photo and video sharing app called Flashes.
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Because it’s built on the same codebase as Bluesky, the app will enable users to post up to a minute of video and four photographs – just like Bluesky. With a design that’ll be familiar to Instagram users, content will be posted independently, but will also be cross posted to Bluesky while comments on posts will also be mirrored between the two clients.
To the developer Sebastian Vogelsang, who created a Bluesky client for low-vision users on iPad called Skeets, this represents an opportunity to bring more users to Bluesky.
“I thought about the idea of having one base social graph and then having just different apps pick from that graph whatever they want to display,” Vogelsang told TechCrunch. “I found it very intriguing, because before we had these separated networks.”
Earlier this week I wrote about how Meta’s changes in policies could isolate millions of users, thus ending a brief period where Meta and its founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg had been looked upon with less critical eyes due to Elon Musk’s controversial leadership of X.
On Instagram specifically, the company is looking to reintroduce politically motivated content, while on the Facebook mothership fact checkers are being dispensed with and speech surrounding sensitive topics on gender and immigration will be less subjected to moderation.
There’s yet to be a leading contender to emerge to take Instagram’s place as the dominant photo-centric social platform.
