Bluesky social network launched support for Thursday group chats, another feature designed to make the app more competitive with its biggest competitor, X.
While Elon Musk-owned X recently doubled down on chats with the release of a standalone XChat app, Bluesky is just now catching up by offering a way for teams to interact more privately on its platform.
The characteristic, which is arriving in the latest version of the social networking app (v1.124), it is one of the first to implement Bluesky’s plan to focus more on communities, rather than trying to be a social network where users post solely to reach a wider audience.
This is a notable shift in strategy, and one that arrives as Bluesky’s overall growth has slowed. Today, the network is arriving about 44.8 million registered users, compared to X’s 600 million monthly active users. If Bluesky can’t reach the scale of competitors like X or Meta’s Threads, it may have to find new ways to make its app appealing to would-be users, including by offering different forms of social connection.
The startup added support for messaging in 2024, but only recently started offering encrypted chats, and only by integrating third-party messaging service Germ. Bluesky now offers support for group chats of up to 50 people, its announcement said.
This is less than Support X for 1,000 membersbut it’s a start. And the company says it may raise that limit in the future.
Group chat creators can manage their chats however they want and can decide who is allowed to participate, the company noted. They can generate an invitation link that can be shared across the web, including on Bluesky posts where it appears as an embedded card.
Chat participants, meanwhile, can control who is allowed to invite them to chats — everyone, just the people they follow, or no one. The default setting will be “only people you follow” unless users choose a different option for DMs.
Sharing media in group chats is not yet supported, as it will require additional security and control systems, Bluesky says.
In a series of recent posts from Bluesky’s head of product, Alex Benzer talked about how Bluesky will be working to make its app more community-focused in the coming days.
“Today, Bluesky is one big space. Communities will be smaller spaces where you can go deeper and hang out with people who are interested in the same things,” he wrote. Benzer also explained that the goal was to build more community features into the underlying protocol (AT Proto) with support from the wider developer ecosystem.
“On Bluesky, you’ll be able to create communities, join them, post to them, and get updates,” Benzer added.
The timing is particularly notable given that X announced in April that it was shutting down its Communities feature due to low usage and excessive spam. Bluesky, ostensibly, is trying to pick up where X left off, catering to those who want more control and ownership of their community’s online experience.
For example, Benzer noted that communities on Bluesky will have their own handle that doubles as a URL, such as community-name.bsky.social or community-name.bsky.space. They’ll also be able to set it as public, invite-only, or private, similar to the options available on Facebook or Reddit Groups.
With communities, Bluesky is ultimately betting that people are looking for an exit from platforms run by Big Tech players, and could be tempted to explore more open technologies where they feel they have more control over the experience (and won’t have their account disabled by unscrupulous AI moderation systems!).
Along with group chats, the Bluesky update also offers a new way to share profiles via a personalized QR code, similar to other social networking apps.
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