Bluesky is getting its own photo-sharing app, Flashes

More good news for those looking to opt out of Meta’s social app ecosystem in favor of a more open alternative: An independent developer is creating a photo-sharing app called Bluesky. flash. The soon-to-be-launched app is powered by the same technology that underpins Bluesky, the AT protocol, and is built using code from the developer’s previous Bluesky client, Skits.

At launch, the Flashes could tap into growing consumer demand for alternatives to big tech’s social media monopoly. This trend has led to the adoption of open source, decentralized apps like Mastodon and Bluesky, With the recently launched Pixelfed mobile appBuilt on Mastodon’s ActivityPub protocol. This is also, in part, what is shifting TikTok users Chinese app RedNote ahead of US TikTok ban — that is, US users are signaling that they’d rather use a foreign counterpart’s app than return to Meta at this point.

Flashes itself is based on Berlin developer Sebastian Vogelsang’s earlier app, Skeets, his initial effort at creating consumer-facing apps for the growing social network, Bluesky, which is now at the top. 27.5 million users.

While Bluesky offers its own official mobile client, Skits differentiates itself by focusing on the needs of iPad users and customized accessibility features for blind and low-vision users, as this is one of Vogelsang’s areas of expertise.

Late last year, Vogelsang realized there was potential to use this same codebase to create apps that made Bluesky users more interested in visual content like images and videos. Since Bluesky already supports this type of media, it was just a matter of reconfiguring the Skeets app so its design and user interface looked more similar to other photo-sharing apps like Instagram.

“I thought about the idea of ​​having a base social graph and then different apps pick and choose whatever they want to display from that graph,” Vogelsang told TechCrunch. “I found it very interesting, because before we had this separate network.”

He says Flash can help draw in new potential Bluesky users who haven’t yet joined the social network because they don’t see themselves as “Twitter people.”

“It could give them an entry point into the network, into the whole protocol,” Vogelsang said.

However, the developer emphasizes that Flash is not an Instagram clone, nor will it offer the same features.

At launch, Flashes will support photo posts of up to four images and videos of up to 1 minute in length, just like Bluesky Users who post in Flash will also have their posts appear in Bluesky, and comments on those posts will also return to the app as if it were another Bluesky client. It will also support Bluesky’s direct messages

To do this, Flashes filters Bluesky’s existing timeline for posts with only photo and video posts (In the future, Vogelsang plans to add metadata to Flash’s posts so that Bluesky users have a way to keep their feeds from being flooded with photo posts in Bluesky’s main app if that becomes a problem.)

Flash didn’t take too long to build because it was able to reuse existing code from Skit. The app will also be able to be marketed to Skeet’s existing users, who have downloaded the app nearly 30,500 times to date.

Vogelsang said he’s now working to integrate subscription-based features from both of his apps so users don’t have to pay twice for premium features, such as Skit’s bookmarks, drafts, muting, rich push notifications and others specific to Flash. (Both apps are free to use without a subscription, we should note.)

Later, Vogelsang said he also wants to launch a video-only app called Blue Screen.

The developer hopes to roll out Flash to the public in a few weeks before a testflight beta arrives. Interested users can follow Flash’s account on Bluesky For more updates.