Bluesky Enters the Group Chat Game

Bluesky, the social network backed by Y Combinator and others, has finally caught up with its larger competitor, X, by launching group chats. This feature is part of Bluesky's plan to focus more on communities and less on being a social network where users post solely to reach a wider public audience.

A Shift in Strategy

Bluesky's growth has slowed down, and the network currently reaches 44.8 million registered users, compared to X's 600 million monthly active users. To compete, Bluesky needs to offer different forms of social connection and make its app more attractive to potential users. The company has been working to achieve this by adding features like messaging and encrypted chats, which are now being joined by group chats.

Group Chat Details

The latest version of Bluesky (v1.124) supports group chats of up to 50 people, which is smaller than X's support for 1,000 members. However, Bluesky plans to increase this limit in the future. Group chat creators can manage their chats however they like and decide who's allowed to participate. They can also generate an invite link that can be shared across the web.

Community Focus

Bluesky's head of product, Alex Benzer, has been speaking about the company's plans to make its app more community-focused. He explains that Bluesky will be working to build more community features on the underlying protocol (AT Proto) with support from the wider developer ecosystem. This includes creating communities, joining them, posting in them, and getting updates.

Communities on Bluesky

Bluesky's communities will get their own handle that doubles as a URL, like community-name.bsky.social or community-name.bsky.space. They'll also be able to be set as either public, invite-only, or private, similar to the options available on Facebook Groups or Reddit. This is a notable shift in strategy, and one that arrives as X announced in April that it was shutting down its Communities feature due to low usage and too much spam.

A More Private Online Experience

Bluesky is ultimately betting that people are looking for an exit from platforms operated by Big Tech players and could be enticed to explore more open technologies where they feel they have more control over the experience. Along with group chats, the updated version of Bluesky is also offering a new way to share profiles via a personalized QR code, similar to other social apps.