Bluesky is launching group chats, as the company shifts its focus to community features

Bluesky social network Fired Support for group chats comes on Thursday, which is another feature designed to make the app more competitive with its bigger competitor, X.

While Elon Musk’s company X recently doubled down in chats with the launch of a Standalone XChat applicationBluesky is only now starting to catch up by offering a way for groups to interact more privately on its platform.

The advantage is access In the latest release of the social media app (version 1.124), 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 people just post to reach a broader general audience.

This is a notable shift in strategy, one that comes as Bluesky’s overall growth slows. Today the network arrives About 44.8 million Registered users, compared to X 600 million Monthly active users. If Bluesky can’t reach the level of competitors like X or Meta’s Threads, it may need to find new ways to make its app attractive to potential users, including by offering different forms of social networking.

startup Adding support for messaging in 2024, But it only recently started showing Encrypted chatsAnd only by integrating the third-party messaging service Germ. Now, Bluesky offers support for group chats of up to 50 people, its announcement said.

This is smaller than X support for 1000 membersBut it’s the beginning. The company says it may increase this limit in the future.

The company indicated that group chat creators can manage their conversations however they want and can determine who is allowed to participate. They can create an invitation link that can be shared across the web, including Bluesky posts where it displays as an embed card.

Meanwhile, chat participants can control who they’re allowed to invite to chats — everyone, just people they follow, or no one. The default will be “Only people you follow,” unless users select a different option for direct messages.

Media sharing in group chats is not supported yet, because it would require additional security and moderation systems, Plosky says.

In a series of Recent posts From Bluesky’s Chief Product Officer, Alex Benzer talks about how Bluesky is working to make its app more community-focused in the coming days.

“Today, Bluesky is one big space. Communities will be smaller spaces within it where you can delve deeper and hang out with people who care about the same things,” he wrote. Binzer also explained that the goal was to build more community features on top of the underlying protocol (AT Proto) with support from the broader developer ecosystem.

“In Bluesky, you will be able to create communities, join them, post in them, and get updates,” Binzer added.

The timing is especially notable considering X’s April announcement about it Its Communities feature has been closed Due to lack of use and a lot of spam. Bluesky seems to be trying to pick up where X left off by catering to those who want more control and ownership over their online community experience.

For example, Binzer noted that communities on Bluesky will get their own handle that can be used as a URL, such as Community-name.bsky.social or Community-name.bsky.space. They’ll also be able to set it as either public, invite-only, or private, similar to the options available on Facebook Groups or Reddit.

With Communities, Bluesky is ultimately betting that people are looking for an exit from platforms run by big tech companies, and could be tempted to explore more open technologies where they feel they have more control over the experience (and won’t have their accounts). Disabled by rogue AI moderation systems!).

Besides group chats, the updated version of Bluesky also introduces a new way to share profiles via a custom QR code, similar to other social apps.