New Bluesky app could work as an Instagram surrogate, too

Great news for anyone whose big problem with hanging out on Twitter/X replacement Bluesky was all those dang words: An app developer working on the social media platform is now attempting to help it serve as a replacement for more photo-focused offerings like Meta’s Instagram, too.

This is per a report from TechCrunch, covering a new project called Flashes, from third-party Bluesky developer Sebastian Vogelsang. Like Vogelsang’s earlier Skeets—an alternative fronted for accessing the open-source service via iPads, made back before Bluesky Social PBC released a dedicated mobile app of its own—Flashes is basically an alternate way of viewing the content people are already posting on the service. In this case, it puts the focus on images and video sharing, basically filtering out text posts and making the experience of scrolling through your various posts and skeets a lot more like, well, Instagram.

Notably, because it’s still running off the Bluesky architecture, what Flashes—which is supposed to be out to the public in a few weeks—won’t let you do is go beyond the service’s current posting limits for images or video: You’ll still be stuck with four images per post, and one minute of video. But, if we’re being honest, at least half the reason we’re on Bluesky these days is because we want the basic feeling of the big social media networks without the ever-present sense of slowly feeding our lives into a monster, piloted by sociopathic billionaires, that’s steadily devouring reality one data-filled chomp of a time. (See also the people flocking to various TikTok replacements, so loathe are they to use one of Mark Zuckerberg’s similar offerings as the company’s U.S. ban draws closer.) So if Flashes can get the feel of something like Instagram, even if it can’t match it in features, then it’s honestly doing more than half of what we’d want from it already.