Bluesky will soon have a feature called communities, which will allow users to post custom content intended to be seen by other receptive users in a given niche. Bluesky product manager Alex Benzer admits that the idea is a bit like subreddits.
The announcement of the communities arose from a series of Benzer’s Bluesky Publicationswho indicated that the communities would arrive in Bluesky sometime this year.
Communities will have three types of privacy: public, invitation-only, and private. Any given Bluesky community “gets an identifier that also functions as a URL,” and that URL will lead to “a custom landing page for the community,” Benzer writes. I’m picking up a distinctly sebreddit-like vibe from all of these attributes so far. Benzer adds, however, that community creators can choose to create a “completely customized experience there.”
It is worth noting that Twitter implemented a communities feature in 2021and it was renewed and promoted in 2024long after the Elon Musk acquisition. But that feature never caught on and It was closed just last month..
Communities may not fare much better in Bluesky, but for what it’s worth, I think Bluesky is a place where a communities feature could be unusually beneficial. As I have written in the past, As it stands, account discovery on Bluesky is plagued by a tendency to display very similar posts that appeal to a cross-section of Bluesky users. This is one way to avoid that problem.
Currently, the Discover feed on Bluesky is pretty notorious for being bland, but activity in communities you’ve joined will appear as posts in your Discover feed. Not only will this dramatically improve your Discover feed, but it also means that communities could feel less like a closed room and more like a sleek, easy way to find users you’re likely to find interesting. Alternatively, users “can also turn on activity notifications and get updates from communities they’ve joined,” Benzer writes.
If you think of Bluesky as a Twitter clone used primarily as a social media haven for those who don’t like X owner Elon Musk and want to be surrounded by leftists, progressives, liberals, or even centrists…someone but the rightists… would be right. the thing isand in a way that can be annoying even if you agree politically. But it’s also a pleasantly offbeat social media platform, where there’s a lot going on besides politics, and its masters have a penchant for peculiarly ambitiousand sometimes inadvisableR&D.
Bluesky has a relatively small but dedicated developer communityand it is federatedmeaning it is decentralized and, in theory, your Bluesky identity and posts are transferable to other social networks. Bluesky’s decentralized protocol, the AT Protocol, aims to be a standard for “diverse” platforms, and even has its own developer conference called ATmosphere, which is also the term for the broader developer community related to the AT Protocol.
This is relevant to this new communities feature. Benzer notes that Bluesky is “building this protocol and openly with the development ecosystem.” The communities feature, then, is not just a new feature for Bluesky, but “a new structure for everyone who builds in the Atmosphere.”
