🦋 Bluesky Social

Flashes, an Instagram alternative built on top of the Bluesky social network, is now opening its doors to beta testers. Announced just weeks ago, the app offers people a means of exiting Meta’s social networking empire for a more open alternative, while also attracting new users who may not have been interested in using Bluesky’s official app, which works more like X.

Built by Berlin-based developer Sebastian Vogelsang, Flashes runs on the same underlying protocol that powers Bluesky, the AT Protocol (or atproto for short). As a Bluesky client, it supports photo posts of up to four images and videos of up to one minute in length. Users who post on Flashes will also have their posts appear on Bluesky, and Bluesky users’ comments on those posts will also appear on Flashes.

To work, Flashes filters Bluesky’s timeline for posts with photos and videos. Users can also switch between their own Bluesky feeds within Flashes to see different views of the social network.

As Vogelsang explained in January, he hopes Flashes will pull in newcomers to Bluesky who may have never seen themselves as a “Twitter person.”

Last week, there was a one-day story about the NFL prohibiting the Patriots from being on Bluesky, with some speculation that it’s got something to do with the NFL appeasing X owner Elon Musk. He has certainly earned any skepticism about his influence and motivations, but there’s not much reason to believe there’s a political angle. Every major social media platform had some period during its early growth when teams wanted to use it, but the NFL hadn’t yet blessed it.

For teams, it’s simple -- they want to be where their fans are. If a new social platform experiences big user growth, any content producer worth their salary is going to want to join them.

But it’s not so simple in the eyes of the NFL, which is acutely aware of the league’s capability to be a business kingmaker. If all 32 teams organically got on Bluesky, the platform could create a robust NFL news hub out of those accounts without much work at all. The NFL knows exactly what that would be worth to Bluesky, and wants to be paid for it.

Bluesky, an alternative to the social networking website previously known as Twitter, has reached 30 million registered users, according to the company.

Bluesky has experienced a surge in interest in the wake of last year’s presidential election in the U.S., although it’s still relatively small when compared to Twitter/X and Meta’s Threads, both of which have hundreds of millions of active users.

Bluesky’s 30 millionth user signed up at 11:21 p.m. ET on Tuesday, according to the company. It’s unclear how many of those are actively using the app but data from one tracker showed at least 2 million accounts liked a post on Tuesday alone.