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Better news for those looking to leave the Meta social app ecosystem in favor of a more open alternative: An independent developer is building a photo-sharing app for Bluesky. Flashing. The soon-to-be-launched software Bluesky is powered by the same technology that underpins the AT Protocol and is built using code from the developer’s previous Bluesky client. Skeets.
Flashes, when launched, could tap into growing consumer demand for alternatives to Big Tech’s social media monopoly. This trend has led to the adoption of open source, decentralized software such as Mastodon and Bluesky, among others. including the recently launched Pixelfed mobile appsBuilt on Mastodon’s ActivityPub protocol. This is also partly what drives TikTok users to switch to another Chinese app RedNote before US TikTok ban — that is, US users say they’d rather use a foreign competitor’s software than switch back to Meta at this point.
Flashes itself is based on Skeets, previously implemented by Berlin developer Sebastian Vogelsang, his first foray into creating consumer-facing apps for the growing social network Bluesky. 27.5 million users.
While Bluesky offers its own official mobile client, Skeets has distinguished itself by focusing on the needs of iPad users as well as customized accessibility features for blind and visually impaired users, which is one of Vogelsang’s areas of expertise.
Late last year, Vogelsang realized there was potential to create apps using the same code base that would cater to Bluesky users who were more interested in visual content like photos and videos. Since Bluesky already supports this type of media, all it took was to reconfigure the Skeets app so that its design and user interface were more similar to Meta’s other photo-sharing apps, such as Instagram.
“I came up with the idea of having one basic social graph and then just having different apps choose what they want to show from that graph,” Vogelsang told TechCrunch. “I found that very interesting because before we had these separate networks.”
He says Flashes can help attract new potential Bluesky users who haven’t yet joined the social network because they’ve never seen themselves as a “Twitter person.”
“It can give them an access point to the network, to the whole protocol,” Vogelsang said.
However, the developer emphasizes that Flashes is not intended to be an Instagram clone and will not offer all the same features.
At launch, Flashes will support up to four photos and videos up to 1 minute long, just like Bluesky. Posts from users who post to Flashes will also appear in Bluesky, and comments on those posts will also be sent back to the app as another Bluesky client. It will also support Bluesky’s direct messages.
To do this, Flashes simply filters Bluesky’s existing timeline for posts with photos and videos. (In the future, Vogelsang also plans to add metadata to Flashes’ posts so that Bluesky users can avoid flooding their feed with photo posts in Bluesky’s main app if that’s a problem.)
Flashes didn’t take long to build because he was able to reuse Skeets’ existing code. The app will also be able to sell to Skeets’ existing user base, who have downloaded the app nearly 30,500 times so far.
Vogelsang says he’s now working to integrate subscription-based features in both apps so users don’t have to pay twice for Skeets’ bookmarks, drafts, mute, rich push notifications and other premium features specific to Flashes.
Later, Vogelsang says he also wants to launch a video-only app called Blue Screen.
The developer expects to be able to release Flash to the public in a few weeks, with the TestFlight beta coming before that. Interested users can follow Flash’s account on Bluesky for further updates.
