Tired of the same old social media apps? Meet Flashes—a fresh platform for sharing photos and videos. Built on Bluesky, a Twitter alternative, Flashes puts privacy and control at the forefront. Think of it as Instagram, but for the Bluesky community. Let’s explore its features and how you can get started.

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What Is the New Flashes App About?
Flashes is a new social media app built on Bluesky, a decentralized micro-blogging platform originally created as an alternative to X. Flashes is all about photos and videos. At launch, it will allow users to post up to four images or a video of up to 1 minute in length, just like Bluesky.
Think of it as Instagram, but with an emphasis on privacy and direct integration with Bluesky, which has now grown to over 27 million users worldwide.
Flashes pulls in all photos and videos from Bluesky, filtering out all text-based content. Users who post to Flashes will also have their posts appear on Bluesky and comments on those posts will also feed back into the app as if it were just another Bluesky client. It will also support Bluesky’s direct messages.
Here’s how it looks like:
Is Flashes Owned by Bluesky?
No, Flashes is not owned by Bluesky. It’s developed by Sebastian Vogelsang, an independent developer who previously created Skeets, a third-party Bluesky client.
Vogelsang is utilizing the AT Protocol—an open-source and decentralized framework that powers Bluesky—to create Flashes. This enables Flashes to seamlessly integrate with the Bluesky network and use its existing social graph.
Think of it like email. You can have an email account with Gmail, Outlook, or Yahoo, and they can all still communicate with each other because they follow the same open standards. Similarly, Flashes is its own app, but it seamlessly integrates with Bluesky because they both use the AT Protocol.
Why Flashes?
Flashes is based on Skeets, an earlier app by developer Sebastian Vogelsang. Skeets launched as a third-party Bluesky client. It included enhanced features like bookmarks, drafts, mute words, and accessibility features for blind and low-vision users.
Vogelsang then realized the potential to build another app using this same codebase. This new app would cater to Bluesky users primarily interested in visual content, like photos and videos. Since Bluesky already supports photos and videos, it was kind of easy for him to adapt the Skeets app design and user interface to resemble Instagram.
In an exclusive interaction with TechCrunch, Vogelsang mentioned that Flashes could help attract potential Bluesky users who have yet to join the social network because they never saw themselves as a “Twitter person.” However, he further insists that Flashes is not meant to be an Instagram clone, nor will it offer all the same features.
How to Download the New Flashes App
Flashes is currently unavailable to the public. The developer, Sebastian Vogelsang, expects to launch Flashes on the App Store within a few weeks. Prior to the public launch, he will roll out a TestFlight beta program for iPhone users to try it early.
The app will be free at launch. However, since Vogelsang now has two free Bluesky apps—Skeets and Flashes—he is working to integrate subscription-based features from both apps. This way, users won’t have to pay twice for premium features. These include features like bookmarks and drafts on Skeets, and rich push notifications on Flashes.
You can follow the Flashes App account on Bluesky for more updates.
Will Flashes Succeed?
When it comes to scrolling video feeds, there are multiple apps already on the market. Meta’s Instagram and Facebook both have Reels, and Threads is X’s design with Instagram-like content. However, not everyone’s into these Meta apps or Elon Musk’s X. We’ve lately seen the onset of decentralized social media platforms like Mastodon and Bluesky.
But boredom or censorship are not the only catalyst pushing people to try other apps. TikTok was severely popular but got banned in the US, which pushed American folks not to Instagram, but to flock to the Chinese Xiaohongshu (RedNote in English) app, which quickly gained the no. 1 spot for free apps on the U.S. App Store.
Flashes, if executed correctly, could bridge the gap between something like TikTok and Instagram Reels. A platform where you open, scroll photos and videos, interact with them, and post your own. All of it while being open source and decentralized—sounds like a good recipe for sure.