Bluesky will soon have a feature called communities, which will allow users to post narrowly tailored content intended to be seen by other receptive users in a given niche. Bluesky Head of Product Alex Benzer admits the idea is a little like subreddits.
The announcement of communities came from a series of Bluesky posts from Benzer, who indicated that communities would come to Bluesky at some point this year.
Communities will come in three privacy flavors: public, invite-only, and private. Any given Bluesky community “gets a handle that doubles as a URL,” and that url will lead to “a custom homepage 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 build a “completely custom experience there instead.”
It’s worth noting that Twitter rolled out a communities feature in 2021, and it was revamped and promoted in 2024, well after Elon Musk’s takeover. But that feature never caught on, and was shut down just last month.
Communities may not fare much better on Bluesky, but for what it’s worth, I believe Bluesky is a place where a communities feature could be unusually beneficial. As I’ve written in the past, in its current form, account discovery on Bluesky is plagued by a tendency to surface very similar posts that appeal to a meh cross section of Bluesky users. This is one way to bypass that problem.
Currently, the Discover feed on Bluesky is rather notorious for its blandness, but activity in communities you’ve joined will show up as posts in your Discover feed. Not only does that stand to improve the Discover feed drastically, it also means communities could feel less like a closed room, and more like an elegant and effortless way to encounter users you’re likely to find interesting. Alternatively, users “can also turn on activity notifications and get updates from communities you’ve joined,” Benzer writes.
If you think of Bluesky as a Twitter clone mostly used as a social media haven for those who dislike X owner Elon Musk, and who want to be surrounded by leftists, progressives, liberals, or even centrists—anyone but right-wingers—you would be right. It is that, and in a way that can be irksome even if you agree politically. But it’s also a pleasantly off-the-beaten-path social media platform with a lot going on besides politics, and its overlords have a penchant for quirkily ambitious, and sometimes ill-advised, R&D.
Bluesky has a relatively small but dedicated developer community, and it’s federated, meaning it’s decentralized, and in theory, your Bluesky identity and posts are transferable to other social networks. Bluesky’s decentralized protocol, AT Protocol, is meant to be a standard for “fediverse” platforms, and even has its own developer conference called ATmosphere—which is also the term for the wider AT Protocol-related developer community.
That’s relevant to this new communities feature. Benzer notes that Bluesky is “building this on-protocol and in the open with the dev ecosystem.” The communities feature, then, is not just a new feature for Bluesky, but “a new structure for everyone building in the Atmosphere.”
