Bluesky is still playing catch-up to some of its larger rivals, and this week, it’s adding support for longer videos and the option to filter who slides into your DMs.
With App Version 1.99, the social networking platform Bluesky now lets you post three-minute videos. That’s up from the previous limit of 60 seconds, which has been in place ever since video uploads were made available on the platform in September.
The extended video support will benefit creators and users of the Bluesky-based Instagram alternative Flashes—which filters Bluesky feeds to show only posts with photos and videos.
For Bluesky users chatting via direct messages, this update also adds a “Chat requests” section to the inbox, where they filter messages from people they don’t know. It’s intended to reduce the number of scammers and spammers in your inbox, Bluesky said last week.
Bluesky has also added a quicker way to mute accounts. Rather than navigating to a user’s profile, you can now just tap on the three-dot menu from a user’s post and pick “Mute account” to get the job done.
Muting allows you to stop receiving notifications from a user or seeing their posts on your feed. If a muted account replies to your thread, you’ll see a section that says, “Post from an account you muted.” You can tap that to view the comment, but in any case, the muted account will never know they have been muted, Bluesky writes in a blog post.
After the updates were announced, Blueksy was down for several hours. According to Downdetector, several users started reporting outages at around 3:30 p.m. ET. What caused the outage is unclear, but the issue seems to have been resolved by 5:30 p.m. ET. Bluesky’s rival X also suffered a widespread outage the same day, with CEO Elon Musk blaming it on a “massive cyberattack.”
(Disclosure: Downdetector owner Ookla is owned by PCMag parent company Ziff Davis.)
