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.”
“This may give them an entry point into the network, into the whole protocol,” he said.
Flashes was able to quickly launch its beta thanks to Vogelsang’s ability to re-use code from his earlier app Skeets, a Bluesky client with north of 30,000 users. By building on top of Bluesky, Flashes also benefits from the social networking startup’s growing reach. Just last week, Bluesky hit a milestone of 30 million users and 1 billion posts. Today, it has nearly 31 million users according to data tracked via Bluesky’s developer API.
Across both Flashes and Skeets, Vogelsang aims to test features like push notifications, support for multiple accounts, bookmarks, and user notifications. He later plans to add more image editing options, support for Stories, and possibly custom profile pages.
In time, Vogelsang aims to integrate subscription features into all his apps, including a way to make sure users don’t have to pay twice as they switch between his various clients.
Today, that list of clients also includes Bluescreen, one of the many apps building a TikTok-like experience for Bluesky. Like Flashes, Bluescreen is built on Bluesky for the time being, though Vogelsang is exploring the idea of expanding both to work with atproto more directly, which would allow for things like longer videos.
Flashes beta, which runs on Apple’s TestFlight platform, is currently having technical difficulties but Vogelsang says Apple’s engineering team is looking into the problem and working on a fix. The beta had seen around 3,500 sign-ups within its first hour live, indicating healthy consumer demand. A sign-up form for the beta is also live.
It’s worth noting Flashes isn’t the only app thinking of building an Instagram alternative on open protocol. Another Bluesky photos client, Pinksky, is already up and running, and Pixelfed recently launched its mobile apps, which run on the ActivityPub protocol, also used by Mastodon.
