More good news for those looking to exit Meta’s social app ecosystem in favor of a more open alternative: an independent developer is building a photo-sharing app for Bluesky called Flashes. The upcoming app is powered by the same technology behind Bluesky, the AT protocol, and was built using code from Skeets, the developer’s previous Bluesky client.
Flashes’ launch could capitalize on growing consumer demand for alternatives to Big Tech’s social media monopolies. This trend has led to the adoption of open source decentralized apps like Mastodon and Bluesky, including the recently released Pixelfed mobile app built on Mastodon’s ActivityPub protocol. This is also partly driving TikTok users switching to the Chinese app RedNote ahead of the U.S. TikTok ban. In other words, US users are now signaling that they would rather use a foreign app than return to Meta.
Flashes itself is based on Skeets, an earlier app from Berlin developer Sebastian Vogelsang. The app was an early attempt at creating a consumer-facing app for Bluesky, a growing social network that currently has 27.5 million users.
While Bluesky offers its own official mobile client, Skeets differentiates itself by focusing on the needs of iPad users as well as custom accessibility features for blind and low vision users, one of Vogelsang’s specialties.
Late last year, Vogelsang realized there was potential to use the same codebase to build an app for Bluesky users who are more interested in visual content like photos and videos. Since Bluesky already supports this type of media, all you have to do is reorganize the Skeets app to make its design and user interface look more similar to other photo-sharing apps like Meta’s Instagram.
“I thought about the idea of having one basic social graph and letting different apps choose what they want to display from that graph,” Vogelsang told TechCrunch. “It was very interesting because before we had these separate networks.”
He says Flash could help attract new potential Bluesky users who haven’t yet joined the social network because they’ve never seen themselves as “Twitter guys.”
“This can provide an entry point into the network, into the entire protocol,” Vogelsang said.
However, the developer emphasizes that Flashes is not an Instagram clone, nor will it offer all the same features.
At launch, Flashes, like Bluesky, supports photo posts of up to four images and videos up to one minute long. Users who post to Flashes will see their posts appear in Bluesky, and any comments on those posts will be fed back into the app as if they were another Bluesky client. Direct messages from Bluesky are also supported.
To accomplish this task, Flashes filters Bluesky’s existing timeline for posts containing photo and video posts. (In the future, Vogelsang plans to add metadata to posts in Flashes, giving Bluesky users a way to avoid flooding Bluesky’s native app feed with photo posts if something goes wrong.)
Flashes didn’t take very long to build because we were able to reuse Skeets’ existing code. The app can also be marketed to Skeets’ existing user base, which has downloaded the app approximately 30,500 times to date.
Vogelsang says he’s currently working to integrate the subscription-based features of both apps so users don’t have to pay twice for Skeets’ bookmarks, drafts, mute, rich push notifications, and other Flash-related premium features. (Both apps are free to use without a subscription.)
Later, Vogelsang said he also wanted to release a video-specific app called Blue Screen.
Developers expect to be able to release Flash to the public within a few weeks, with the TestFlight beta arriving before that. Interested users can follow Flashes’ account on Bluesky for further updates.