Overview
- Bluesky’s head of product published a thread on Thursday saying the platform will add a communities feature that is expected to arrive sometime this year.
- The feature will be built on the decentralized AT Protocol, which Bluesky calls the Atmosphere, and the company says it will develop the work openly with the protocol’s developer ecosystem.
- Each community will get a handle that doubles as a URL leading to a custom community homepage and creators may host fully custom experiences at those addresses.
- Communities will offer three privacy levels—public, invite-only, and private—each will have its own feed, and posts from joined communities can appear in users’ Discover feeds or generate activity notifications.
- Bluesky frames the change as a move away from a single public square inspired by Reddit, a shift that follows other platforms’ experiments with communities and could help the network solve weak discovery by letting niche groups surface content and users.