Sebastian Vogelsang, the Berlin-based developer of Skeets, an alternative to Bluesky’s official client, is working on a new photo-sharing app called Flashes that is built on the same codebase as Skeets. As reported by Sarah Perez at TechCrunch:

When launched, Flashes could tap into growing consumer demand for alternatives to Big Tech’s social media monopoly. This trend has led to the adoption of open source, decentralized apps like Mastodon and Bluesky, among others, including the recently launched Pixelfed mobile apps, built on Mastodon’s ActivityPub protocol. It’s also, in part, what’s fueling TikTok users’ shift to the Chinese app RedNote ahead of the U.S. TikTok ban — that is, U.S. users are signaling that they would rather use a foreign adversary’s app than return to Meta at this point.

The idea behind Flashes is fundamentally different from Instagram. Whereas Instagram is a standalone product that allows users to cross-post to Threads automatically, Flashes is being built on top of the same social graph as Bluesky. That means Flashes will act as a Bluesky filter focused on photo and video content instead of your entire Bluesky feed. It’s an interesting approach that sidesteps the messiness of cross-posting entirely and allows Vogelsang to focus Flashes’ feature set on photos and video.

I’m looking forward to giving Flashes a try. Instagram is more deeply embedded in many people’s lives than Threads, which makes it harder to replace. However, I’m glad to see Vogelsang and Pixelfed trying. There are enough people like us who are fed up with Meta’s policies that these sorts of alternatives may have a shot at gaining traction with users.