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Posts tagged with "Bluesky"

A Bluesky-Based Photo-Sharing App Is Coming→

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.

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MacStories Is on Bluesky

It’s been another busy year for social networks. It seems more recent, but it was nearly a year ago that Threads became available in the EU and we introduced readers to the MacStories team there.

Now, Bluesky has taken off, with many MacStories readers moving their social media lives there or splitting their time between multiple services. So today, we wanted to let readers know where they can find all of us on Bluesky.

Our [MacStories Starter Pack](https://go.bsky.app/MSyjAAg) includes the accounts for the site, podcasts, writers, and hosts.

Our MacStories Starter Pack includes the accounts for the site, podcasts, writers, and hosts.

MacStories and each of our six podcasts have brand-new official accounts on Bluesky, and you can find each of our writers and podcasters there, too. Best of all, it’s easy to find us using the MacStories Starter Pack, which will take you to a list of every account. From there, you can follow all of the accounts at once or pick and choose among them; you can also browse a timeline of all of our posts.

The MacStories.net Starter Pack: go.bsky.app/MSyjAAg

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— MacStories (@macstories.net) November 16, 2024 at 8:22 PM

Now, I know some of our readers don’t like Bluesky and may be concerned that we’re dumping Mastodon to chase the latest social media trend. We’re not. If anything, in the eleven months since MacStories became active on Threads, we’ve been even more active on Mastodon. So there’s no need for concern.

We’re splitting our attention across three social media platforms, which in some respects isn’t ideal, but that’s simply what social media has become in 2024. And while each of us has our own preferences among the latest crop of social networks, our goal as a team is to reach as much of the MacStories audience – and potential MacStories audience – as possible. So we’re not leaving Mastodon, or anywhere else for that matter.

If you follow MacStories on Mastodon or Threads, you already have a pretty good idea of what to expect on Bluesky. We’ll be posting links to the stories we publish and what’s going on with Club MacStories, as well as highlights of other things the team is doing. The podcast accounts will be posting links to the latest episodes and whatever else the hosts of those shows want to share with their listeners. You’ll also find the entire MacStories team on Bluesky, each doing their own thing.

It’s worth noting that we’re expanding our podcast presence on Threads, too. AppStories is already up and running there, as well as on Instagram, and you can expect to see other shows pop up there in the near future.

Thanks as always for reading MacStories.net, joining the Club, and listening to our podcasts. It means a lot to all of us here, and with the addition of Bluesky, we hope that even more people who enjoy what we do now have a way to keep up with us.