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 soon-to-launch app is powered by the same technology that underpins Bluesky, the AT Protocol, and has been built using code from the developer’s earlier Bluesky client, Skeets.
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.
Flashes itself is based on Berlin developer Sebastian Vogelsang’s earlier app, Skeets, his initial foray into creating consumer-facing apps for the growing social network, Bluesky, which now tops 27.5 million users.
While Bluesky offers its own official mobile client, Skeets differentiated itself by focusing on the needs of iPad users as well as customized accessibility features for blind and low-vision users, as that’s one of Vogelsang’s areas of expertise.
Late last year, Vogelsang also realized there was potential to build apps using this same codebase that would cater to Bluesky users more interested in visual content, like photos and videos. Because Bluesky already supports this type of media, it was only a matter of reconfiguring the Skeets app so its design and user interface would look more similar to other photo-sharing apps, like Meta’s Instagram.
“I thought about the idea of having one base social graph and then having just different apps pick from that graph whatever they want to display,” Vogelsang told TechCrunch. “I found it very intriguing, because before we had these separated networks.”
He says Flashes could help pull in new potential Bluesky users who have yet to join the social network because they never saw themselves as a “Twitter person.”
“This may give them an entry point into the network, into the whole protocol,” Vogelsang said.
However, the developer stresses that Flashes is not meant to be an Instagram clone, nor will it offer all the same features.
At launch, Flashes will support photo posts of up to four images and videos of up to 1 minute in length, just like Bluesky. Users who post to Flashes will also have their posts appear on Bluesky and comments on those posts will also feed back into the app as if it were just another Bluesky client. It will also support Bluesky’s direct messages.
To make this work, Flashes simply filters Bluesky’s existing timeline for posts with photos and video posts. (In the future, Vogelsang also plans to add metadata to Flashes’ posts so Bluesky users would have a way to keep their feeds on Bluesky’s main app from being flooded with photo posts if that became a problem.)
Flashes didn’t take too long to build because it was able to reuse Skeets’ existing code. The app will also be able to market to Skeets’ existing user base, who have now downloaded the app some 30,500 times to date.
Vogelsang says he’s now working to integrate subscription-based features from both his apps so users don’t have to pay twice for the premium features, like Skeets’ bookmarks, drafts, muting, rich push notifications, and others specific to Flashes. (Both apps are free to use without a subscription, we should note.)
Later, Vogelsang says he wants to launch a video-only app, too, called Blue Screen.
The developer expects to be able to launch Flashes to the public in a matter of weeks with a TestFlight beta arriving ahead of that. Interested users can follow Flashes’ account on Bluesky for further updates.
