Bluesky embraces long-form content to counter X Articles

Elon Musk’s X lets you write long-form content on the platform through its articles feature, but only if you’re a paid subscriber or business. Decentralized social networking startup Bluesky has a different idea.

Bluesky on Thursday rolled out a new version of its app that integrates with Standard.site, a community project for building long-form content on the same underlying protocol that powers Bluesky.

This means that Bluesky users can now explore content beyond the microblogging, or short-form posts that Bluesky is known for. Instead, they can read articles, blog posts, and newsletters published across the broader network of AT-enabled applications, known as the “Atmosphere.” This includes sites like Leaflet, pckt, and Offprint, which cater to independent writers and publishers who want to own their content and expand their distribution across the open web.

These articles will initially appear as dynamic link cards – essentially an enhanced preview. Plosky says this is just the first step, and the functionality will be improved over time.

This represents the second expansion of Bluesky’s capabilities based on other projects created by community members. In February, a startup called Germ became the first private messaging service that could be run directly from the Bluesky app, thanks to a similar integration.

By building the technical infrastructure alongside the social networking client application, Bluesky is able to leverage other applications and services that also run on the AT protocol. This isn’t a bad deal for third parties either, as they can take advantage of the distribution provided by Bluesky’s network of about 44.5 million registered users.

The expansion into long-form content comes shortly after WordPress announced earlier this month its own plugin that allows any WordPress site to publish to Atmosphere. (The plugin joins another WordPress already offered for publishing on open social services powered by a different protocol, ActivityPub, like Mastodon.)

Like Bluesky, WordPress integration relies on Standard.site dictionary records, which essentially means your blog becomes data on the AT protocol itself, rather than just a link you share on an app like Bluesky. For this reason, any AT-compliant application can allow its users to read WordPress blog posts.

With this integration now coming to Bluesky, you can see more of the startup’s vision of the open social web — where the data itself is open and freely distributable, accessible from any client, and where users can move between personal data servers (PDS) at will. (Although Bluesky was the first PDS, there are now others to choose from, including those offered by Eurosky, Blacksky, Northsky, and others.)

This is certainly different from X’s approach to content, long-form or otherwise, which remains isolated in its application and can only be included elsewhere on the web.

However, the advantage that X offers in terms of distribution is 550 million monthly active users – something Bluesky’s open social competitor may never be able to overcome.

The company noted that the updated version of Bluesky (version 1.122) also includes a host of other features, including an updated GIF picker and image viewer, expanded account-level moderation label, and a fix for a bug that was silently dropping some iOS video uploads.