Bluesky is launching group chats, as the company shifts its focus to community features

Social network Bluesky launched support for group chats on Thursday, another feature designed to make the app more competitive with its bigger rival, X.

While Elon Musk’s company X recently doubled down on chats with the launch of its standalone XChat app, Bluesky is only now catching up by offering a way for groups to interact more privately on its platform.

The feature, which arrives in the latest version of the social app (version 1.124), is one of the first to introduce Bluesky’s plan to focus more on communities, rather than trying to be a social network where people just post to reach a broader general audience.

This is a notable shift in strategy, one that comes as Bluesky’s overall growth slows. Today, the network has about 44.8 million registered users, compared to 600 million monthly active users for X. If Bluesky can’t reach the level of competitors like X or Meta’s Threads, it may need to find new ways to make its app attractive to potential users, including by offering different forms of social networking.

The startup added support for messaging in 2024, but only recently began offering encrypted chats, only by integrating third-party messaging service Germ. Now, Bluesky offers support for group chats of up to 50 people, its announcement said.

That’s less than X’s support of 1,000 members, but it’s a start. The company says it may increase this limit in the future.

The company indicated that group chat creators can manage their conversations however they want and can determine who is allowed to participate. They can create an invitation link that can be shared across the web, including Bluesky posts where it displays as an embed card.

Meanwhile, chat participants can control who they’re allowed to invite to chats — everyone, just people they follow, or no one. The default will be either “Only people you follow,” unless users select a different option for direct messages.

Media sharing in group chats is not supported yet, because it would require additional security and moderation systems, Plosky says.

In a recent series of posts from Bluesky’s head of product, Alex Benzer, he talked about how Bluesky is working to make its app more community-focused in the coming days.

“Today, Bluesky is one big space. Communities will be smaller spaces within it where you can delve deeper and hang out with people who care about the same things,” he wrote. Binzer also explained that the goal was to build more community features on top of the underlying protocol (AT Proto) with support from the broader developer ecosystem.

“In Bluesky, you will be able to create communities, join them, post in them, and get updates,” Binzer added.

The timing is especially notable considering that X announced in April that it would be shutting down its Communities feature due to low usage and too much spam. Bluesky seems to be trying to pick up where X left off by catering to those who want more control and ownership over their online community experience.

For example, Binzer noted that communities on Bluesky will get their own handle that can be used as a URL, such as Community-name.bsky.social or Community-name.bsky.space. It will also be possible to set it as either public, invite-only, or private, similar to the options available in Facebook or Reddit groups.

With Communities, Bluesky is ultimately betting that people are looking for an exit from platforms run by big tech players, and can be tempted to explore more open technologies where they feel they have more control over the experience (and won’t have their accounts disabled by rogue AI surveillance systems!).

Besides group chats, the updated version of Bluesky also introduces a new way to share profiles via a custom QR code, similar to other social apps.