Flashes, an Instagram alternative built on top of the Bluesky social network, is opening the door to beta testers. Announced a few weeks ago, the app offers people a way to leave the social networking empire of meta, offering more open alternatives, and is interested in using Bluesky's official app that works like X. Attract new users that didn't exist.
Built by Berlin-based developer Sebastian Vogelsang, Flashes runs on the same underlying protocol that enhances the AT protocol (or Atproto for short). As a Bluesky client, we support posting photos of up to 4 images and up to 1 minute of video. Users who post on Flash will also see posts on BlueSky, and comments about those posts will also be shown in Flash.
Flashes BlueSky photo and video post timeline for it to work. Users can also toggle their own blue ski feeds within the flash to see different views of the social network.
As Vogelsang explained in January, he may not have seen Flashes as a “Twitter guy” who draws in newcomers, draws them into Bluesky.
“This could give you an entry point to the network, an entry point to the entire protocol,” he said.
Flashes was able to launch the beta quickly thanks to his ability to reuse code from his previous app skeet, a Bluesky client with 30,000 users north. By building on top of Bluesky, Flash also benefits from the growth reach of social networking startups. Last week, Bluesky hit a milestone with 30 million users and 1 billion posts. Today, there are nearly 31 million users, according to data tracked through Bluesky's developer API.
With both Flashes and Skeets, Vogelsang aims to test features like push notifications, support for multiple accounts, bookmarks, user notifications, and more. He will later add more image editing options, story support and, in some cases, custom profile pages.
In time, Vogelsang aims to integrate subscription features into all apps, including how to ensure that users don't have to pay twice to switch between different clients.
Today, that client list also includes BlueScreen. This is one of many apps that build experiences like Bluesky's Tiktok. Like Flash, BlueScreen is built on Bluesky for the time being, but Vogelsang explores the idea of expanding both to work more directly with Atproto.
While Flashes Beta, running on Apple's TestFlight platform, currently has technical issues, Vogelsang says Apple's engineering team is investigating the issue and working on fixing it. This beta has seen around 3,500 sign-ups within the first hour, indicating the demand for healthy consumers. The beta sign-up form is also available live.
It's worth noting that it's not just an app that's thinking about building an Instagram alternative with Open Protocol. Another Bluesky Photos client, Pinksky, is already up and running, and Pixelfed recently launched a mobile app that runs on the ActivityPub protocol used by Mastodon.
