Bluesky, the upstart social media platform that aims to take on X, finally has its own Instagram rival. Named Flashes, the app was first introduced in January and aims to recapture the core photo-sharing experience of Instagram in its early days. Now, it’s live on the App Store.
The brainchild of Sebastian Vogelsang, an independent developer, the Flashes app is built atop the same AT Protocol as Bluesky. Vogelsang also created Skeets, a third-party Bluesky client built specifically for iPhone, iPads, and macOS.
The biggest benefit of AT Protocol is that it’s an open ecosystem without any platform lock-in strategy. It allows decentralized social networking, which means what you post on Flashes can also be taken over seamlessly to another platform built atop the same protocol.
This is more or less the same premise as Fediverse, which has been built atop another protocol called ActivityPub. Meta has already enabled it for Threads, which means you can see and reply to content from other social platforms, such as Mastodon, appearing on Threads.
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Flashes lets users share up to 4 pictures in a post, or videos of up to a minute in length. It has an optional portfolio mode that lets users curate what they want to appear on the home page of their social profile.
Talking about their profile, users can choose to show their media, likes, feeds, and the lists they’ve curated. There’s also an option to save a handful of feeds for revisiting later on. At the top are four tabs, which can be customized.
The most alluring part of the app is the feed system, which lets you follow the pages of your choices, but without any algorithmic role, unlike Instagram.
That means you only see content you want to interact with, instead of an algorithm recommending content based on your activity history and what you might like. Research says Instagram’s feed can lead to addictive usage patterns, because it pushes an endless barrage of such content to keep users hooked.
There are currently over 50,000 feeds to pick from, with the ability to pin whichever feeds users like. Flashes also offers a bunch of creative filters, as well, alongside the ability to download RAW photos from a profile.
Unsurprisingly, all content that is shared on Flashes is natively compatible with Bluesky. That means what you post on Flashes can access the Bluesky user base, giving your content a much bigger reach among roughly 30 million users.