The announcement of Communities followed a series of Bluesky posts from Benzer, who indicated that Communities would be coming to Bluesky sometime this year.
Communities will come in three privacy flavors: public, invite-only, and private. Any BlueSky community “gets a handle that doubles as a URL,” and that URL will lead to “a custom homepage for the community,” Benzer writes. I’m picking up a distinctly subreddit-like vibe from all of these features so far. However, Benzer says community creators can choose to create “completely custom experiences instead.”
It’s worth noting that Twitter launched a community feature in 2021, and it was revamped and promoted in 2024, well after Elon Musk’s acquisition. But that facility never became operational and was closed last month.
Communities may not perform much better on Bluesky, but based on its value, I believe Bluesky is a place where the community feature can be unusually beneficial. As I’ve written in the past, in its current form, account search on Bluesky suffers from a tendency to surface very similar posts that attract a large cross section of Bluesky users. This is a way to avoid that problem.
Currently, the Discover feed on Bluesky is notorious for its dullness, but activity in communities you’ve joined will show up as posts in your Discover feed. Not only does this stand to drastically improve the Discover feed, it also means communities can feel less like a closed room, and more like a beautiful and intuitive way to meet users you’re likely to find interesting. Alternatively, users can also “turn on activity notifications and receive updates from communities you’ve joined,” Benzer writes.
If you think of Bluesky as a Twitter clone that is mostly used as a social media haven for people who dislike X boss Elon Musk, and who want to be surrounded by leftists, progressives, liberals, or even centrists—Any But right-wingers—you would be right. It is that, and in a way that can be troubling even if it is politically agreeable. But it’s also an offbeat social media platform with a lot more than just politics going on, and its overlords have a penchant for bizarrely ambitious and sometimes ill-advised R&D.
Bluesky has a relatively small but dedicated developer community, and it is federated, meaning it is decentralized, and in theory, your Bluesky identity and posts are transferable to other social networks. Bluesky’s decentralized protocol, the AT Protocol, is considered a standard for “fediverse” platforms, and even has its own developer conference called Atmosphere – which is also the term for the broader AT Protocol-related developer community.
This is relevant to this new community facility. Benzer notes that Bluesky is “building in the open with this on-prem protocol and dev ecosystem.” The community feature, then, is not just a new feature for Bluesky, but “a new structure for everyone building in the environment.”
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