Bluesky will soon have a feature called communities, which will allow users to post narrowly tailored content intended to be seen by other receptive users in a given niche. Bluesky Head of Product Alex Benzer admits the idea is a little like subreddits. The announcement of communities came from a series of Bluesky posts from Benzer, who indicated that communities would come to Bluesky at some point this year. Communities will come in three privacy flavors: public, invite-only, and private. Any given 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 sebreddit-like vibe from all of these attributes so far. Benzer adds, however, that community creators can choose to build a “completely custom experience there instead.”
It’s worth noting that Twitter rolled out a communities feature in 2021, and it was revamped and promoted in 2024, well after Elon Musk’s takeover. But that feature never caught on, and was shut down just last month. Communities may not fare much better on Bluesky, but for what it’s worth, I believe Bluesky is a place where a communities feature could be unusually beneficial. As I’ve written in the past, in its current form, account discovery on Bluesky is plagued by a tendency to surface very similar posts that appeal to a meh cross section of Bluesky users. This is one way to bypass that problem.
