Bluesky launches group chats, as company shifts focus to community features

bluesky’s latest feature is group chats, arriving amid a shift in focus on building features for smaller communities.

The feature, which is arriving in the latest version of the social app (v1.124), is one of the first to deliver on Bluesky’s plan to focus more on communities, rather than trying to be a social network where people post solely to reach a wider public audience. That’s a notable shift in strategy, and one that arrives as Bluesky’s overall growth has slowed. Today, the network reaches some 44.8 million registered users, compared with X’s 600 million monthly active users. If Bluesky can’t reach the scale of competitors like X or Meta’s Threads, it may need to find new ways to make its app attractive to would-be users, including by offering different forms of social connection. The startup added support for messaging in 2024, but it only more recently began offering encrypted chats, and only by integrating the third-party messaging service Germ. Now, Bluesky is offering support for group chats of up to 50 people, its announcement states. That’s smaller than X’s support for 1,000 members, but it’s a start. And the company says it may increase this limit in the future. Group chat creators can manage their chats however they like and can decide who is allowed to participate, the company noted. They can generate an invite link that can be shared across the web, including in Bluesky posts where it’s displayed as an embedded card. Chat participants, meanwhile, can control who’s allowed to invite them to chats — everyone, only people they follow, or no one. The default setting will be “only people you follow,” unless users select a different choice for DMs.