Bluesky is building a communities feature that will let users create and join topic-specific groups within the decentralized social network, the company’s head of product Alex Benzer announced Thursday. The move positions Bluesky to compete with Reddit and Facebook Groups, and arrives as X shuts down its own communities feature and Meta’s Threads begins testing a similar one.
Communities will give Bluesky a structure that its current all-in-one feed cannot provide. Benzer described them as smaller spaces where users can “go deeper and hang out with people who care about the same stuff.” The feature is set to launch sometime this year, built on the AT Protocol, which Bluesky calls the “Atmosphere.”
How Communities Will Work
Each community gets a handle that doubles as a URL, according to Benzer. Visiting that URL lands on a custom homepage for the group. “Builders can also host a completely custom experience there instead,” he said in a thread on Bluesky.
Communities operate at three privacy levels: public, invite-only, and private. Each has its own feed, separate from the main timeline. “On Bluesky, you’ll be able to create communities, join them, post in them, and get updates,” Benzer wrote. “The core features on Bluesky stay simple. The magic comes from communities also existing on the open web. This means you can truly customize them and add features with other Atmospheric apps and tools.”
The decentralized architecture means communities are not locked inside Bluesky’s app. Because they are built on the AT Protocol, a community’s data lives on the open web, and third-party developers can build custom tools and interfaces for them.
The Timing Is Strategic
Bluesky’s community push comes as the social media landscape shifts around it. In April, X announced it would shut down its own communities feature entirely. Meta’s Threads, meanwhile, is currently testing a communities feature of its own, putting it in direct competition with Bluesky for the same user need: structured group conversations outside the main algorithmic feed.
The announcement follows comments from Bluesky COO Rose Wang last week that the company wanted to move away from being a “public square” and was “very inspired by companies like Reddit.” Communities represent the most concrete product expression of that strategy so far.
For Bluesky, which has grown rapidly since its public launch in 2024 but still operates a relatively simple feature set compared to established platforms, communities offer a way to increase user engagement and time spent on the network without complicating the core microblogging experience. The feature is opt-in: users who want structured groups get them; users who just want to scroll their timeline are unaffected.
The move also plays to Bluesky’s architectural strengths. A closed platform building communities would have to build moderation tools, group management, and discovery features from scratch inside a walled garden. Bluesky’s AT Protocol approach means communities can be built, hosted, and customized by anyone, with the protocol handling the underlying data layer.
X’s decision to shut down its communities suggests the feature is hard to get right. Whether Bluesky succeeds where its larger rival gave up will depend on how well it solves moderation at group scale, discovery of relevant communities, and the network effects that make Reddit’s subreddit ecosystem sticky. Benzer’s thread offered no timeline beyond “this year,” and the company has not announced a beta or early access program.