X’s competitor Bluesky on Tuesday announced a new product roadmap for the coming months. In the announcement, the social media network shared that it is bringing new “long-request features” to the platform.
“Over the next few months, we’ll be putting more of our energy into the application. This includes a lot of “Quality of Life” improvements and some long-requested features.” Bluesky said in a blog post.
Some of the new features to be added to the social network soon include DMs, Videos, and Improved Custom Feeds, among others. While Bluesky didn’t give the exact date for users to expect these updates, the decentralized social app shared that these features will be available in the next few months.
Bluesky acknowledges that while all posts have been public so far, “there’s a world of interactions that are opened up when users can directly message each other.” The social network said that they are now working on a DM feature that will be “off protocol” — the protocol that Bluesky uses —in the beginning, so they can develop “iteratively”, and promises to use what they learn to land protocol-driven DMs later. Bluesky shared that the first version of their DM feature will be one-to-one so users can restrict who can contact them privately with the option to leave them open, followed users only, or disabled.
Regarding the videos feature, whose absence on the platform can be easily felt, the company says that the initial version of video integration on Bluesky will be 90-second clips that users can share on their posts.
Bluesky is also exploring several ideas for Custom Feeds, including a new trending feeds view, in-app feed creation, better feed discovery, the ability to submit posts to feeds, curate the submissions and manually moderate them, and a way to arrange feeds on the home screen better. Additionally, the social network will also be getting OAuth in hopes that users can one day “Log In with Bluesky” to different services that are related to the social platform.
Notably backed by Twitter co-founder and former CEO Jack Dorsey, Bluesky opened to the public in February this year and has since grown from 40,000 to 5.6 million users in one year. However, Dorsey recently confirmed that he was no longer on Bluesky’s board in response to an X user who asked “you still on the bsky board,” and Dorsey said only, “no.”
