Bluesky launches group chats
Platform shifts from public posting toward community spaces on AT Proto, media sharing delayed until moderation systems catch up
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ScreenshotImage Credits:Bluesky
Image Credits:Bluesky
Image Credits:Bluesky
Image Credits:Bluesky
Image Credits:Bluesky
Image Credits:Bluesky
Sarah Perez
techcrunch.com
Bluesky has added group chats in an update to its app, a feature it says is part of a broader shift toward building communities rather than relying solely on public posting. TechCrunch reports the change arrives as Bluesky tries to compete with X, which has rolled out its own chat-focused product, while operating at a very different scale: Bluesky has about 44.8 million registered users, compared with roughly 600 million monthly active users on X.
The new group chats support up to 50 people. Users can control who can invite them—everyone, only accounts they follow, or no one—and the default is limited to people a user follows. Chat creators can manage participation permissions and generate invite links that can be shared across the web, including as embedded cards inside Bluesky posts.
Bluesky already introduced messaging in 2024 and later added encrypted chats via an integration with a third-party service called Germ. The company is now betting that smaller spaces will keep people engaged and reduce the downside of a single, high-stakes public feed where a mistaken enforcement action can wipe out years of contacts. TechCrunch notes that Bluesky has explicitly framed community features as a way to give users more control and ownership over their online groups.
The platform is also designing the feature so it can travel beyond Bluesky itself. According to TechCrunch, the company plans to build community tools on its underlying AT Proto, with the expectation that other developers in the ecosystem will build on the same foundations. Communities are expected to get their own handles that double as URLs, and can be public, invite-only, or private—privacy choices that mirror familiar patterns from Facebook Groups and Reddit.
Safety and moderation constraints are already shaping the product. Media sharing is not yet supported in group chats, with Bluesky saying it needs additional safety and moderation systems before allowing it. That is a reminder that private spaces do not eliminate moderation costs; they often concentrate them, because abuse reports arrive with fewer public signals and higher expectations of confidentiality.
Bluesky’s head of product, Alex Benzer, has described the app today as “one big space” and said the goal is to create smaller community spaces. For now, the most concrete change is simple: a group chat on Bluesky tops out at 50 members, and it ships without the ability to share photos or videos.