Product Roadmap

In the past year, Bluesky has grown from 40K users to 5.6M users. We’ve made it possible to create custom algorithms, introduced community-driven moderation, and opened up federation. This has laid the foundation for a social protocol that can exist long after Bluesky the app does.

What’s coming next? 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. The biggest changes will be:

• DMs
• Video
• Improved Custom Feeds
• Improved anti-harassment features
• OAuth

We’re very excited to deliver these features you’ve been asking for. We don’t have exact timelines, but you can expect to see all of these in the next few months.

DMs (direct messages)

Historically, all bluesky posts have been public. But there’s a world of interactions that are opened up when users can directly message each other. Making personal connections, finding job opportunities, organizing events, workshopping posts – there’s a lot of reasons to slide into the DMs.

We’re currently working on a DM service that will integrate into the Bluesky app. This service will be “off protocol” at first so we can develop iteratively. We’ll use what we learn to land protocol-driven DMs in the future. For an update on what’s next for the protocol, see our protocol roadmap.

The v1 of DMs will be one-to-one. You’ll be able to restrict who can DM you (open, followed users only, and disabled). If you’ve used DMs on other social networks, it should feel familiar.

Video

Our devs keep getting told about cute animal videos which our users can’t share. The guilt is terrible.

We’re still finalizing the details, but it’s looking like the v1 of video integration on Bluesky will be 90-second clips that you can share on your posts.

Improved Custom Feeds

“Custom Feeds” are one of the best features of Bluesky, allowing users to completely customize their timeline, but they’re still pretty tough to work with. Our community has done an incredible job filling in the gaps, but we want to finally invest some more energy into making Feeds better.

Here’s the list of ideas in the works:

• In-app feed creation.
• The ability to submit posts to feeds, curate the submissions, and manually moderate what’s included.
• Better feed discovery, and a way to see trending feeds.
• New feedback mechanisms which the algorithmic feeds can request, such as “show more” and “show less” buttons, and a way to track which posts have been seen to stop duplicates from showing so often.
• The ability to move “Following” out of the leftmost tab of your homepage.
• Feed “following” to drive superfeeds which show what’s happening in each of your communities.
• Better caching strategies to improve performance.

Algorithmic choice has been a key goal of Bluesky from the start, and we can’t wait to move Custom Feeds forward. It’s incredible how much our community has done with them already, and we think a little extra love will enable you to go even further.

What you see on social media is mostly determined by algorithms, and giving you the power to control your algorithms like this is one of the most important things we do.

Improved Anti-harassment Features

Public social networks unfortunately all have to deal with the problem of users who want to troll, harass, and just make other people’s lives miserable. Over the past year, we’ve implemented tooling like reply controls for threads, user lists, and community-driven moderation through labeling, but there is still more work to be done.

In the months to come, we’ll be doing another pass over moderation tooling, with a focus on anti-harassment mechanisms. We’ll be publishing more on this soon.

OAuth

You know those “Log in with Facebook” or “Log in with Google” buttons you see in apps? What if there was a “Log in with Bluesky” button? We think there should be! OAuth is the internet standard that makes that possible, and we’re bringing it to Bluesky and atproto.

OAuth is especially important for third-party clients – it’ll make signing in easier and safer for users. You never share your password with other clients, and “App Passwords” will no longer be required.

Once OAuth lands, we’ll expand on our 2FA model to enable more factors than email (which landed last week).

You can read about our technical design here.

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