There's more good news for those looking to exit Meta's social app ecosystem in favor of more open alternatives: An independent developer is working on a photo-sharing app called Flashes for Bluesky. The upcoming app is powered by the AT protocol, the same technology that powers Bluesky, and is built using code from the developer's earlier Bluesky client, Skeets.

Flashes launches to capitalize on growing consumer demand for an alternative to Big Tech's social media monopoly. This trend has led to the adoption of open source, decentralized applications such as Mastodon and Bluesky, including the recently launched Pixelfed mobile application built on the Mastodon ActivityPub protocol. This also partly prompted TikTok users to switch to the Chinese app RedNote before the US TikTok ban - that is, US users said they would rather use the foreign rival's app than return to Meta at this time.

Flashes itself is based on Berlin-based developer Sebastian Vogelsang's earlier app Skeets, which was his first attempt to create a consumer-facing app for the growing social network Bluesky, which currently has 27.5 million users.

Bluesky offers its own official mobile client, while Skeets stands out by focusing on the needs of iPad users and customizing accessibility features for blind and low-vision users, as this is one of Vogelsang's areas of expertise.

Late last year, Vogelsang also realized that it would be possible to use the same code base to build apps that catered to Bluesky users who were more interested in visual content like photos and videos. Since Bluesky already supports this type of media, it's a matter of reconfiguring the Skeets app so that its design and user interface look more similar to other photo-sharing apps, such as Meta's Instagram.

“I came up with the idea of ​​having a basic social graph and then letting different applications choose whatever they want to display from that graph,” Vogelsang told TechCrunch. “I find that very interesting because before we had these separate networks.”

He said Flashes could help attract new potential Bluesky users who haven't joined the social network yet because they've never considered themselves "Twitter people."

"This could give them an entry point into the network, into the entire protocol," Vogelsang said.

However, the developers stress that Flashes is not an Instagram clone and won't offer all the same features.

Like Bluesky, Flashes will support photo posts of up to four images and videos of up to one minute at launch. Users who post on Flashes will also have their posts displayed on Bluesky, and comments on those posts will be fed back into the application as if it were just another Bluesky client. It will also support Bluesky's direct messages.

To achieve this, Flashes simply filters Bluesky's existing timeline for posts that include photo and video posts. (In the future, Vogelsang also plans to add metadata to posts in Flashes, so Bluesky users will have a way to prevent their feeds on the main Bluesky app from being flooded with photo posts, if that becomes an issue.)

Flashes doesn't take long to build because it reuses Skeets' existing code. The app will also enable marketing to Skeets' existing user base, who have downloaded the app approximately 30,500 times to date.

Vogelsang said he's now working to integrate subscription-based features in both apps so users don't have to pay twice for premium features like Skeets' bookmarks, drafts, mute, rich push notifications and other features unique to Flashes. (We should note that both apps are free to use, no subscription required.)

Later, Vogelsang said he also wanted to launch a video-only app called Blue Screen.

The developer expects to be able to launch Flashes to the public within a few weeks, with a TestFlight beta available before then. Interested users can follow Flashes’ account on Bluesky for more updates.