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More good news for those looking to exit Meta’s social app ecosystem in favor of a more open alternative: An independent developer is building a photo-sharing app for Bluesky called Lamps. The soon-to-be-launched app is powered by the same technology that powers Bluesky, the AT Protocol, and was built using code from the previous developer’s Bluesky client, Skeets.
At launch, Flashes could tap into growing consumer demand for alternatives to Big Tech’s social media monopoly. This trend has led to the adoption of open source, decentralized applications such as Mastodon and Bluesky, among others, including the recently launched Pixelfed mobile appsbuilt on Mastodon’s ActivityPub protocol. It is also, in part, what fuels the change of TikTok users to the Chinese app RedNote before US TikTok ban – that is, US users report that they would rather use a foreign opponent’s app than return to Meta at this point.
Flashes itself is based on Berlin developer Sebastian Vogelsang’s previous app, Skeets, his first foray into creating consumer apps for the growing social network, Bluesky, which he now tops. 27.5 million users.
While Bluesky offers its own official mobile client, Skeets differentiates itself by focusing on the needs of iPad users, as well as custom accessibility features for blind and low vision users, as it is one of Vogelsang’s skills.
Late last year, Vogelsang also realized that there was potential to build apps using this same codebase that would make Bluesky users more interested in visual content, such as photos and videos. Because Bluesky already supports this type of media, it was just a matter of reconfiguring the Skeets app so that its design and user interface would look more similar to other photo-sharing apps, such as Meta’s Instagram.
“I thought about the idea of having a basic social graph and then just having different apps choose from that graph what they want to see,” Vogelsang told TechCrunch. “I found it very intriguing, because before we had these separate networks.”
He says Flashes could help attract new potential Bluesky users who haven’t yet joined the social network because they’ve never seen themselves as a “Twitter person.”
“This can provide an entry point into the network, throughout the protocol,” Vogelsang said.
However, the developer stresses that Flashes is not intended to be an Instagram clone, nor does it offer all the same features.
At launch, Flashes will support photo posts of up to four images and videos of up to 1 minute, just like Bluesky. Users who post to Flashes will also have their posts appear on Bluesky and comments on those posts will also feed back into the app as if they were just another Bluesky customer. It also supports Bluesky direct messages.
To make this work, Flashes only filters Bluesky’s existing timeline for posts with photos and videos. (In the future, Vogelsang also plans to add metadata to Flashes posts so that Bluesky users have a way to keep their feeds on the main Bluesky app from being flooded with photo posts if this becomes a problem.)
Flashes didn’t take too long to build because I was able to reuse Skeets’ existing code. The app will also be able to market to Skeets’ existing user base, who have now downloaded the app approximately 30,500 times to date.
Vogelsang says he’s now working to integrate subscription-based features from his apps so users don’t have to pay twice for premium features like Skeets bookmarks, drafts, muting, rich push notifications, and others specific to Flashes. (Both apps are free to use without a subscription, we should note.)
Next, Vogelsang says he also wants to launch a video-only app, called Blue Screen.
The developer expects to be able to launch Flashes to the public in a matter of weeks with a TestFlight beta arriving before that. Interested users can follow Flashes account on Bluesky for more updates.
