Bluesky Now Has Its Own Version of TikTok

Bluesky is setting itself up to be a social media jack of all trades. There's the main experience, of course, which replaces something like X or Threads. But it's not all about the text posts: Soon, you'll be able to use an app like Flashes to transform Bluesky into a kind of Instagram. Before that drops, however, you can use a different app to turn Bluesky into TikTok. It's not quite there yet, but it's a fascinating look into a unique kind of social media client—an app that turns one platform into something else entirely.

Introducing Bluescreen for Bluesky

Bluescreen is a Bluesky client with one singular purpose: It identifies the videos from your Bluesky feed and delivers them to you in a TikTok-style endless scrolling interface. You don't interact with text-based posts, nor do you see still images. It's as if Bluesky offered a "video only" feed. But, since they don't, Bluescreen exists.

It's a cool idea, and it's also the idea behind Flashes. Instead of isolating the videos in your Bluesky feed, Flashes isolates the images, which lets you turn Bluesky into an Instagram alternative. If you're surprised to hear two different Bluesky clients using the same strategy to achieve two similar outcomes, that's because they're both developed by the same person: Sebastian Vogelsang.

Vogelsang announced Flashes before Bluescreen, but released the video app ahead of the photo app. While we wait for the Instagram of Bluesky to get here, we can try out the TikTok of Bluesky instead.

Using Bluescreen to watch videos on Bluesky

Credit: Lifehacker

In execution, Bluescreen does it what's it's supposed to, though there is definitely some room to grow. Once you connect your Bluesky account to the client, you'll be presented with a video—just as you are when opening an app like TikTok, or when using Instagram Reels or YouTube Shorts. As with these services, there are multiple options to interact with the video: Tapping the heart button gives the video a like, without having to leave the video feed itself. If you tap on the comment button, however, Bluescreen leaves the video feed, and shows you the comments in a different window. You can tap the button with the two arrows to repost the video, and the three dots icon to access additional controls, like Translate, Share, and Report. There's also a general mute button available in the bottom right corner.

If you tap the video itself, you'll pull up the standard iOS video control menu. From here, you can play and pause, rewind or jump ahead, AirPlay, or control the volume of the video, if you'd rather not mess with your iPhone's general volume setting. Speaking of volume, that is my one main criticism of Bluescreen as it exists right now: Each video is muted by default, even though the mute button says the volume should be on. You have to tap this mute button twice; once to mute the video, then again to unmute it, before it starts playing. You need to do this for each video you swipe through. Oddly, this is only a problem when watching through your phone's speakers: Connect a pair of Bluetooth headphones, and the videos sound off as they should. I imagine this is a bug that Vogelsang will work out in due time.

At the top of the page, you can choose which feed to pull videos from. The App Store page says you can choose from thousands of feeds, but if that sounds overwhelming, you can stick with video from your main feeds, such as the Following or Discover tabs, or any of your pinned feeds. It's neat to choose the Astronomy feed I follow, for example, and see videos specifically about this topic. (It also shows me I might need to drop some of my pinned feeds, due to low-quality content.) You can also use the search icon in the top right to search for whatever content you like, in addition to finding trending topics. Again, if you've used a social media platform before, you'll be familiar with this.

In theory, this could be an awesome experience. If you curate your Bluesky feeds well enough, you could have a varied filter of all short-form videos posted to the platform. It's still an early concept, so the UI isn't quite as fluid or polished as established video apps, but I can totally see the potential here.

Uploading your own videos via Bluescreen

This isn't just a passive experience, however: You can use Bluescreen to upload videos to Bluesky. If you hit the (+) on the bottom of the screen, you can choose a video from your library to post on Bluesky via Bluescreen. You can access light editing tools along the way, add a caption for your video, choose who can reply to the post, and the language of the post before publishing. Remember: You're not posting on Bluescreen; rather, Bluesky. While it'll look like you're posting on a new platform, all you're really doing is posting a video to your existing Bluesky account.

Credit: Lifehacker

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