Bluesky posts are finally open to the public

According to a blog post from Bluesky CEO Jay Graber, Bluesky remains an invite-only decentralized Twitter alternative, but now, you don't need to have an account and log in to be able to view posts on the platform. Now, one can easily view posts from both the web and the BlueSky app – like this one.

If you want to prevent people who aren't logged in from seeing your posts, you can "Discourage" it by clicking the toggle in Settings. But Bluesky says "other apps may not honor this request" and the toggle doesn't make your account private.

"BlueSky is an open and public network," BlueSky says in a note below the toggle. "This setting limits the visibility of your content only on the BlueSky app and website, and other apps may not respect this setting." In the blog post, Graber said that "posts on Bluesky have always been public through developer tooling and other apps."

BlueSky also has a new logo: a butterfly. Previously, the app's logo was a blue sky with clouds, but "early on, we noticed that people were using the butterfly emoji 🦋 to indicate their BlueSky handle," Graber says in the blog post. "The butterfly speaks to our mission to transform social media into something new."

I think the butterfly is a big improvement from the usual blue sky. And, as my colleague Parker Ortolani observed, the app has a fun animation that will look familiar to Twitter fans. (I mean Twitter, not X.)

With the growing momentum behind ActivityPub – including public support of meta threads – I'm concerned that Bluesky, which is based on its own AT protocol, may be left behind. But every time I visit my Bluesky account, it seems like people are having a lot of fun – the platform is also growing rapidly – so hopefully the protocols can co-exist and usher in a diverse future. can do. Can do.

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