Summary
- Bluesky is introducing a “Trending Videos” feature that looks a lot like TikTok.
- You can watch vertical videos in fullscreen and swipe through an infinite feed.
- Blueksy’s flexibility means you can create a feed of just videos if you want.
Bluesky has introduced its own take on a TikTok-esque video of scrolling videos it calls “Trending Videos,” the company announced via Bluesky post. The addition seems like an attempt to recapture some of the magic of TikTok, even though the app’s ban in the US ended up being a lot shorter than expected.
If you head to the search tab in the official Bluesky app, you can hop into the feed yourself by picking a vertical video from the Trending Video section. The video will load in fullscreen, and you can comment, favorite, and reshare it, just like any other post on Bluesky. Just like TikTok, swiping up or down will take you to the next video or the one you were previously watching. In Bluesky’s thread announcing the new feature, the company says you can create your own custom feed of only videos if you want, too.
Bluesky
A microblogging social networking platform that functions similar to X, but with decentralized technological underpinnings.
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Bluesky was introduced as an alternative to X, and originally started as a project at Twitter before the latter was purchased and rebranded by Elon Musk. Bluesky is built on the AT Protocol, a decentralized network for building social apps, which means that the app should be just as capable at handling videos as it can photos and text. And more importantly, if you don’t like how Bluesky is approaching video features, because the app is decentralized, your information is portable, and you can pick up your followers and posts and head to another app (or server) that does things the way you like.
Since TikTok was only briefly banned before coming back online and recently recieved a 75-day extension to find a new buyer by President Trump, Bluesky’s new feature isn’t making quite the same splash as it could have.
It’ll take a lot more scrolling and posting to see if Trending Videos on Bluesky are sticky in the same way TikTok and its prized recommendation algorithm are. And it’s possible TikTok might not find a buyer, and it will be a good thing that all of these alternatives exist.
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