Bluesky Now Has Its Own Version of TikTok

Bluesky: Exploration of multi-functional social media client

Bluesky's goal is to be a versatile social media platform. It offers a core experience similar to X or Threads, but not limited to text posts. Soon, users will be able to use applications such as Flashes to build Bluesky into an Instagram-style platform. Before this, users could already use the Bluescreen app to transform Bluesky into a TikTok-style experience. While Bluesky doesn't have these features themselves, these client applications demonstrate a unique model for social media clients - converting one platform completely into another.

Bluescreen: Bluesky's TikTok client

Bluescreen is a Bluesky client whose core function is: to identify videos in Bluesky information flow and present them to users with a TikTok-style infinite scrolling interface. Users won't see text posts or static images, just as Bluesky provides a "video-only" stream of information. Since Bluesky itself does not have this function, Bluescreen came into being.

This is a cool idea and the philosophy behind the Flashes app. Instead of extracting videos from Bluesky's stream, Flashes extracts images, turning Bluesky into an Instagram alternative. Both applications were developed by Sebastian Vogelsang, using the same strategy to achieve similar results.

Vogelsang first released the Flashes announcement, but the video application Bluescreen was released before the image application. While waiting for the Bluesky version of Instagram to appear, we might as well experience the Bluesky version of TikTok first.

Watch Bluesky videos using Bluescreen

Bluescreen's functionality is as advertised, although there is still room for improvement. Once connected to your Bluesky account, users will see a video—just like opening TikTok, Instagram Reels, or YouTube Shorts. Like these services, Bluescreen also provides a variety of ways to interact with videos: click the Love button to like it without leaving the video stream; click the Comment button, Bluescreen will jump to another window to display comments; click the Double Arrow button to forward the video ; Click the three dot icon to access other control options such as translation, sharing, and reporting; there is also a global mute button in the lower right corner.

Click on the video itself and the standard iOS video control menu will be called up. Here, users can play, pause, fast forward, rewind, use AirPlay, or control the video volume (if they do not want to use the iPhone's global volume settings). Speaking of volume, this is my only major criticism of Bluescreen at the moment: every video is muted by default, even if the mute button shows that the volume should be turned on. Users need to click the mute button twice to play the video: mute the first time, unmute the second time. This is necessary for each video. Strangely, this only occurs when viewed through the phone speakers: Connecting to Bluetooth headsets, the video sound is normal. I think this is a bug that Vogelsang will fix in due time.

At the top of the page, the user can select the information flow to extract the video. The App Store page shows that thousands of information flows can be selected, but if you feel too much, you can choose videos in the main information flow, such as the "Follow" or "Discover" tag, or any fixed information flow. For example, select the astronomical information flow I follow and you can see a video dedicated to this topic. (This also made me realize that I might need to remove some streams of lower content quality.) Users can also use the search icon in the upper right corner to search for anything they want, as well as look for hot topics. If you have used social media platforms before, you will be familiar with this.

In theory, this would be a great experience. If you fully organize your Bluesky information flow, you can get various filtering results for all short videos on the platform. It's still an early concept, so the UI isn't as smooth or refined as mature video apps, but I can totally see its potential.

Upload videos through Bluescreen

But this is more than just a passive experience: users can use Bluescreen to upload videos to Bluesky. Click " " at the bottom of the screen to select the videos in the library to publish to Bluesky via Bluescreen. In the process, users can access simple editing tools, add video titles, choose who can reply to posts, and the post language before posting. Remember: you are not posting on Bluescreen; While it looks like it's released on a new platform, it's really just posting the video to your existing Bluesky account.

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