Flashes App for Bluesky, a Layperson's Overview for Crafters, Designers and Other Small Businesses.
I've been using the Beta version of Flashes for a couple of weeks and I want to try and explain the way it works for other business owners like me who aren't too techy. I may misunderstand some of the details, i'm going for a basic understanding here but any edits from Blueskyers and Flashes Beta testers welcome.
Firstly, Bluesky itself is primarily a Twitter alternative built differently from most other social media platforms. Its decentralised, meaning users can create add ons, features, 3rd party apps and personalised feeds rather than the app creator deciding who sees what. We don't really need to know too much about the how but this is great news.
For those of us that never really used twitter (that's me), the main Bluesky platform is going to seem fast paced with long comment threads and a lot of link sharing and reposting.
Importantly, there's no algorithms and advertising forced upon you, you control what you look at and can choose feeds chronologically, by interest, by location, following etc. There are something like 50,000 themes feeds that users have already set up. If you follow a feed its there at the top of your home page to select. You can catch up with your special interest in one scroll session and then scroll local posts and then a feed of accounts you follow.
Flashes is going to be a 3rd party "photo first' app that looks like early Instagram and you can use with your existing Bluesky handle (there are alternative handles, like you're own server, but that's not relevant to most of us). In the first few days it showed content from Bluesky (as it was starting from nothing) and then moved to showing any photo first content from Flashes and other 3rd party photo first apps, i assume including Pinksky. Within the app again, you choose your own feeds and what kind of posts appear in your grid - you probably don't want everything you post on Bluesky showing with your images. Beta users informed the developers of any bugs and issues they came across on their IOS version and device (it is IOS only for now) and we watched all these get ironed out in several updates. It's been great to watch this and be part of the community.
So how can it work for us, the people who built businesses on Instagram?
Imagine using Instagram to post your image based updates, look at the work of your peers and other interests without unwanted algorithmic interjections and then, if you want to check on some news hop over to Twitter where you use the same handle and all of your contacts and followers are there.
You can post up to 4 photos currently and include links in the caption i.e. post an image of a new piece of work and in the description you can link straight to it on your web shop. No more "link in bio" or "on the website now"! Personally I don't like to be too salesy on social media but it'd definitely be useful sometimes.
You might be worried which non Meta app to invest your time in. Well, back to the decentralised nature of Bluesky. Flashes is one app that iPhone users can use and posts can be visible to all Bluesky users, some of who might be using Pinksky, which is a current Android photo first app. And you should be able to see their photo posts and interact with them. Imagine a kind of hub where you are based on Instagram but you can see and interact with posts from Flickr and Vimeo.
There's around 31 million Bluesky users and several thousand testing Flashes, which is now available from Apple App Store as a pre order. It's a very liberal place and anyone doing something a bit alternative should find their people. Sure, there's some catching up to do and we've a lot of local and themed community to build but it promises to be a viable alternative to the corporate control we've been stuck with for so long.