A week after Bluesky's COO said the quiet part out loud, the company put a name on its next big bet. It's called "communities," and it's landing sometime this year.

The announcement came June 11 from head of product Alex Benzer, who laid out the plan in a thread, as The Verge reported. The pitch is simple. Smaller spaces where people who care about the same thing can gather, post, and stick around. You'll be able to spin one up, join others, drop posts inside them, and get updates. Benzer framed it as a fresh structure for the whole ecosystem.

If that sounds familiar, it should. The shape of this thing is unmistakably Reddit.

The Reddit tell

Last week, Bluesky COO Rose Wang said the company wanted to step back from being a "public square," and that it was taking cues from Reddit. That's a notable change of tone for a platform that built its early reputation on being the friendlier, less chaotic version of the open timeline.

The public square model has a problem, and anyone who has spent ten minutes on a big social feed knows exactly what it is: everything gets flattened into one screaming stream. Topic communities fix that by giving people walls. You go where the conversation you actually want is happening, and the rest of the internet's noise stays outside.

Reddit figured this out years ago, and it's now worth billions on the strength of it. Bluesky watching that and deciding to borrow the blueprint is, frankly, the obvious move. The harder question is whether grafting it onto a Twitter-style app actually works.

How Bluesky communities will work

Here's where the AT Protocol comes in, and where the plan gets more interesting than a straight Reddit clone.

Bluesky communities will run on the same decentralized backbone as the rest of the app, the AT Protocol. Benzer repeatedly referred to the broader ecosystem around it as the Atmosphere, the company's shorthand for everything built on the protocol. The core promise is twofold: the basic experience inside Bluesky stays simple, but because each community also lives on the open web, builders can bolt on extra features using other apps and tools.

A few concrete details emerged. Every community gets a handle that doubles as a URL. Visit that address and you'll find a custom homepage for the group. Developers who want to go further can replace that page with something entirely their own, hosting a bespoke experience instead of the default.

Each community will also run its own feed. And there will be three privacy settings to choose from:

  • Public, open to anyone
  • Invite-only, where you need a way in
  • Private, locked down tight

That tiered approach is the right call. Not every group wants to perform for the entire internet. The gap between a sprawling public hobby forum and a small invite-only circle is the gap between two completely different products.

Why the open web part matters

The idea worth sitting with is that these communities also exist on the open web. On most platforms, a community is a feature the company owns. It lives on their servers, behaves how they decide, and vanishes when they pull the plug.

Bluesky is describing something else. Because these spaces sit on an open protocol with their own web addresses, in theory they aren't fully captive to Bluesky the app. Other developers can build alternative interfaces, add tools, or extend what a community can do.

Whether that openness survives contact with real-world moderation headaches and spam is another matter entirely. Decentralization sounds great until someone has to decide who gets banned.

Still, it's a genuinely different starting point from the walled gardens everyone else runs.

The timing is hard to ignore

Look at what the competition is doing and the picture sharpens.

Meta's Threads is currently testing its own communities feature. So the two biggest text-first apps chasing the post-Twitter crowd are reaching for the same idea at roughly the same moment. That's not a coincidence. It's a read on where these platforms think the value lives, and it isn't in the endless central feed anymore.

Then there's X. In April, the platform formerly known as Twitter announced it was shutting down its own version of communities. So while Bluesky and Threads build the feature out, Elon Musk's company is tearing it down. Make of that what you will. One company's dead end is apparently another's road map.

It's worth remembering how much of Bluesky's growth came from people fleeing X in the first place. Many of those users wanted the old Twitter experience minus the parts that drove them off. Now Bluesky is signaling it doesn't want to be old Twitter at all. It wants to be something more structured, more sticky, more like the places people actually spend hours instead of doomscrolling for ten minutes and logging off.

What's still unanswered

For all the detail in Benzer's thread, the things that will actually decide whether this works are still blank.

Moderation, for one. Reddit's communities live and die by their moderators, an unpaid army that does enormous, thankless work and occasionally goes to war with the company. Bluesky hasn't said how community moderation will function, who holds the power, or how the open-web angle complicates enforcement. Remember that spammer? Boot them from the Bluesky app and their content still lives on the protocol. Nobody has fully solved that one.

Discovery is another. Reddit's strength is that you can stumble into a niche subreddit you never knew existed. Will Bluesky surface communities the same way, or will they be islands you have to already know about to find?

And there's the launch itself. "Sometime this year" is a generous window, and features announced in threads have a habit of slipping. The company described these as ideas it's still working through, which is honest, but it also means what ships could look different from what was described.

What to watch: whether the first communities feel like real destinations or just renamed feeds, and whether outside developers actually build on the open-web hooks Bluesky is dangling. If they do, communities could be the thing that separates Bluesky from every other microblogging app trying to be the next Twitter. If they don't, it's another features list in a thread. We'll know soon enough.