Bluesky adds group chats as it pivots to smaller communities

Bluesky is betting that the fastest way to grow is to feel smaller. The app launched group chats in version 1.124 on June 11, opening chats to as many as 50 people, with invite links that can be shared broadly across the web and embedded in posts as cards.

The feature fits a broader shift in strategy. After a year spent scaling, Bluesky said in January that 2026 would be about leaning into what makes the service different, with more emphasis on live moments, custom feeds and community-driven experiences. The company has also built its identity around the AT Protocol, a stack meant to distinguish it from X and Threads by putting more weight on open infrastructure, moderation tools and user-controlled curation.

Bluesky’s next major step is communities, which it says will arrive later in 2026. Alex Benzer, the company’s head of product, has described those spaces as smaller parts of Bluesky where people can go deeper with others who care about the same topics. The company is also framing communities as a more Reddit-like layer, with handles that can function as URLs and with custom landing pages. Bluesky says its team plans to speak with developers and community organizers as the product takes shape.

The company is moving carefully on the mechanics of tighter social groups. Chat participants can decide who is allowed to invite them, with settings for everyone, only people they follow, or no one. Media sharing is not yet available, because Bluesky says it still needs additional safety and moderation systems. The company also said the 50-person cap may rise later.

The push into intimate spaces comes as Bluesky looks for the kinds of behavior that keep people returning. In January, it pointed to live events as a major use case, saying more than 600,000 posts about baseball were made during the World Series and that traffic jumped 30% during Game 7. By March, Bluesky said it had grown from 13 million users after its Series A to more than 43 million global users, after a $100 million Series B led by Bain Capital Crypto in April 2025.

That scale has brought new pressure to turn attention into habit. Jay Graber stepped back as chief executive on March 9 and became chief innovation officer, with Toni Reid taking over as CEO. Bluesky’s next test is whether group chats and communities can do what broad public posting alone has not: create stickier relationships, the kind that helped Discord and Reddit build durable networks, while avoiding the churn and fragmentation that have dogged X.