Bluesky Now Has Its Own Version of TikTok
Bluesky bills itself as a social media jack of all trades. Of course there is a core experience that replaces something like X or Threads . But it’s not just about text messages: you’ll soon be able to use an app like Flashes to turn Bluesky into an Instagram of sorts. However, before that happens, you can use another app to turn Bluesky into TikTok. It’s not quite ready yet, but it’s a fascinating look at a unique social media client – an app that completely transforms one platform into something else.
Introducing Bluescreen for Bluesky
Bluescreen is a Bluesky client with one purpose: it identifies videos from your Bluesky channel and delivers them to you in a TikTok-style infinite scrolling interface. You don’t interact with text messages or see still images. It’s like Bluesky offering a “video only” channel. But since they don’t exist, Bluescreen exists.
It’s a cool idea and it’s at the heart of Flashes. Instead of isolating videos in Bluesky’s feed, Flashes isolates images, turning Bluesky into an Instagram alternative. If you’re surprised to hear that two different Bluesky clients are using the same strategy to achieve two of the same results, it’s because they were both developed by the same person: Sebastian Vogelsang.
Vogelsang announced Flashs before Bluescreen, but released the video app before the photo app. While we wait for Instagram Bluesky to arrive, we can try TikTok Bluesky instead.
Using Bluescreen to watch videos on Bluesky
In execution, Bluescreen does what it should, although there is definitely room for improvement. Once you connect your Bluesky account to the client, you’ll be presented with a video – just like when you open an app like TikTok, or when using Instagram Reels or YouTube Shorts . As is the case with these services, there are several options for interacting with the video: pressing the heart-shaped button will like the video without leaving the video channel itself. However, if you click the comment button, Bluescreen will close the video stream and display the comments in another window. You can click the two-arrow button to republish the video and the three-dot icon to access additional controls such as Translate, Share, and Report. There is also a general mute button in the lower right corner.
If you tap the video itself, you’ll open the standard iOS video controls menu. From here, you can play and pause, rewind or skip forward, use AirPlay, or control video volume if you don’t want to fiddle with your iPhone’s overall volume settings. Speaking of volume, this is my main criticism of Bluescreen as it currently exists: every video is muted by default, although the mute button says the volume should be on. You need to press the mute button twice; once to mute the video, then again to unmute it before it starts playing. You need to do this for every video you watch. Oddly enough, this is only an issue when viewed through your phone’s speakers: plug in a pair of Bluetooth headphones and the video will sound as it should. I believe this is a bug that Vogelsang will correct in due course.
At the top of the page you can choose which channel to take the video from. The App Store page states that you can choose from thousands of channels, but if that sounds overwhelming, you can use videos from the main channels, such as the Subscriptions or Discover tabs, or from any of the pinned channels. For example, it’s convenient to choose an astronomy channel that I follow and watch a video specifically on that topic. (This also shows that I may have to remove some of the pinned channels due to poor quality content.) You can also use the search icon in the top right corner to search for any content you like, as well as to search for trending topics. Again, if you’ve used a social media platform before, you’ll be familiar with this.
In theory, this could be an amazing experience. If you curate your Bluesky channels well enough, you can have a varied filter for all the short videos published on the platform. It’s still an early concept, so the user interface isn’t as fluid or polished as established video apps, but I can totally see the potential here.
Uploading your own videos via Bluescreen
However, it’s not just a passive experience: you can use Bluescreen to upload videos to Bluesky. If you click the (+) at the bottom of the screen, you can select videos from your library to publish to Bluesky via Bluescreen. Along the way, you can access easy editing tools, add a caption to your video, choose who can reply to a message, and the language of the message before posting. Remember: you are not posting to Bluescreen; rather, Bluesky. While it may seem like you’re posting a video to a new platform, all you’re really doing is posting a video to your existing Bluesky account.