Bluesky posts are finally open to the public

Bluesky remains an invite-only decentralized Twitter alternative, but now, you don’t need to have an account and log in to be able to see posts on the platform, according to a blog post from Bluesky CEO Jay Graber. Now, anyone can easily see posts from both the web and from the Bluesky app — like this one.

If you want to prevent people who aren’t logged in from seeing your posts, you can “discourage” that by clicking a toggle in settings. But Bluesky notes that “other apps may not honor this request” and that the toggle doesn’t make your account private.

“Bluesky is an open and public network,” Bluesky says in a note under the toggle. “This setting only limits the visibility of your content on the Bluesky app and website, and other apps may not respect this setting.” In the blog post, Graber notes that “posts on Bluesky have always been public via developer tooling and other apps.”

Bluesky has a new logo, too: a butterfly. Previously, the app’s logo was a blue sky with clouds, but “early on, we noticed that people were organically using the butterfly emoji 🦋 to indicate their Bluesky handles,” Graber says in the blog post. “The butterfly speaks to our mission of transforming social media into something new.”

I think the butterfly is a big improvement from the generic blue sky. And, as spotted by my colleague Parker Ortolani, the app has a fun animation that will feel familiar to fans of Twitter. (I do mean Twitter, not X.)

With the increasing momentum behind ActivityPub — including the very public support from Meta’s Threads — I’ve worried that Bluesky, which is based on its own AT Protocol, might get left behind. But every time I hop over to my Bluesky account, it seems like people are having a lot of fun — the platform seems to be growing quickly, too — so hopefully the protocols can co-exist and usher in a fediverse future.