You now have yet another app that can contribute to your information overload: Twitter alternative Bluesky has rolled out direct messaging.
Updating Bluesky’s Android or iOS apps or refreshing its website should add a chat-bubble icon to its toolbar. The default setting lets anybody you follow send you DMs, but you can allow DMs from anyone on the service (aside from those you’ve blocked) or disable the feature entirely.
DMs are the latest addition of a foundational feature from the company that launched in 2019 as an experiment in decentralized social media with funding from then-Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey. But it's very much a minimum viable product. It only supports text and emoji with one other user; no group chats, no indication that the other person is typing, no tapback emoji, no GIFs, and no other kind of media. And because Bluesky doesn’t use monospaced fonts, ASCII art is out as well.
Bluesky’s announcement lists group chats and media attachments as coming features along with end-to-end encryption. But it also advises users that in the meantime, Bluesky moderators “may need to open your DMs to investigate broader patterns of abuse, such as spam or coordinated harassment,” subject to strict access controls.
Bluesky developer Paul Frazee, who regularly uses his account to share updates on Bluesky’s progress, said on Wednesday that Bluesky encrypts DMs in transit between servers and users, a protection against outside snooping that most email services have provided for years.
In another post, he suggested that "extremely privacy-conscious” users should use Bluesky DMs only to share their contact info with a separate messaging app, Signal Private Messenger, which delivers “e2e” encryption.
Among alternatives to the Elon Musk-owned platform that now goes by X, messaging has been a weak point. The federated platform Mastodon, for example, only allows what it calls “private” or “direct” mentions, a form of post that only the recipient should see.
Twitter DMs have been problematic in their own right. Hackers have been able to read them by compromising some of the service’s systems, and last year’s addition of stronger encryption for paying subscribers came with serious weaknesses in that implementation.
Bluesky shipping basic messaging represents its third major step this year toward feature parity with X, following the service opening itself to signups from the public in early February and adding hashtag support at the end of that month,
The company—set up as a separate, public-benefit corporation in 2022—has also moved its underlying ATProto protocol far enough along to allow people to host their own Bluesky accounts instead of using its servers–without losing their followers or having to change their usernames in the process. Yet another sign of its separation from Twitter came in early May, when Dorsey revealed that he had quit his spot on Bluesky’s board some time ago.
A Bluesky roadmap document updated May 6 lists a few short-term goals, such as enabling a wider range of multifactor authentication (today Bluesky only supports one-time codes sent via email to confirm a login), as well as such post-2024 objectives as adding support for editing posts while keeping old versions of them accessible.