Bluesky launched group chats on Thursday and outlined a broader pivot toward community features, a strategic shift for a social network that has so far focused on open public posting. Group chats support up to 50 people in the current release. The company says it may increase that limit later.

The feature arrives in version 1.124 of the app. Chat creators control who can participate and can generate invite links that display as embedded cards when shared in Bluesky posts. Users can set who is allowed to invite them: everyone, only people they follow, or no one. Media sharing in group chats is not yet supported because it requires additional safety and moderation systems.

The more significant announcement is what comes next. Head of product Alex Benzer said Bluesky will build communities, smaller spaces inside the platform where users go deeper on shared interests. Communities will have their own handle that doubles as a URL, like community-name.bsky.social. They can be public, invite-only, or private.

“Today, Bluesky is one big space. Communities will be smaller spaces inside that where you can go deeper and hang out with people who care about the same stuff,” Benzer wrote. The features will be built on the underlying AT Protocol with support from the wider developer ecosystem.

The timing is deliberate. X shut down its own Communities feature in April, citing low usage and spam. Bluesky is picking up where X left off, targeting users who want more control over their online communities without Big Tech intermediaries. Bluesky’s Attie app already lets users customise their feeds with AI. Communities extend that philosophy to group interaction.

The pivot reflects a growth problem. Bluesky has 44.8 million registered users. X has 600 million monthly actives. Threads has hundreds of millions more. If Bluesky cannot match those numbers, it needs a different value proposition. Communities and group chats offer something X and Threads do not: user-owned spaces on an open protocol, where moderation rules are set by the community rather than the platform.

X recently moved in the opposite direction, launching a standalone XChat messaging app while shutting down its group community features. Bluesky is betting that small, controlled spaces matter more than massive public reach, especially for users who have already decided they want an alternative to platforms operated by Musk or Meta.

Whether 44.8 million users are enough to sustain vibrant communities is the open question. Reddit works because communities have critical mass. Bluesky’s total user base is smaller than many individual subreddits. The group chat launch and the communities roadmap are an acknowledgment that growth alone is not working, and that depth of engagement may matter more than breadth.