Social network Bluesky launched support for group chats on Thursday, another feature designed to make the app more competitive with its larger competitor, X.

While Elon Musk-owned X recently doubled down on chats with the launch of a stand-alone XChat app, Bluesky is only now catching up by offering a way for groups to interact more privately on its platform.

The feature, which is arriving in the latest version of the social app (v1.124), is one of the first to deliver on Bluesky’s plan to focus more on communities, rather than trying to be a social network where people post solely to reach a wider public audience.

That’s a notable shift in strategy, and one that arrives as Bluesky’s overall growth has slowed. Today, the network reaches some 44.8 million registered users, compared with X’s 600 million monthly active users. If Bluesky can’t reach the scale of competitors like X or Meta’s Threads, it may need to find new ways to make its app attractive to would-be users, including by offering different forms of social connection.

The startup added support for messaging in 2024, but it only more recently began offering encrypted chats, and only by integrating the third-party messaging service Germ. Now, Bluesky is offering support for group chats of up to 50 people, its announcement states.

That’s smaller than X’s support for 1,000 members, but it’s a start. And the company says it may increase this limit in the future.

Group chat creators can manage their chats however they like and can decide who is allowed to participate, the company noted. They can generate an invite link that can be shared across the web, including in Bluesky posts where it’s displayed as an embedded card.

Chat participants, meanwhile, can control who’s allowed to invite them to chats — everyone, only people they follow, or no one. The default setting will be “only people you follow,” unless users select a different choice for DMs.

Sharing media in group chats is not yet supported, as it will require additional safety and moderation systems, Bluesky says.

In a series of recent posts from Bluesky’s head of product, Alex Benzer spoke about how Bluesky will be working to make its app more community-focused in the days ahead.

“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,” he wrote. Benzer also explained that the goal was to build more community features on the underlying protocol (AT Proto) with support from the wider developer ecosystem.

“On Bluesky, you’ll be able to create communities, join them, post in them, and get updates,” Benzer added.

The timing is particularly notable given that X announced in April that it was shutting down its Communities feature because of low usage and too much spam. Bluesky, seemingly, is trying to pick up where X left off by catering to those who want more control and ownership over their online community experience.

For instance, Benzer noted that communities on Bluesky will get their own handle that doubles as a URL, like community-name.bsky.social or community-name.bsky.space. They’ll also be able to be set it as either public, invite-only, or private, similar to the options available on Facebook Groups or Reddit.

With communities, Bluesky is ultimately betting that people are looking for an exit from platforms operated by Big Tech players, and could be enticed to explore more open technologies where they feel they have more control over the experience (and won’t have their account disabled by rogue AI moderation systems!).

Along with group chats, the updated version of Bluesky is also offering a new way to share profiles via a personalized QR code, similar to other social apps.

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.