Where are the Bluesky Clients?
Wednesday, January 29, 2025
Let’s be clear, Bluesky has handily defeated Mastodon to be the main alternative to the big microblogging networks. It may be smaller than Threads or X, but it’s still far larger than the platform named after the long extinct prehistoric creature. Mastodon currently has around 9 million users, while Bluesky has just broken 30 million. Recall that Mastodon has been around for almost a decade, while Bluesky really only launched about two years ago. ActivityPub, the framework that underlies Mastodon, does in fact seem to have a future. Sites and news platforms are starting to federate and Threads’ limited federation bodes well for at least some kind of interoperability. But Mastodon hasn’t taken off the way that Bluesky has.
Mastodon has lots of nerds, including me. So that’s not meant to be some sort of dig. The platform’s high concentration of nerds means lots of developers and lots of client apps. Mastodon clients have become the new UI playground in the same way that Twitter clients used to be. But what I can’t wrap my head around is the business decision of developers to lean into Mastodon clients versus Bluesky ones. Fortunately some progress seems to be starting to be made with apps like PinkSky that replicate the Instagram experience but using Bluesky as the backend. There are also a handful of clients like Skeets and GraySky, but nothing that approaches the quality of some Mastodon clients or the legendary Twitter clients of old. They’re okay, but they’re not worth dropping the official client. Other apps like OpenVibe and Reeder are designed to combine feeds from multiple services and they do work with Bluesky. But they’re not dedicated clients. I want Tweetbot or Twitterrific, but for Bluesky. I’m not seeing that yet. The opportunity is clearly there, it has tens of millions of users making it three times the size of Mastodon. In my experience, there’s also a wider array of interests and people on Bluesky. It’s far less homogenous and generally has a better, friendlier vibe. Heck, I would take Bluesky support in Tapbots’ Mastodon client Ivory even if they didn’t want to make a dedicated one.
I’m hopeful that someone is working on a high quality, beautifully designed, extremely stable Bluesky client for iOS and macOS. It would be crazy not to build one if you have an affinity for the platform as well as the skills and the time. I wish I could do it myself.