Okay Bluesky just dropped a massive announcement about something called "communities" coming sometime this year, and honestly I'm super excited because head of product Alex Benzer laid some really interesting details in his thread that show they're building more than just another Reddit clone (though yes Rose Wang mentioned last week that they were very inspired by companies like Reddit — love when COOs are transparent about their inspirations). These communities will live on the AT Protocol which is Bluesky's entire decentralized backbone, and Benzer specifically called this a "new structure for everyone" as part of what he casually refers to simply as "Atmosphere" (which apparently doubles as shorthand for the whole AT Protocol ecosystem — they've gone ahead and made one word into an actual brand concept now, I love it). You'll be able to create communities, join them, post in them, get updates on them, each with its own feed; their handles "double as a URL" so going there lands you directly on the community's custom homepage (builders can also host completely customized experiences at that address); and Benzer listed out three privacy levels — public, invite-only, private. But here's where it gets genuinely clever in my opinion: while keeping Bluesky core features simple across the board, communities actually exist as open web citizens meaning anyone building on Atmosphere with other apps can interact natively rather than being locked inside some walled-garden feed experience; you'll be able to truly customize them and add whole new layers of functionality via Atmospheric tools. This is really interesting timing seeing Threads testing their own community implementation right now, while X actually announced in April that they were going ahead with shutting down THEIR communities feature instead — talk about an ecosystem in flux! Benzer's post comes from around June 11th last year and he laid out a few ideas specifically so the team could get early feedback before fully committing. I honestly think this is one of those quietly ambitious features where once people actually start building on top of it, we're going to see some genuinely different community experiences emerge that make Bluesky feel meaningfully distinct from other social platforms rather than just another microblogging thing.

Source: https://www.theverge.com/tech/948215/bluesky-communities-at-protocol-atmosphere-reddit