If Mark Zuckerberg’s recent statements have convinced you to leave Instagram, perhaps you will find what you are looking for on “Flashes”, a new competitor to Meta’s photo sharing service.
While Facebook and Instagram seem to be slowly following the same path that Twitter took a few months ago, competitors are emerging to offer an alternative to Musk and Zuckerberg’s ecosystems. “Flashes”, an app still in development, attempts to capitalize on this trend.
Spotted by Techcrunchthe app presents itself as a competitor, or rather as a variation, to the Instagram model. Flashes is based on ATProto technology, the same technology used by Bluesky, the very fashionable competitor of Twitter/X.
Bluesky revisited
Designed by Sebastian Vogelsang, a German developer who has previously created alternative clients for Bluesky, Flashes isn’t exactly a new social network. The application is in fact just a new interface for Bluesky but which focuses exclusively on photo and video content. By filtering text messages, Flashes turns your feed into an Instagram clone filled with ramen photos and funny illustrations.
« I’ve been thinking about having a basic feed and allowing different apps to just choose the content they want to display from the same source», Explains Sebastian Vogelsang to Techcrunch. The idea is therefore no longer to have several separate networks, but a single one which can be consulted in several different ways according to the wishes of each Internet user.
And why not Pixelfed?
Thus, photos posted on Flashes will also be posted on Bluesky and vice versa. And the comments will also be synced. At the moment, the application is not yet released, but should arrive in beta on the Apple application store next week. For those who are interested, the invitations will be shared on the Bluesky account (obviously) dedicated to the application.
If the idea of a single social network capable of taking 1000 different forms is intriguing, we will have to see to what extent the two uses can really coexist. Content posted on Twitter is rarely reproduced as is on Instagram, each network having its own label.
To go further
How this Chinese application is riding the end of TikTok and the anti-Mark Zuckerberg wave
If you want to discover alternatives to Instagram while waiting for the release of Flashes, Pixelfed can also be a solution. A distant cousin of Mastodon (another alternative to Twitter), this platform is a network in its own right capable of communicating with the rest of the fediverse (Mastodon, Peertube, Lemmy, etc.). Bonus point, it is growing enough that Facebook sees fit to censor links pointing to the site.
