While TikTok is already crawling back online in the US, uncertainty around the video platform’s future has created an opportunity for Bluesky, X, and others to seize.
Over the last few hours, both social media platforms introduced new features — including dedicated tabs and feeds for video content — that make it easier for users to discover and watch vertical videos in their apps. Yesterday, Instagram announced a new rival to CapCut — the video editor owned by TikTok’s parent ByteDance — just after it went offline in the US.
“We had to get in on the video action too,” said Bluesky with the launch of customizable feeds for videos. Users can swipe up or down on these feeds to flip through videos and create targeted feeds that only pull video content from specific hashtags, such as this #BookSky feed that riffs on TikTok’s “BookTok” reading community.
“Like any other feed, you can choose to pin these or not,” the company said in its post. “Bluesky is yours to customize.”
The update has added a new video feed under the search tab that provides a timeline of videos that are trending on the platform. Bluesky says that the ability to swipe through a video-only timeline is specific to custom feeds.
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Bluesky also gave a shout-out to AT Protocol developers — the decentralized protocol that Bluesky relies on — who are using it to build video-only TikTok alternatives like Tik.Blue, Skylight.Social, and Bluescreen.Blue, which are currently in early development.
X similarly started rolling out a new “Video Tab” to users in the US on Sunday, which appears as a circular play button in the app’s bottom navigation bar. “From there, you can explore a personalized feed of recommended videos reflecting the real-time nature of X across sports, entertainment, news and more,” X said in its announcement.
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