The decentralized social platform also debuts a new butterfly logo. It still requires an invite, but plans to soon open its ‘AT’ protocol to other sites and launch public sign-ups.
Bluesky, a growing destination for ex-X users that started in 2019 as a Twitter-funded research project, spread its wings a little further Friday by adding a limited public view of posts and introducing a new butterfly icon.
The decentralized social platform, which launched in March, still requires an invite code to open an account, but now any visitor can see an individual account’s posts on its bsky.app site and in its mobile apps, unless that user has opted out of this public display.
“Like a butterfly emerging from its chrysalis, we are starting to open up,” CEO Jay Graber wrote in a blog post Friday. “Posts on Bluesky have been public from the start through the open protocol, but today we’re making them publicly accessible through the app.”
The easiest way to explore this option is through Bluesky’s Android and iOS apps, which as of version 1.6 sport a butterfly icon in place of the old thumbnail image of a partly cloudy sky.
Either app will let you search for account profiles without having to know somebody’s Bluesky handle, which may either consist of a username followed by bsky.social (for instance, historian Kevin Kruse is at kevinmkruse.
