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Bluesky's New Group Chats Are a Quiet Admission That Scale Isn't Coming
The 50 person cap and follow only invites ship as the first concrete product of a strategy that says Bluesky will grow in depth, not reach.
The 50 person cap and follow only invites ship as the first concrete product of a strategy that says Bluesky will grow in depth, not reach.
Bluesky has stopped pretending the public feed will carry it to X-scale. The group chats that launched Thursday in app version 1.124 are the first concrete product of a strategy that acknowledges a hard ceiling on public-feed growth, and builds for the size it can plausibly reach.
That ceiling is real and getting harder to ignore. Bluesky reports 44.8 million registered users, a fraction of the 600 million monthly active users that TechCrunch cites for X. The gap is structural. X is doubling down on chats with a standalone XChat app that supports rooms of up to 1,000 members. Meta's Threads is still adding mass through Instagram's distribution. Competing head-on in the broadcast model has been a difficult proposition for Bluesky for two years, and the company is choosing a different fight.
The group-chat feature itself reads as a deliberate narrowing. Caps sit at 50 people per chat. Invites default to follow-only, so a stranger cannot pull you into a group the way they can on X. Media sharing is deferred until safety and moderation systems are in place. Each of those choices is a way of saying: this product is for people who already know each other, not for everyone on the internet.
The strategic framing is on the record, not inferred. According to TechCrunch's reporting, Bluesky head of product Alex Benzer has described the company's direction as community-first, with group chats as the first feature shipping under that roadmap. The pivot is real, even if the language is careful. A social network that wants to grow in places, not in counts, looks different from a social network that wants to be a feed.
The launch is smaller than XChat on member count and narrower than Bluesky's own 2024 direct-message rollout on feature breadth. None of that is a reason to dismiss it. The smallness is the product. A 50-person ceiling is what the strategy requires, because a 1,000-person ceiling would just rebuild the broadcast problem at smaller scale.
What to watch next is whether the community-first direction actually changes retention. Group chats can deepen engagement among people who already use Bluesky, but they cannot, by themselves, bring in the millions of new registered users a feed strategy would have needed. If the slower growth that TechCrunch flags in its report continues into the second half of 2026, the question becomes whether depth at this size is a sustainable business, or a graceful exit from the scale race.