AINEWS
What changes when a 'subreddit' lives on an open protocol
Bluesky's head of product Alex Benzer says communities are coming in 2026. The interesting part is what running them on an open protocol actually changes about the subreddit model.
Bluesky's head of product Alex Benzer says communities are coming in 2026. The interesting part is what running them on an open protocol actually changes about the subreddit model.
The Reddit comparison is doing a lot of work in coverage of Bluesky's planned communities feature, and most of it is wrong in a way that matters. On June 11, Bluesky head of product Alex Benzer said publicly that "Communities are coming to Bluesky this year." Communities, in his description, are smaller, topic-defined spaces inside the main network where users can post, subscribe, and surface new activity in feeds. That part is genuinely Reddit-shaped. The harder question is what running those communities on Bluesky's open AT protocol actually changes, and what it doesn't.
In the design Benzer described, each community gets a handle that doubles as its URL, with examples like community-name.bsky.social or community-name.bsky.space. Each community has a custom landing page reachable at that address, and a set of tools that let community owners build features and experiences on top of AT protocol, Bluesky's own open-source social framework. That last piece is the part the Reddit framing leaves out. A subreddit is a configuration inside Reddit's stack. A Bluesky community is, at least in principle, an extension point. An owner can wire in apps, custom feeds, and tools built against the protocol rather than choosing from a fixed menu of options Reddit offers its moderators.
The competitive context also makes this more than a feature announcement. Meta's Threads launched its own communities feature in late 2025, and the two products are now openly chasing the same organizing idea: topic-bounded spaces with their own identity inside a larger network. Bluesky's pitch is that the underlying protocol gives community owners a different ceiling. Whether that ceiling is actually higher, or just higher-sounding, is one of the things the launch will have to demonstrate.
Several things are unresolved at the time of the announcement, and they are worth naming rather than papering over. There is no specific launch date or quarter. The window is calendar year 2026, and feature capabilities such as custom experiences, AT protocol apps, and custom landing pages are described as coming, not as live. The "Reddit-style" framing is Engadget's editorial characterization, not Bluesky's own language, so the underlying feature may diverge from Reddit's subreddit model in governance, moderation, or federation once it ships. Whether communities get a dedicated feed or only surface in Discover, and what opt-in alerts for new posts and responses actually look like, are open design questions Benzer has not yet answered.
The tradeoff that may matter most is the one Bluesky's own user base is most likely to feel. A large share of Bluesky's growth came from people who left Reddit, or were pushed out, after subreddit-era moderation and brigading failures. Importing the subreddit shape without a protocol-level answer to those failure modes would be a familiar disappointment wearing new branding. The design's openness is also its risk. If a community owner can build custom experiences on top of the protocol, they can also build bad ones, and the moderation story for those add-ons is not part of what has been announced.
What to watch between now and the actual rollout: whether community handles and feeds behave the same way across .bsky.social and .bsky.space suffixes, how AT protocol apps for community owners are reviewed and surfaced, whether the feed placement of community posts is opt-in for users who did not ask for them, and how Bluesky handles moderation when the offending content lives in a third-party app rather than in a Bluesky-hosted post. The protocol underneath is genuinely the interesting part of this story. It is also the part that will determine whether the result feels like a better subreddit, or like something else.