You’ve already left Twitter, (whoops, X), TikTok may soon go dark in this country, and now to fight against the rise of fascism, you fear you may have to leave your beloved Instagram forever. Where will you post pictures of your food, your family, or your fit?

Fear not: Bluesky has got you covered. The social media platform that users embraced en masse last year after the sour odor of Musk drove them off the app formerly known as Twitter, will soon launch their own photo sharing app called Flashes.

Scheduled for a test launch in beta mode next week, Flashes will be powered by the same technology that was used to develop Bluesky, called the AT Protocol, and has been built using code from the developer’s earlier Bluesky client, Skeets.

Flashes is poised to satisfy the growing consumer demand for alternatives to Big Tech’s social media monopoly, especially as the leaders of platforms like X (née Twitter) and Facebook/Instagram become politically active in a way that is distasteful (to say the least) to great swathes of the users of the apps who don’t consider facts to be controversial.

The nascent trend away from platforms controlled by billionaires and/or fascism-friendly tech bros has led to the adoption of open source, decentralized apps like Mastodon and Bluesky. Unlike Twitter, et al, Bluesky is not owned by one single company. Its algorithms are transparent to users, who can customize their feeds to have better control over their timelines.

Flashes came from Berlin developer Sebastian Vogelsang, the designer of Skeets. Skeets focused on both the iPad interface, and on improving the user experience for vision-impaired users. Vogelsang then reconfigured the Skeets app so its design and user interface would look more similar to other photo-sharing apps, like Meta’s Instagram.

If you want to know more, and you’re not currently on Bluesky, you can sign up for updates here: docs.google.com/forms/d/1PSw….