Bluesky adds group chats, doubles down on smaller communities

Bluesky is pushing deeper into smaller, semi-private conversation with group chats for up to 50 people, a feature rolling out in app version 1.124. The move marks another step away from the old logic of social media as mass broadcast and toward a product built around tighter circles, more control, and more intent.

The new group chats arrived after Bluesky added direct messages in May 2024 and later brought encrypted chats into the app through an integration with Germ. Taken together, those features show a platform that is no longer just building for public posting, but for the kinds of narrower exchanges that keep people returning to an app because their friends, interest groups, and recurring conversations are there.

That direction was laid out plainly by Alex Benzer on January 26, 2026, when he said Bluesky was entering a new phase and would invest more intentionally in what makes it different. In January, Bluesky also said feeds would become more central and that it was building for live, event-focused moments, a sign that the company sees retention as tied not only to scale, but to relevance inside specific communities.

The product shift fits the company’s broader messaging over the past year. In October 2025, Bluesky said it was building for better, more personal conversations rather than louder ones, and for a less outrage-driven experience. The company has also leaned into niche, interest-based discussion, with community-built feeds already covering subjects from science to sports.

Bluesky’s bet on intimacy comes alongside a company that has scaled fast enough to test that theory. In March 2026, Bluesky said it had raised $100 million in Series B funding in April 2025 led by Bain Capital Crypto, and that its user base had grown from 13 million to more than 43 million global users since its Series A. Earlier, in May 2024, Bluesky said it had expanded from 40,000 users to 5.8 million in the previous year.

That trajectory gives the group-chat launch a larger significance. Bluesky is now trying to prove that the next phase of social media is not about building the biggest possible public square, but about making smaller spaces useful enough, safe enough, and specific enough that people stay.