In challenge to TikTok, Bluesky and X roll out dedicated vertical video feeds

Social media sites X Corp. and Bluesky have announced new dedicated vertical video feeds, similar to Instagram Reels, YouTube’s Shorts and TikTok videos.

Both announcements came Sunday evening after TikTok went dark briefly late Saturday. The Chinese-owned social media service parent company ByteDance had taken it offline in accordance with an upcoming ban in the United States. The service has since been restored, although the fate of TikTok in the U.S. is still uncertain.

In a post on its site, BlueSky wrote: “We had to get in on the video action too — Bluesky now has custom feeds for video! Like any other feed, you can choose to pin these or not. Bluesky is yours to customize.”

Vertical video works just like every other social media site, allowing users to discover custom video feeds by swiping up to enter a timeline and scroll through only video posts. The initial implementation of the capability is rolling out to mobile in the Explore tab.

Bluesky also noted that developers are working on alternatives for TikTok using the AT Protocol, or Authenticated Transfer Protocol, the decentralized protocol behind the social media service. These include upcoming apps such as Tik.Blue, Skylight.Social and Bluescreen.Blue.

X announced it added a dedicated video tab to the bottom bar of its mobile app for users in the U.S. “An immersive new home for videos is rolling out to users in the US today,” the company posted on Sunday.

Getting a feed of videos is already possible on X by tapping on a video and scrolling up. The new tab for videos will allow users to quickly move from the main screen to a dedicated section for videos.

Although TikTok’s services are now available again in the U.S., it’s still missing from major app stores such as Google LLC’s Play Store and Apple Inc.’s App Store. The ban will affect more than just ByteDance’s TikTok in the U.S., but also the company’s photo-sharing app Lemon8, online video editing app CapCut and hero shooter video game Marvel Rivals.

Also seeing an opportunity to grab a major audience of creators, Meta Platforms Inc.-owned Instagram announced Edits, a new video editing app and rival to CapCut. Just like the aforementioned app it acts as a video editing platform for short-form videos, but will target creators on mobile devices instead of on personal computers.

“Edits will have a much broader range of creative tools and probably a smaller addressable audience. Think a place to track all your ideas instead of templates,” Instagram chief Adam Mosseri said on Sunday. “Think AI video editing tools on a per clip or per video basis.”

Edits can be preordered in the iOS App Store and is coming to Android soon.

Photo: Pixabay