As TikTok stumbles, Bluesky and X introduce new tab to binge watch vertical videos
News Mania Desk \ Piyal Chatterjee \ 21th january 2025
On his initial day as President of the United States, Donald Trump enacted an executive order postponing the TikTok ban by 75 days. He stated that he wanted his administration “to decide the suitable course of action.” Although the video-sharing platform owned by ByteDance is temporarily re-entering the United States, Elon Musk’s X and the decentralized social media platform Bluesky are enhancing their offerings by introducing their own vertical video feeds similar to TikTok.
In a post, Bluesky revealed that they are joining “in on the action” and introduced a new video tab that is reachable from the Search tab on the app’s mobile version. Users can decide whether to pin or unpin the newly added video tab, and like TikTok, swiping up allows access to a feed of video-only content. Nonetheless, in contrast to Instagram Reels, videos in standard feed posts will not automatically lead to an endless scroll of videos.
In addition to the like, share, comment, and repost buttons, users are provided with a three-dot menu that allows them to access options such as copying or translating captions, muting threads, words, and tags, as well as informing Bluesky about their preferences regarding similar videos. One hour prior to Bluesky revealing its new videos tab, X, owned by Elon Musk, also introduced its own vertically scrolling video feed.
You can access it by clicking the button resembling a play icon located next to the Grok icon. At the moment of this writing, the new feed is accessible solely to residents of the United States. Apart from Bluesky and X, Meta-owned Instagram also seems to be capitalising on TikTok’s uncertain future. The platform recently made changes to the profile grid, which is now rectangular instead of square. While the change has caused quite a backlash, Instagram head Adam Mosseri said that they are “going to improve the ability to customize those thumbnails” and a new future that lets you directly upload posts to the grid.
