Why the Flashes App is Renewing My Hope in Federated Social Media

The Dream of Federated Social Media

For years, the idea of federated social media has been floating around as this idealistic vision of a better internet—one where you actually own your identity and content instead of handing everything over to whatever app happens to be popular at the moment. Instead of being locked into Twitter, Instagram, or Facebook, you could exist as you, and your posts, followers, and interactions would move with you.

The problem is, for the most part, federated social media hasn’t really felt different from traditional platforms. Mastodon and Bluesky are great alternatives to Twitter, but they still feel like “another Twitter” rather than something fundamentally new. You sign up, you post, people follow you, but it doesn’t really change how we experience social media.

But when I signed up for Flashes, something clicked. For the first time, I actually felt what federated social media is supposed to be.

Discovering Flashes: A Moment of Realization

Flashes is a new photo-sharing app built on the AT Protocol—the same protocol that powers Bluesky. When I went to sign up, it gave me the option to either create a new account or just use my existing Bluesky account. Out of habit, I used my Bluesky login, expecting to start fresh like I would with any other new app.

Except… I wasn’t starting fresh.

Immediately, all the photos I had ever posted on Bluesky were already there. The people I followed? Already there too. And just like that, I realized: this wasn’t a separate social media account—it was just me, showing up in a different context.

And that’s when it hit me. This is what federated social media is actually about. It’s not about choosing between apps—it’s about using the apps that work best for what you want to share while staying connected to the same people, the same identity, the same online presence.

The Beauty of a Unified Social Identity

Think about how we’ve used social media for the past decade or so. If you wanted to share a photo, you’d post it on Instagram, then manually cross-post it to Facebook or Twitter, hoping your friends or followers saw it in at least one of those places. But the interactions—likes, comments, shares—were always scattered. You might get 30 likes on Instagram, 5 on Facebook, and 2 comments on Twitter, but they were all in their own separate silos.

Flashes doesn’t do that. If someone likes my photo on Flashes, that like also appears on Bluesky. If they comment, I can reply to them from either app. My followers on Bluesky are my followers on Flashes because they’re following me, not some separate account. It’s the same content, the same identity, just viewed through a different lens.

That’s what’s so refreshing about this. Instead of splitting myself across multiple platforms, Flashes and Bluesky let me be a single, unified presence across multiple experiences. If someone wants to see everything I post—text, images, whatever—they can follow me on Bluesky (or any other AT Protocol app, presumably). If they only care about photos, they can use Flashes. But either way, they’re following me, not just “my account on this specific app.”

Final Thoughts: The Future of Federated Social Media

Flashes is a small step, sure. But it’s a glimpse of a world where we don’t have to rebuild our social presence from scratch every time a new app comes along. Where we own our identity—not the platform.

And that idea isn’t just limited to Bluesky and the AT Protocol. Ghost—the CMS I use for my website—is looking into enabling ActivityPub, which would push this even further. That means my site wouldn’t just be a blog people visit occasionally—it could be something you follow, just like you’d follow a person on social media. My posts could show up in your Mastodon feed, your federated reader, maybe even future apps that don’t exist yet.

The future of social media might not be about picking the right platform. It might just be about following people, no matter where they post. And honestly? That’s the kind of internet I want to be part of.