With TikTok’s future in limbo, rivals X (formerly Twitter) and Bluesky have introduced vertical video feeds similar to those popularized by the China-based platform.
The announcements were made late on January 19 ahead of TikTok’s short-lived ban in the US. “We had to get in on the video action, too,” Bluesky said. The decentralized platform’s video feed is accessible from the Search tab on its mobile app. Here, users will find a new “Trending Videos” section, which they can pin to display on their home screen or add to their feed list.
Since this is a custom video feed, standard feeds and posts “that contain video don’t automatically put you in a video timeline,” Bluesky says.
In Bluesky’s video feed, you can swipe up to skip to the next video and use a single tap to pause it. Alongside the regular buttons to like, share, comment and repost a video, you get a three-dot menu that brings up options to copy or translate the title, mute the subject, words or tags, or just tell Bluesky if you want to see more or less what you just saw.
If you don’t see the new video feed, Bluesky recommends “relaunching your app once or twice to allow the latest changes to take effect.”
X introduced its own video an hour before Bluesky, calling it “a new comprehensive home for video”. However, unlike Bluesky, the X release is limited to US users.
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The Elon Musk-owned platform has created a dedicated tab on the homepage for its vertical video feed. To access it, users can tap the play button-like icon next to the Grok icon. This opens a familiar interface, and based on the video attached to the notification, the platform appears to have options to stream the video to a larger screen or minimize it.
Instagram also tried to take advantage of TikTok’s ban. It launched a new high-profile grid this week “because most of the photos and videos that are uploaded to Instagram at this point are vertical, and rectangles do a better job of displaying those photos and videos,” said IG head Adam Mosseri. .
He later admitted that some of the feedback on the change was “pretty negative”, in part because “some of you spend a lot of time debugging your networks and this blew it all up.” As a result, Instagram will “improve the ability to customize those thumbnails to make it easier to get back to a place you’re happy with.” This includes “the ability to post directly to your network, in case you want to bypass the feed entirely.”
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Over the weekend, Mosseri also announced a video editing app called Edits, which aims to provide people who create videos on their phones with “a full set of creative tools.”
Mosseri’s announcement came just hours after Apple and Google removed ByteDance’s apps, including CapCut, from their respective app stores to comply with a US law requiring ByteDance to sell its US business to a non-US owner. foreigner
While TikTok was quickly reinstated in the US, thanks to “President Trump’s efforts”, the future of other ByteDance-owned apps remains uncertain.
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