Key Points
- Bluesky has rolled out a “Live Now” badge for Twitch streamers—the badge links directly from a user’s profile to their livestream.
- The company has also introduced “cashtags” for discussing publicly traded companies.
- Both features are designed to attract users from X, its main competitor.
- The move signals Bluesky’s ambition to become a more mainstream social network.
Bluesky, the decentralized social network gaining traction as an alternative to X, is rolling out two new features to attract a broader user base. The first is a “Live Now” badge for streamers, and the second is “cashtags” for people who want to talk about stocks.
The “Live Now” badge, previously in limited beta, is now available to everyone. It allows Twitch streamers to add a badge to their Bluesky profile picture that links directly to their livestream.
For now, it only works with Twitch, but Bluesky says it may add support for other platforms in the future. This is a clear shot at X, which has at times tried to prevent users from posting links to other sites.
Cashtags are another feature that will be familiar to veteran X users. By typing a dollar sign followed by a company’s stock ticker symbol (like $AAPL for Apple), you can create a special hashtag that links your post to other conversations about that company. This is a smart move by Bluesky, as it aims to attract financial and business-oriented users, a significant part of X’s user base.
So far, the vibe on Bluesky has been less corporate and more community-focused than on X. But these new features show that the company is serious about competing on all fronts.
By adding tools tailored to specific communities, such as gamers and investors, Bluesky is signaling that it wants to be more than a niche alternative.
