The exodus from X is in full swing. That opens up a variety of federated platforms. But if you’re missing the Twitter experience, Bluesky might be worth a look. Here’s where to get started.
I will refrain from getting on a bandwagon about decentralization here. And I remain most excited about Mastodon, which I’ll talk about soon. Bluesky shares some of the team that built Twitter and its venture-backed governance, so you should not be under any illusions about the political progressiveness of this platform. But there are many great reasons to dump X, and it’s worth sharing Bluesky just because some great conversations are going on there. Like Threads and Mastodon, it’s also a federated platform (even if it uses the AT protocol rather than the rival ActivityPub). If you’re curious about that, The Verge did an intro earlier this year, and yes, these platforms can talk to one another.
Let’s save that for another day and get straight into where to begin and how to find some inspiration and community. And I am finding that there’s some great stuff happening away from the Elonverse.
For a crash course in Bluesky itself, there have been some nice pieces lately:
Ian Shepherd wrote a music-specific guide:
BlueSky for Musicians and Audio Nerds – a Quickstart Guide
Probably the most important thing to know right away is that there is not a standard media player. One reason I vastly prefer Mastodon for music discovery is there’s automatic support for Bandcamp. (Follow me / check the Bandcamp tag.) You do get thumbnail previews, though:
Maybe we’ll see this soon. Players do work already for YouTube, for instance:
Labels are using it alongside publishers. Dragon’s Eye for instance has a Starter Pack with its roster (I should do that!) and gives away Bandcamp codes.
I’ve built a Starter Pack with a mix of music tech and adventurous electronic music. I did not include any site feeds – we’ve got RSS for that. I did include people who were posting regularly and on the topic. There are lots of other people around, too.
Music tech and electronic music mix – https://go.bsky.app/JwEMgBH
And you can also view this as a Feed, which includes additional options. (That was fun to make using a powerful tool calle SkyFeed – see below.)
You might be interested in these, too:
Mastering Engineers on BlueSky
There’s no CDM feed yet, but – follow me, if you like, and I’m considering how to automate a BlueSky feed. (But seriously – RSS! That deserves a new 2024, post-Google Reader guide.)
Advanced topics
I found these useful in building a Feed:
The Moderately Skilled Person’s Guide to Making a Bluesky Feed [Paul Musgrave]
On the ranking topic – and this is not unique to Bluesky – there’s some fascinating work done by Hacker News. That algorithm works on Bluesky, including on feeds you build. Here’s Amir Salihefendic with a nice explanation of the geeky details from back in 2015:
How Hacker News ranking algorithm works
All in all, I’m enjoying the Fediverse. It’s so much less of a black box than X/Twitter ever was. It has a weird Tumblr feeling about it, as if people are having fun again online. I think the worst possible idea would be for everyone to jump to one service again, like we learned nothing from the past 20 years. But the change is positive; that’s already clear. So stay tuned here for more on how to manage those changes from a hopefully practical and critical perspective.
Your feedback welcome; I’ll update this guide if you want to bookmark it.