Bluesky for Music – How To Start

 

Bluesky is having a momentum. The recent events in United States and seemingly increasing Republican control over Instagram, Threads and TikTok accelerated will to find something better, as non-corporate as possible and resistant to the whims of its owners. 

I reckon this website already exists and it’s called Bluesky. Bluesky had a slow start, it was originally invite-only and I got there thanks to the kindness of some stranger. Even while open, at first it clearly lost competition with Threads, that cheated its way to their „hundred million of users” basically creating a placeholder account for everyone using Instagram. But now, after US elections, Bluesky grew immensely in popularity, the process is very fast – while Threads is dying out, and its users are mostly angrily posting about Mark Zuckerberg.

I wanna help building music community on Bluesky – or, rebuild what we’ve already had elsewhere, and also show why it can be better here. This is the post that I’ve been thinking about for a while. As a sort of Bluesky veteran, I’m collecting all the tips that I’ve shared with new users over these past few weeks. While the post is targeting music folks – and I’m talking about writers like me, musicians, label owners, A&R people, promoters, festival organizers etc etc. – I think everyone can take something from it.

Enjoy reading it, and most importantly, enjoy our new platform.

Why Bluesky?

Just a couple of bullet points I’m listing over and over again.

- Bluesky doesn’t train AI LLMs on what You write. It’s, with Mastodon, the only major social media that doesn’t do so.

- Bluesky doesn’t throttle your links like other websites. Since the following feed is on by default, it means your posts will be better seen than on the other social media. In fact, popular media organizations like The Guardian revealed that they’re getting more referral traffic from Bluesky than elsewhere https://pressgazette.co.uk/platforms/bluesky-x-traffic-guardian-boston-globe-news/ From my own personal experience, it’s clear than I’m getting more notifications here than anywhere else, I finally feel appreciated and I’m surprised how fast I grew my new community.

- Bluesky has better protection from trolls than elsewhere – even if Threads is already stealing its features

- Controversial billionaire Jack Dorsey was originally involved in creating Bluesky, but left, when his ideas clearly didn’t align with the rest of the owners. He is no longer involved in any capacity.

- This is what the developers Paul Frazee and Emily Liu said about the mission of Bluesky in Reddit AMA, including explaining what are the current ideas about financing. https://www.reddit.com/r/BlueskySocial/comments/1gyfram/hi_were_members_of_the_bluesky_team_ama/

I really don’t want this article to become a propaganda piece. It’s already an advertisement of sort and I HATE those! We’ve been here before, obviously, we had a lot of shiny websites that promised something new and then were taken over by billionaires who revealed their worst tendencies. You don’t have to tell me – I’ve built my blog – and my whole writing careeer - on one of it and in hindsight, it wasn’t my best idea. Writer Cory Doctorow, who originally coined a term enshittification, criticized Bluesky for the fact that it’s not entirely decentralized like Mastodon – you can read his remarks here https://pluralistic.net/2024/11/02/ulysses-pact/ Here’s a response from Bluesky’s Mike Masnick https://www.techdirt.com/2025/01/21/the-technological-poison-pill-how-atprotocol-encourages-competition-resists-evil-billionaires-lock-in-enshittification/

As a matter of fact, as mentioned by Masnick, a group called Free Our Feeds, supported by people like actor Mark Ruffalo, is already building a prototype of Bluesky competitor, also built on ATProtocol but separate from the app. We can never know for sure but I can only hope that these efforts will be proven succesful.

Import your contacts

After signing up, the first thing you wanna do is follow people that you know. I’d recommend a browser extension called Sky Follower Bridge, available for Chrome, Chrome-based browsers - and Firefox. It supports a couple popular social media websites – you’ll have to sign in to your Bluesky account, open the following/follower list on the other social website and start scanning. The process is relatively automatic, if it gets stuck or finish before it reaches the end of the list, you can resume it. Be careful with automatic following – while usually reliable, it can give you false positives.

By the way, this is one of few reasons why I discourage deleting your account from other social websites. If you don’t wanna post there anymore – it’s fine. But I don’t think you wanna abandon your contacts there, so if you wanna help them find you on Bluesky – it goes both ways.

Chrome Web Store:

https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/sky-follower-bridge/behhbpbpmailcnfbjagknjngnfdojpko

Firefox: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/sky-follower-bridge/

More from developer:

https://skyfollowerbridge.com/

https://www.sky-follower-bridge.dev/get-started.html

Starter Packs and Music community on Bluesky

A good way to find people on Bluesky to follow is by using Starter Packs – a compiled lists of people that you can follow with one click or browse separately.

I’ll be sharing my own Starter Packs when I make them but for now, I’d like to recommend two music blogs that have created interesting ones already.

These are The Line Of Blue Fit https://www.thelineofbestfit.com/news/bluesky-guide-music-fan-starter-packs

and Drowned In Sound https://bsky.app/profile/drownedinsound.org/post/3lbdgwbga5k22

You won’t get notified when you’re added - but you can find Starter Packs and other lists you’re on, using this website. https://clearsky.app/ That’s how I found that I’m myself on The Line Of Best Fit bloggers list, I’m very grateful!

Verify yourself on Bluesky

Now, before you even start posting, it’s probably a good time to verify yourself. Bluesky doesn’t have blue checks, and it does have impersonators, at this moment it’s also got quite a lot new accounts with names of famous musicians with no profile pic or bio. It’s hard to say if these accounts are legit or not. Malicious actors are reported fast, but if you wanna make sure that it’s really you who people hear from – you can verify yourself. Currently, you can do it if you own a domain for your website. Head here for more information: https://bsky.social/about/blog/4-28-2023-domain-handle-tutorial

At the end of the process, you’ll receive a changed username that will be, in fact, your domain. For a good example of that, check out Weyes Blood’s account.

https://bsky.app/profile/weyesblood.com

I believe there was originally an account for „Weyes Blood” that wasn’t real, so Natalie intervened. At the moment of writing this, she hasn’t posted yet, but thanks to the name, I’m 100% sure it’s her real account.

App Passwords

If you used Sky Follower Bridge, you’ve already encountered the term „app passwords”. App passwords are additional protection of your account. If you don’t want to give a password to your account to a third party tool, like that extension, you can generate an app password in Bluesky security settings. It can be only viewed once so if you wanna use it in the future, you better save it somewhere!

At this point, I’d also encourage to use the other security setting – two factor verification, because you should use two factor verification EVERYWHERE you can. Unfortunately, Bluesky hasn’t added a verification by authetication apps yet, but for now you can use 2FA through e-mail and I have it on!

Protection against trolls

Trolls kill social media. I’m an idealist, I believe that social media are not just megaphones to try to shout out whatever you have to share, but also a place to make a connection. And through my own career, I met online people I’d never expect – or dream! - to meet. But trolls are key reasons why people are migrating and sometimes unfortunately abandon social media altogether.

Bluesky has a few unique features for protection against trolls.The most important are labelers – third party services that provide the lists of malicious actors. You can mute or block them all with one click, and boom, they’re gone! While it’s called „subscribing” to these services, it’s absolutely free! I’m still a newcomer in this, The Verge mentions a few here https://www.theverge.com/24295933/bluesky-social-network-custom-how-to in „Labelers” section, but I’m using blocklists from this trusted account https://bsky.app/profile/skywatch.blue

You gotta be careful, because some malicious actors are also creating their own blocklists (I’ve even found myself on one of it). Make sure to use blocklists from trusted users.

- This post from Lifehacker website explores some other ways that you can protect yourself against trolls, like hiding replies from posts (this is the feature that was totally „borrowed”, read: stolen by Threads from Bluesky) https://lifehacker.com/tech/the-best-tools-to-fight-the-trolls-on-bluesky

A popular philosophy on Bluesky is „block and don’t engage”. We’re too tired of ruining our mental health by trolls. It’s not a „discourse”. https://medium.com/bouncin-and-behavin-blogs/bluesky-culture-why-we-block-and-dont-engage-9fe6e2e74eb5

Custom Feeds

Custom Feeds are another fun way to discover people and get more from Bluesky. If you actually used a discovery feed on other websites – Bluesky has it too, but it takes some time to get really good. But why wait, when you can look for custom feeds for your interests?

„Feeds” section is on the left sidebar. You can find feeds for a lot of subjects and communities and pin them on your homepage, next to Following and Discover. There are also feeds for „Mutuals” (accounts who follow you back), „Popular With Friends” and one for Bluesky team. A lot of thematical feeds are automated, and by the way, if you add a headphones emoji 🎧 to your post, it will be automatically added to one of main music feeds, so that’s the way to get noticed. If you use a film camera emoji 🎥 or use a term „Filmsky”, your post will be added to the film feed.

Multi Column View

If you were an avid Tweetdeck user, you may be looking for something similar on Bluesky. Mastodon has it, Threads’ implementation is very poor. Bluesky has a third party tool called Deck.Blue, which also offers some features that weren’t added by the developers of regular Bluesky yet. For more information, their website https://deck.blue/

Before you go...

That’s pretty much all what I’ve wanted to share (and it’s much easier to share it as a formated blog post than as a series of „skeets” – that’s how Bluesky posts are called). But I’m sure I’ll have more on my mind, I still have my Starter Packs to make – they will be added to this post soon– so I’ll be editing. And again, I can only hope for Bluesky’s growth and resistance to enshittification. It’s not gonna be easy, but with this website, it’s already more reliant on us and what we can do with it. I hope you will like Bluesky, I hope you will stay on it and you will find it useful and actually quite pleasant to use.

Oh, and you can follow me here, if you like! Send me a feedback, tell me what else you wanna know!

https://bsky.app/profile/mavoyofficial.bsky.social

Image Source:

"Butterflies are self propelled flowers. ~ R.H. Heinlein" by VinothChandar is licensed under CC BY 2.0.