BlueSky for Music Science 101
This post is a brief description and concise argument concerning BlueSky and the #musicscience community. I wrote it so I can just send this link to people instead of give the same spiel over and over again. (Remember, if you’re asked the same thing 3x you are legally obliged to write a blog post about it).
What is BlueSky? (And why to people refer to it as things like Azul-Ski, B**eS__, and the like?)
In short, it is literally just a new Twitter.
It was founded by Twitter’s old CEO and looks nearly identical to Twitter. Just yesterday (12 Sept 2023), the site reached over 1,000,000 active users, so it’s still quite small, which is why you might not have heard of it.
You might hear people call it by weird things on Twitter because word-on-the-street is that if you talk about BlueSky on Twitter, you’ll get shadow banned. So you gotta get creative with something un-regex-able:
Look how similar it is to Twitter.
How is BlueSky different?
It’s probably more similar than different, with a few key changes. The first has zero practical implications for the readers of this post, which is that the network is decentralized. What that means in practice is that no big loser like Elon can eventually take it over.
The second is that there is way more control for community moderation. Instead of one big feed, you have the option to subscribe to multiple little feeds. Notice in the above picture the little listings across the top.
I set up a #musicscience feed that you can find by either…
… going to My Feeds and searching for it.
or
… going to my profile, then going to feeds and finding it there.
If you “like” it, it will pin it to your main page like this:
You do not have to like or pin it to use the functionality I describe below. It would be nice if you did though, so I know people are using it!
What’s slick about feeds?
Feeds are customized by the person who made them (me, but more than open to suggestions of how to run this).
How is music science currently set up?
As of today, the way it works is that the feed is set up to catch up a smattering of terms related to #musicscience. It grabs the old hashtag of #musicscience that many of us used on Twitter to help organize as a community, but also several interesting emoji pairings that in practice are way less clunky than slapping the #musicscience branding on each tweet.
The current list that tracks it is:
// Twitter tags
'#musicscience',
'musicscience',
'music and science',
'icmpc17',
'#icmpc17',
'icmpc2023',
'icmpc23',
'#icmpc2023',
'#icmpc23',
// Round 2
'ICMPC',
'ICMPC 2023',
'icmpc',
// Emoji Crossing
'🎧🧪',
'🎧🔬',
'🎧🧬',
'🎧⚕️',
'🎧🥼',
'🎧📏',
'🎧⚙️',
'🎵🔬',
'🎵🧪',
'🎵🧬',
'🎵⚕️',
'🎵🥼',
'🎵📏',
'🎻🧠', // Psyche addition
'🎵⚙️',
]
I keep adding these as I think of relevant ones, Psyche wanted 🎻🧠 so I added that in. If you want something weird, I will add it (assuming it’s not too esoteric).
What does this mean in practice?
In practice, this means that you can tweet all the dumb thoughts you want on your main account, then if and when you want to say something to the music and science community, you just slap on anything from the above list and the post/tweet gets picked up by the #musicscience feed.
From a reader’s perspective, if you want to check BlueSky and not see all your colleague’s opinions on their favourite sports team, you can just look at the #musicscience feed.
What might we lose moving to BlueSky?
What I am describing here is an infrastructure for researchers, scientists, academics, and nerds to talk to each other. As of now, there really is not a big public outreach or #scicomm component to any of this. That might change if more and more people adopt the platform. But what I liked about Twitter was staying up to date with current publications and discussions between academics. So if you want to keep reaching a bigger audience, maybe don’t delete your Twitter.
But what is nice about having the whole feed thing is that WERE this community to grow, we could change the custom rules on the feed to make it so that only approved people can show up on the feed (aka no man-ifestos on how the overtone series actually explains all of music and why has no one ever written about this yet?! people masquerading as active scientists) and if someone is rude and behaves inappropriately, I will ban them from the feed.
How do I join?
Right now, you do need an invite code to join. I get these pretty regularly, so just get in touch with me (knowing I don’t check Twitter often anymore!!) and I will be happy to give these to anyone who has been a part of the #musicscience community.
Once you’re there, it’s literally just like Twitter, with some new terminology. Just find the #musicscience feed and you’ll see many familiar faces.
As the current evangelist for BlueSky, I will do my best to be a good host and interact with you and help out as it slowly grows.
I don’t have the energy to join another god damn website. Why this and not mastodon? What if this just totally flops?
I feel that. I think BlueSky has more potential given what I have read about the feeds, but it’s more by total sheer will I am trying to push all the music and science people into using BlueSky.
It could totally flop, but that’s just life on the internet. I am trying to be optimistic about it and imagine how nice it would be to just have a space on the internet, moderated by researchers, for researchers, to talk about research.
Why don’t I write more posts using this Socratic dialogue method?
I don’t know, this post has been infinity easier to write than anything else I have tried to write.