How to make a lofi music feed on Bluesky

Crossposted on my other blog: https://low-frequency.beehiiv.com/p/how-to-make-a-lofi-music-feed-on-bluesky

Last week, I whipped up a something fun: a feed on Bluesky that only shows posts with YouTube, Bandcamp, Soundcloud, and Mirlo embeds from people who I personally believe post cool music. I didn't need to write code or deal with an AI or anything. Anyone who can use Bluesky can make one just like mine:

sug's music feed by @sugzone.bsky.social

music posted by people I like

This all started because my friend Glorb posted a real groovy track (typical).

And I said to myself... wow I need to be checking my main feed more. The typical way I use Bluesky is that I check lists I've made for certain topics (like the news) so that my regular feed is a chill and refreshing place where I basically only see posts from friends and William Gibson.

And then I said to myself... wow what if I had a feed that was just links to music. Ends up it's actually really easy. Like so easy that if Bluesky existed when I was researching what became Freq, I might not have even bothered actually building Freq. That's another way of saying that as someone who has been very invested for years in getting the music web off of the surveillant monopolist platforms, I'm really excited by Bluesky and ATproto.

Ok, I'll get to it. Here's how you can make a feed just like mine.

The easy way

Step 1: Find some friends on Bluesky

So first off, you need a Bluesky account. I'm pretty sure sign-ups are open. Next, you'll need to find some accounts on there that post cool music you like. Ideally, you already have some friends on Bluesky posting cool music.

Step 2: Curate your list

Now, make a new list and call it something like "music feed list." This won't actually be your music feed, but it will be the list of users who you want your music feed to keep track of. Add some users to it, like those friends we were talking about earlier.

Step 3: Build the feed with a... well... feed builder

The next step requires using something called a no code feed builder. Blah blah blah. It just means you can use another app to do the dirty work for you and spit out a music feed. I used SkyFeed because it's free and it worked. There's also Bluesky Feed Creator, but that's only free sometimes and the stuff that is free didn't do the trick.

Go ahead and log in to SkyFeed using your Bluesky credentials.

When it asks for an "app password" it's not asking for your password, but for a specific password generated by Bluesky. To get that, go to Settings -> Privacy and Security -> App Passwords then create a new app password and title it something like "skyfeed". Copy that, paste it into the SkyFeed login, and you're in!

Here's a little GIF showing how that works.

Once you're logged into SkyFeed, click on Feed Builder on the menu.

Name your feed something like "sug's music feed" (use a good name in case you want others to follow it too)

The Import block decides the source of your posts and how far back the feed goes. Click Entire Network to open a menu and select List. As you can see, it defaults to 24 hours, but I chose 7 days because I might only check this feed once or twice a week. Finally, after you selected List, a button popped up with green text that says Your Lists. Click that, and select the list you made called "music feed list."

The RegEx block sets up your filters so you only see posts with embeds from specific places. Just go ahead and paste this into it: youtu|soundcloud|bandcamp|mirlo and then in the Target list, select Link and unselect everything else. You can add other stuff to that regex list too, like nts or wfmu or whatever other sources you want to appear in your feed. Just use that little vertical bar thingie that I don’t know what it’s called. So like youtu|soundcloud|bandcamp|mirlo|wfmu|nts

You can keep or remove the Remove block. I removed it, since sometimes people I follow post cool music in reply to other people, so I don't want to remove that from my music feed.

The Sort by block is configured for "creation date" "descending." That just means your feed will be in reverse chronological order. Works for me.

Click the Publish Feed button, and give your feed some description like "just the tunes please".

Click the green link to your feed that gets generated. That will open in Bluesky.

Pin it!

That's it! That's literally all it takes.

Why this is so cool

It's just, like, a Twitter style feed with only music?

Sometimes stuff that's this simple seems really mundane. That's a deception. I have a special little term for this phenomenon: "deceptively simple."

I really miss the days when I used my RSS reader to follow a bunch of music blogs and get my mind blown multiple times a week, so I have a big soft spot for stuff like this. And on one level, this is kind of like an RSS reader, except instead of showing you publications you subscribe to, it's showing you just music from accounts you follow.

But on another level, this is a potential way to create a really exciting network of curated music. Like I mentioned earlier, other people can follow your feed. In the frankly delightful fantasy world that I live in, friends and cool bloggers and my favorite DJs on WFMU and Particle FM and NTS would all curate feeds like these, and then I could follow all those and find so much crazy stuff.

My ideal situation would be that Bluesky or some other ATproto service builds functionality for Lists maintained by multiple users, so I could collaborate on a List with my friends to make our ultimate music feed. Maybe my pals at Particle FM would want to make one for their station too. And so on and so forth.

Also, it's very worth stating for the uninitiated: unlike Instagram and Twitter and whatever else, you own your data. Not Bluesky or SkyFeed or whoever else on ATproto. That means if you ever want to stop using Bluesky, you can still take your lists and feeds and whatever other data with you. You could even still follow everyone you currently follow on Bluesky. There's lots of talk about how the music world feels held hostage by the big platforms these days, and all I'm saying is you wouldn't run that risk using Bluesky.

The hard way to build a feed

Ok, I can't say there's an easy way and then not mention the hard way. So instead of using a no code feed generator, you'd write code to generate a feed.

You'd want to clone and modify this GitHub repo: https://github.com/bluesky-social/feed-generator

This post explains one way to host a feed at home: https://atproto.com/blog/serving-the-for-you-feed

And in conclusion

Thanks for reading bye!

This post probably has typos in it because of my ADHD and dyslexia. It's a wonder I manage to write posts at all. Hope it doesn't drive you nuts :)