Twitter was once thriving place for dialogue, exchanging ideas, sharing resources, and meeting people. Around November 2024 (and earlier) many music educators, academics, and people who were interested in the early vibrancy, generativity, and supportive environment of Twitter left “X” and began re-building community in alternative platforms such as Bluesky and Mastadon.
This page shares resources to find your Music Ed people and make the most of social media platforms that are decentralized and not controlled by large for-profit corporate entities.
General Information and Context
- Ongoing News on Alternative Social Media Platforms (The Verge)
- What’s the Difference Between Mastodon, Bluesky, and Threads? (Electronic Frontier Foundation)
- Differences between Bluesky and Facebook
- An Educator Perspective on the Exodus from Twitter to Bluesky
- Background and Information about BlueSky
Bluesky Resources
You can find me on Bluesky at etobias-musiced
General Tips & “How To” Information on Using Bluesky
Finding People and Communities on Bluesky
Starter Parks are sets of people to follow on Bluesky, usually organized around a theme or topic that someone curates. You can search for and look through a starter kit and then click one button to add everyone from the starter kit OR manually add whoever you want to add from the set.
- Directory of all “Starter Packs” on Bluesky
- Music Education specific Starter Packs on Bluesky
- Educators (of all kinds) on Bluesky
- My list of “Music Educators” – people (whoever I can find) who identify as music educators on Bluesky
- EduSky (feed for educators posting on Bluesky) also #EduSky
- AcademicSky (feed for academics posting on Bluesky) also #AcademicSky
Tools and Resources for Augmenting BlueSky
- Directory of tools and applications for Bluesky
- Extensions and Projects built around Bluesky
- How to use your website as your Bluesky username
- Sky Follower Bridge
- A tool to help you migrate your social connections from X to Bluesky – works great!
- Porto (Tweet migration tool)
- Porto is a chrome plug in that lets you import tweets from X to your Bluesky account – I’m probably waiting until it includes the timestamp info before I use this but I have exported all of my data from X.
- Deck Blue
- A fantastic interface to organize your BlueSky into columns of lists, feeds, searches, and other ways of displaying your social network (similar to TweetDeck for those familiar).
- Bluesky bookmarks
- A plugin that lets you bookmark posts in Bluesky so you can return to them later.
Bluesky, Research, and Publishing
- Tracking and sharing research publications on Bluesky with Altmetric
- Use action intent links to create buttons & for sharing research via Bluesky
- Tag Bluesky posts regarding education and research with #EduSky and #AcademicSky