Artist app diary (1): the general idea

I have been thinking for some time now to build something artist focused on atproto. I came back from the Atmosphere Conf in Vancouver in March with the belief that this was really feasible, but that I first needed to get feedback from the artist community to know what to build. I have been talking a lot with musicians in my local community, and last week I went to DWeb Camp, where I hosted a workshop to find out what are the pain points, the needs, but also the big dreams of artists, to create a new Open Social Web, catered to the artist community and their audiences. I came back with some international artist connections and also with inputs from even more diverse perspectives, because DWeb people also bring other protocols, P2P beliefs and data sovereignty principles with them. The last couple of weeks there has also been some chatter on Bluesky about art communities, which led to even more different perspectives in a group chat started by Anna from Germ.

Somehow this input stream became more and more chaotic, which prompted me to take some time to write down the main ideas that I have in my head, so that is doesn't get completely flooded by a tornado of "what if we"-s from all kind of places.

A multipart diary is becoming a kind of genre on this platform, so I plan to spread my thoughts over a couple of posts in the coming weeks. Right now I have more or less three subjects on my mind, and this post will tackle the first one:

More fun than Instagram

I mainly got into the open social space, because I got incredibly worried about Instagram's stronghold on my artistic work and on the music scene that I am part of. I looked for alternatives like Mastodon, Pixelfed, Bluesky and Flashes and tried to onboard my peers to those apps. I love the spirit and the beliefs of those initiatives, but it stays difficult to convince non-technical musicians, who are actually burnt out by social media pressure, to try new apps that can still be a bit clunky or buggy, are more difficult to understand, or have subpar user experience. Moreover, they still keep posting on Instagram, because they still have some reach and an audience there. As a Swiss musician on Bluesky, you are posting a bit into the void, because the Bluesky audience (rather into tech, journalism, politics, etc.) is not really the music community audience. The microblogging format is also not really a format that suits artists very well.

However, I think we should try to emancipate ourselves of passive doom thinking and learned helplessness, and build something which is just better, more interesting and more fun than Instagram. I am convinced that artists and creative app builders can make such a thing work, and word of mouth will do the rest.

Keeping up, slowing down

One of my main frustrations with Instagram & Co is the focus on the superficial, fast pace algorithmic feed. Art often needs a slower pace and more depth. It can be cool to have a 30 second reel with behind the scenes footage of a band tour, but often I want to immerse myself much deeper into an artist's universe. What kind of books do they read? Which research did they do, that lead to those song lyrics? Do they have other multidisciplinary artistic outputs that I didn't know about?

What I imagine, is an app that has different paces. I still think that there is value in 'keeping up' with what is going on with the people and the scene that you follow, in the form of a feed of new songs and works, where you learn about upcoming events, etc. However, I also want there to be an important part of the app, where I can 'slow down', get a deep dive into an artist's universe, where I can be inspired, surprised or even challenged, where I might be invited to move away from the screen and get an old fashioned book that this specific artist recommends, from the library.

There would be two main tabs in this app, one for 'keeping up' and one for 'slowing down'.

The 'keeping up' tab should feel familiar and bring us back to the 'good days' of Instagram: without the ads, with beautiful content, visually attractive (less text focused than Bluesky), where you feel the connection to your whole social graph, not the dopamine driven, pushy algorithm that we have now on Instagram. Bluesky features such as custom feeds and starter packs, can be important tools to make people connect to their community. To new users we could suggest more specific art-centric and local community feeds than the one-size-fits-all Bluesky or Flashes offerings. I think a lot of people feel still attached to the Stories feature of Instagram and we might have to offer them something similar. We can come up with some audience specific extra features (in comparison with e.g. Flashes), such as nice Bandcamp (or subvert.fm) in-feed players, or an integration of the events lexicon, so that artist's event announcements also show up in the feed, with a button to immediately RSVP, as a sign for your friends that you plan to be at this event.

'Slowing down' would be a playground where one artist or artist collective can show or curate something completely different and much deeper. Where 'keeping up' feels familiar, the 'slowing down' tab is the place where app users get surprised and inspired. It is a spot where they can wander around for a much longer time. I imagine it to be like a digital exhibition of an 'artist in residence', an exhibition that stays around for maybe a month. I tried to explain it with different comparisons: it could be like a digital version of an artist zine, a medium that regained popularity lately. Or like a longer artist feature in a more established print magazine. It can be all types of media, original work or a curation of other people's art and research. It can be a list of favourite books or albums, must-read essays. Ideally it is a front door to discover new stuff outside of the app, into the real world. It should be inspiring and thought-provoking, maybe a critical reflection about what we are used to in the 'keeping up' part of the app. I would be very keen on weird reinterpretations and reimaginations of what a social media app can be, things like anisota, twinkl.social , or my very own 2ⁿ. It could be the ultimate creative showcase of the remixability of data that is so exciting about atproto. But above all, I want artists to come up with things I can't even imagine: it should be a 'carte blanche', that somehow still fits into the framework of the overall app.

One statement of Christine Lemmer-Webber during DWeb Camp struck a cord with me: we need to be careful that we don't completely loose the internet, as the wonderful, creative, decentralised place it was meant to be.

It made me understand that what I try to do with the 'slowing down' tab, is bringing the endless creative potential of websites again into the social media app. There is more to social media than an uniform algorithmic feed. Every 'resident' artist creates their own creative website, that can take all kind of forms, and is embedded and showcased in the 'slowing down' tab. With the 'keeping up' feed we trick a generation that never knew better than the endless algorithmic scroll, to (re)discover the beauty and diversity of the creative internet.

Please reach out to me, if this concept speaks to you (of if you disagree). I am particularly interested in artists who have ideas for the 'artist in app residence'. I have a vision and I can code, but I am not really a designer. I would be thrilled to work with other people on this.