Why ATProto and Bluesky matter to artists. Or at least why it matters to me.

I do many things in life, but the first thing that I would say to talk about myself, is that I am an artist, in the first place a musician. My creative drive is the essence of what I am.

I started to grow an interest in the internet and technology around 2006, when the first social media apps started to emerge. Something like MySpace was an empowering revolution for musicians and music fans. For the first time, it was possible to discover and talk directly to bands across the globe, no matter how small and niche they might be. Twitter came along and YouTube, total new ways to connect with a potential audience for your art. It was the time of Kevin Kellys essay about '1,000 True Fans '. I felt that with enough entrepreneurial mindset it was possible to make a living of my creative drive.

I got sucked into the local web startup ecosystem of Twitter meetups, barcamps and unconferences. It was a wild mix of idealists, futurists, marketing people and entrepreneurs with networks reaching out to business angels and venture capitalists. I guess that a lot of people saw me as a weird, artsy outsider, but I tried to build my own startup: a dashboard for musicians to manage all their social media accounts.

I was probably not great at selling my own idea, I didn't find a technical co-founder and I slowly started to code myself. Coding became a new output of my creative drive and I started to enjoy it more and more.

At the same time, in 2010, I was part of a band, that blew up overnight in our little country Belgium with a big radio hit. My entrepreneurial DIY attitude became a valuable asset. I managed the band while playing in it. I did all the administrative and coordinating work and I tried to incorporate some innovative web ideas into our more experimental projects. The energy and the motivation for my startup faded away (and it had burnt most of my savings).

From 2013 on we tried to go more internationally. Touring abroad is more expensive. Building up a name in new territories meant playing for lower fees. Cracks in the DIY philosophy appeared. It didn't seem financially sustainable to provide an income for a four piece band, even if the manager -- me -- was in the band. Maybe it would have worked better to collaborate with more established music industry players?

In 2014, as a musician I no longer felt aligned with the sound that the band was pursuing. We decided that I would concentrate on the management. The new album was not as well received by the public. At the end of the year the other band members and I decided to part ways. The year before I had met some interesting people in Switzerland during one of our tours. I went back to Switzerland quite often and I started to build a new network there.

In 2016 I made a bold decision: I permanently moved to Switzerland and started an internship as a software engineer. Financially, living off music wasn't an option. I wanted a more stable income, and not in some underpaid culture related job. I hoped that the higher salaries in software development would allow me to work less over time, to reduce my workload and spend more time on my music. After some experiments under another name, I started a solo project under my first name, Hilke . I released albums in 2021, 2024 and 2025.

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Nowadays artists no longer need a social media dashboard, because the landscape has completely consolidated. Instagram is the only thing that matters. Every artists tries to get in big Spotify playlists. A younger generation is mainly on Tiktok, and apparently, some new music trends blow up there, but I feel to old to adapt to this hyperactive pace of low quality video bites.

Something else happens, while I am recording my latest album, 'Am I Angry Enough?'. Trump gets reelected, and I notice quite late, during the summer of 2024, how Elon Musk is using his money and the social media channel he owns to support a very troubling politic discourse.

I almost forgot to mention another big change I made from 2013 on: we usually call it a gender transition. In hindsight, I understand that questioning gender, playing wit the binary, transitioning, is another expression of my creative drive. We call it a transgender identity, but that is not actually how I feel and understand it. The only identity I subscribe to, is t he identity of a creative artist , and 'trans', that is what society perceives it as. My 'trans identity' is a politicisation of my creative drive. It is not something that I chose myself, it is a label that society chose to appease its discomfort. And all those queer, gender non-conforming people, they mainly claim the word, to stand up for their right to exist.

This right to exist, it gets more broadly under attack when Trump is reelected. For the first time, 12 years after I started exploring gender in public, I feel no longer safe. Zuckerberg claims Facebook and Instagram overmoderated, and is now giving free rein to hate speech while cutting DEI programs at his company.

With a couple of musicians friends, we feel that a red line is crossed, and we quickly create a small group and organise some workshops to understand if other people have similar feelings. Our whole "business" is dependent on two or three giant tech companies, whose CEOs casually join the diner table of (and open their pockets for) an authoritarian fascist.

As I am the 'techie' person in our group, I mainly start to research the alternatives to Instagram and Tiktok (X is not really a thing for artists over here). I look into Mastodon and Pixelfed. Bluesky also looks promising, but the recent political developments suddenly caused me to deeply distrust platforms running on US servers. The Fediverse appears difficult to explain to my peers, it is almost impossible to find interesting accounts out of the blue on Mastodon. The technical vision and the ethos of the Bluesky people start to convince me more and more. It is easy to sign up and see something interesting right away. Starter packs and custom feeds are a game changer after my first experiences with the Fediverse. I am convinced: this is the thing that can work for artists to stay connected as a community and at the same time have the opportunity to increase reach to potential fans.

I start a new custom feed, ' Swiss music scene '. I relentlessly try to convince my peers to gradually make the switch from Instagram to Bluesky. A couple of them do, but most of them stay a bit hesitant, although they certainly understand the ethical dilemma. They are rather burnt out by spending too much time on social media to self-promote on Instagram. Their audience is still there, even if they need to spend more and more advertising budget to actually be seen in someone's feed. How much energy is there left to try out a new platform (even if you understand that it is a protocol) where your target audience is not yet really present? In an ecosystem that is just emerging and is struggling with a lot of growing pains, with less than perfect apps and too much 'work in progress'?

I understand their energy levels and their hesitations, but I am above all convinced that an open internet and the philosophy of the AT Protocol is the way to go. Flashes needs more money so that the team can grow and they can iron out the glitches. I am looking forward to the equivalent of Instagram Stories on Flashes, so that I can finally say to my friends: this is a mature enough alternative to Instagram, and it is run from Germany, on European servers.

We need to work on more PDS infrastructure in Europe and fund new innovative ideas about social interaction on the web. I think we also need new paradigms about how to finance this technical infrastructure. Maybe we can leverage the networking effect of the biggest artist cooperations we have in Europe: copyright collecting societies like GEMA, SACEM, Suisa, etc. Maybe those organisations can offer PDS infrastructure for their members?

And maybe we can even start to build an alternative to streaming , built on the AT protocol, that gives artists agency over how they want to make money with their music. Something that empowers them to follow their creative drive in a way that is financially sustainable.

I feel just like how I felt in 2007, when the internet was buzzing with hopeful energy. And I hope that this time my acquired coding skills can be used for some creative projects with social impact. I hope that, also in this respect, my creative drive can thrive.

Let's not make the mistakes from the past, and leave the internet into the hands of a group of people who were not all interested in a social and ethical web, but turned out to be a bunch of eugenetic fascists.

Let's do better. We can just do things.