Visibility & Publishing

The three visibility levels — private, unlisted and public — and what each one means for who can open your track.

Every track you own is private until you decide otherwise. Publish is the verb that changes that: it makes a track publicly discoverable in the Explore gallery. Visibility is set from the row's control in Your music, and the current setting shows as a coloured badge next to the title.

Publishing is deliberate, and it is a different thing from sharing a track to edit. Making a track public does not invite anyone to jam on it, and inviting someone to jam does not make the track public. The two decisions are independent.

The three levels

Private

Only you can open the track. To anyone else — signed in or not, link or no link — it does not exist. This is the default posture for work in progress.

Unlisted

Anyone with the link can open the track, but it never appears in the public gallery. This is the setting for sharing something with specific people without publishing it to the world: send the link to whoever you want, and only they will have it.

Public

Publishing a track makes it public: it appears in the Explore gallery for everyone, and anyone can open it — including people without an account. Public tracks can also be remixed by other signed-in users.

Unlisted and public rows carry a copy share link action, which puts the track's URL on your clipboard. Links look like:

/track/midnight-bassline-4kQx9r

The identifier at the end is what resolves the track; the words are a readable slug from the title. Renaming a track updates the slug and permanently redirects the old URL, so links already in circulation continue to work.

Changing your mind

Visibility can be changed at any time, in either direction. Making a public track private removes it from the gallery and closes it to everyone else immediately.

Note: Anyone who already remixed your track keeps their copy. A remix is a genuine copy made at the moment it was taken, not a live reference to your original — so making the original private later does not retract it.

On the roadmap: publish to your own Bluesky account

Note: This is a planned feature, not something you can do yet. It is described here so you know where publishing is heading.

Today, publishing puts a track in our own Explore gallery. A planned fast-follow will let you also publish a track to your own AT Protocol account — the same decentralized network that Bluesky runs on. When it ships:

  • It will be optional, and layered on top of normal publishing. Nothing changes unless you connect an ATProto account and choose to use it.
  • The track record is written to your personal data server, so a published track becomes a portable, self-owned artifact you can take with you — not just a row in our database.
  • Your email stays your login. Connecting Bluesky is only about where a published track can live; it is not a new way to sign in.
  • Collaboration stays on our own servers. Live co-editing does not move to ATProto — only the one-way publish step does.

Until it ships, publishing means the Explore gallery, and only that.

Visibility is not collaboration

Visibility controls who can open a track. It is a separate question from who can edit one with you in real time — that is collaboration, and it has its own membership model. A track being public does not let strangers edit your session.