I spend many weekends building projects for myself. One weekend I wanted an ad-free online radio player. Instead, I accidentally built a radio station powered by Bluesky.
Thousands of people share music there every day: a song they love, a record they just bought, or a performance most people have never heard. That felt like a better playlist than another recommendation engine optimizing for engagement.
The internet is the DJ
Kanada Radio does not host the music. Each station is a live query against the AT Protocol. The catalog changes constantly because it reflects what real people are sharing now, not what a platform decided would keep someone listening longest.
Humans curate the music simply by expressing enthusiasm. The software turns that distributed activity into something you can play.
No account required
The player does not require sign-in. Putting music behind an account would communicate that collecting user data mattered more than the listening experience. For this project, it did not.
Analytics without surveillance
I still wanted to understand whether people used the site, so I wrote a small analytics system. It counts page views and clicks on our own server. It uses no cookies and no third-party trackers. Visitor fingerprints are one-way hashes that rotate daily.
The system can tell us that hundreds of people visited on Tuesday. It cannot tell us who they were. That limitation is intentional.
The best projects often begin with a personal problem
Kanada Radio was not the result of a product roadmap or a trend report. It began because I wanted a calmer, more human way to discover music. Sometimes useful software appears when you solve your own problem carefully enough that other people recognize it as theirs too.