Well, nothing really. I’m not talking about setting up a mastadon instance; which is like a twitter server. I’m quite happy communicating and sharing all my twitter-shaped thoughts here in the forum.
What I’m talking about is a different kind of instance called FunkWhale (https://funkwhale.audio). My understanding is that, like mastadon, it’s based on ActivityPub, and thus is a member of the “fediverse” and can share/interact with mastadon instances. But unlike mastadon, its purpose is hosting music, metadata, and playlists. My hope would be to use it as an alternative to SoundCloud.
Now, I can always post an MP3 directly here or in a tweet or “toot”, so why bother with SoundCloud or a SoundCloud replacement?
For me, the answer is I like having a playlist of my music or collections of the different types of music I make that’s browsable. That’s what I’m hoping a FunkWhale instance could provide (it’s supposed to be a clone of the late GrooveShark, so I think that should be possible). But we’ll have to see. I can’t join any of the existing FunkWhale instances — they’re all timing out (maybe not a great sign?)
Regardless, I wouldn’t dream of just grabbing a linode host, installing packages, and hoping for the best. I’d pay one of the fediverse hosting providers to run and maintain it for me. Most of them are completely swamped right now (see above), so it may take time for this to happen.
Also, I wouldn’t throw the doors open to any rando looking to launder their pirated music collection. I envision just a small instance just for Elektronauts who want a place to stream music of their own creation. Maybe it would be invite only or something?
Lots of unanswered questions, but it seems like there’s enough interest that it will be worth trying to answer them. So I’ll keep digging and experimenting and follow up here with anything I find. Everyone else please do the same!
) music.