After reading and thinking more… I got to a different conclusion than yesterday. Creating a Funkwhale instance (or any free alternative) as a reaction to the Bandcamp situation is likely to solve no problems and cause frustration to the artists joining and the project promoters. Why?
Decentralization? The Fediverse offers true decentralization, very good to federate specialized communities (i.e. free music produced with Elektron devices) but (imho) not to build alternatives to big centralized platforms like Bandcamp or Soundcloud. Most people wanting a “decentralized” platform today, what really want is decentralized governance of a centralized platform.
A new project? Artists willing to try Mastodon, Funkwhale, Peertube, etc, can do so today, and there are plenty of welcoming instances to choose from. There are also many other projects (open source and not, community driven and not) that these days want to establish Bandcamp / Soundcloud / etc alternatives. Some of them have several people volunteering work for years, some of them have semi-professional or professional structures and funding behind. Some might have connections in the music industry and knowledge about the specific law, payment platforms, etc.
Selling? Most artists concerned about the Bandcamp situation are concerned about “the last record shop”. The word “shop” is very important here. They are interested in selling their music, no matter to how niche audiences and for how small quantities. The Fediverse won’t solve the selling part today, especially not the traditional “selling by item” paradigm. Other paradigms like memberships, patrons, donations… are closer to the ethos and current tech trends of the Fediverse. Here too, if there are artists willing to try these models, they can do so already trying existing platforms, no need to wait for a new project coming from this discussion.
For all these reasons… I’ll continue contributing my bit to the Fediverse instances I’m a member of. I keep being interested in promoting Funkwhale / Peertube specialized instances bringing more artists to the Fediverse, but with the understanding that they have their reasons to exist unrelated to current events on commercial platforms.
There is a lot going on about possible post-Bandcamp alternatives. Two good reads imho:
This one calls to caution, stresses the risk of musicians being pulled by opportunists, and bets on Faircamp as a stopgap while the dust settles:
This one introduces a Fediverse alternative under development (not Funkwhale), coming from people with way more tech muscle and better music industry knowledge that we probably/surely have here:
so i was tinkering around with faircamp the last two days. aaaaand i like it.
the DNS might still be ab it flaky but here we go: https://www.astrokill.eu
let’s see if embedding works:
I’ve been think about creating some kind of platform like this… I think the biggest problems are:
a) webspace
b) copyright
Webspace is just a money problem and it would scale quite nicely. And if it’s a small scale at first, it’s a non-issue. 1GB space can handle about 12 hours of MP3 (192 kbit VBR). It wouldn’t be a problem to run this at home.
Copyright is a problem one cannot solve easily because you’d need to check every upload. And there’s no open standard for that (which would be nice to have…) and all in all, you’ll pay money just to verify that your uploads are OK. However, if all users agreed to upload their music under a creative commons license (there are a few versions…), the need to check would be removed.
Sure, you can lie and upload your Taylor Swift collection anyway but including a report button is no big deal. If a report was submitted, the audio could be hidden until the case is resolved.
I’m thinking small scale here, a few hundred users or so. Having that license would also enable the users to resample stuff which has been uploaded (only for personal use by default) previously.
Most important, the platform itself will only supply the service of giving users some space to upload their audio but not the music itself. The music is owned by the users (again, with the CC license applied).
Actually, I don’t want to quibble too much about terminology, but… Fediverse is decentralized for me. If I understand your proposal correctly, you want to provide centralized storage.
If I had the opportunity to wish for a platform from you, it would probably be based on faircamp and be some kind of registry or aggregator. With the aim of making decentralized hosted music more “discoverable” at a central location.
You’re right I wasn’t thinking about federation at this point. But this could be developed as a server which interacts with the fediverse. The content of a post would be the audio file, much like pixelfed (the alternative to Instagram) is designed for images. But then we’d share the audio data with other servers and the copyright would become a problem again…
Happy to help. All these are great open source community projects actively developed. Their level of federation (ActivityPub support) varies and they are all improving it.
Personally, I’m still looking for something like the “current sounds coming from your gear” thread… Just a place where people upload sound snippets and nothing else. No other kind of communication possible, maybe by resampling… But that’s certainly not the scope of this thread.
No, you’d have an account and a profile like on every other social media site. Your way of communication are just limited to sounds - downloading the music/sounds not being the main purpose, just listening to them in the moment. Maybe just post three new chords you made, a short drum loop that sounded nice or that old field recording of some birds in your backyard.
I wasn’t thinking about federation at this point. But this could be developed as a server which interacts with the fediverse. The content of a post would be the audio file, much like pixelfed (the alternative to Instagram) is designed for images. But then we’d share the audio data with other servers and the copyright would become a problem again…