Funkwhale might be the most overlooked Fediverse project
Funkwhale might be the most overlooked Fediverse project
and I am trying to figure out what is missing to get more people interested and using it.
A link to the project would be a good start.
After extensive personal efforts of pasting the copied project name into the google search bar (because i wasn't going to type each and every letter of that name) i can proudly help you out of your missery!
Here you go. https://www.funkwhale.audio/
So if you have a good mix of friends who kept/ripped their CD/Vynil collection or bought songs from their favorite indie musicians, you can end up with a pretty extensive library. This makes it a decent (and legal) alternative to sneaker-net piracy.
Isn't that still not considered legal?
Legality aside, this is the huge barrier of entry for most people, I'd think.
Yeah, I'm pretty sure it's been ruled you technically aren't even allowed to make digital backup copies of your media. There's just no world they'd go after you for that.
Since I'm German and pay an extra fee with every storage medium for it I sure am allowed to do just that. Even though they try to make it absurdly hard for you to do so.
I can even share it with friends and family, just not put it out for the whole world to use it.
The libraries you share can be set to private or "invite-only". So, if you share only with a small group of friends and not make it publicly available it should still be under fair use.
I'm not a lawyer, so I'll defer to this article talking to one about this type of use-case as a result of the Covid pandemic.
https://www.gamespot.com/articles/is-streaming-movies-to-friends-through-discord-and/1100-6476735/
"Fair use comes in a couple of flavors," the professor said. "There is--let's call it the 'small uses,' the quotations and quotes and clips; there is 'satire, parody, transformation;' and there is one thing I think of as 'reasonable, normal consumer uses,' which can include all media, provided it's very personal and appropriately limited to things you already had some kind of access to.
I think the third is the part of Fair Use that you're talking about. But he goes on to say:
The case gets worse as you get to larger and longer media like watching an entire movie; the case gets worse as you raise the quality of the streaming, so as you switch to streaming it through the software itself rather than just picking it up with the microphone; the case gets worse as you include more people and as people are less related to each other--as you get beyond the immediate nuclear family into a larger group of friends."
So streaming to even your family is already a gray area, but it seems that doing what you're suggesting is a much weaker case for Fair Use.
He also doesn't mention the amount and frequency of sharing, which would likely factor in.
If you create a library of every album you ever owned, with a large amount of high quality on demand streamable copyrighted content to all your friends, you're squarely in "most likely not fair use, but you won't know until they catch you" territory.
It all comes down to how likely do you think you'll be caught, and what you think you can prove in court. I definitely would not want to be the first person the RIAA makes an example of.
The other use-cases are very cool seeming. Killing Bandcamp should be every music lover's goal, and this seems like a good platform to do it with.
The problem with funkwhale is legality. Unless somebody buys the streaming rights for copyrighted music, only CC music or copyleft music can be streamed, or stuff like podcasts uploaded and made by the content creators. However, many people with podcasts are trying to make money, which makes this a non-starter without some method of compensation.
What it first needs is a way to compensate content creators, then it needs publicity. If you got a bunch of random people to upload their shit because they can make money with it, then we're talking. Until then, people like me won't use it as users for lack of content nor as hosters for fear of legal repercussions.
Edit: Also, even for private use it doesn't fulfill my needs. It doesn't have smart playlists and last I checked didn't have star ratings (only hearts). Back when I evaluated it, it didn't have a quick track view either.
IMO, if this were hosted on I2P and I2P had decent speeds, it would take off like coke in a bottle.
Anti Commercial AI thingy
Inserted with a keystroke running this script on linux with X11
#!/usr/bin/env nix-shell #!nix-shell -i bash --packages xautomation xclip sleep 0.2 (echo '::: spoiler Anti Commercial AI thingy [CC BY-NC-SA 4.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/) Inserted with a keystroke running this script on linux with X11 ```bash' cat "$0" echo '``` :::') | xclip -selection clipboard xte "keydown Control_L" "key V" "keyup Control_L"What it first needs is a way to compensate content creators
Agreed. This is why I wrote a proposal to fund musicians, and it's also why I'm adding crowdfunding support to Communick.
I have a Funkwhale instance set up and it is part of the services provided for those that subscribe to Communick. It does have some users, but to be honest I'm more interested now in making it more appealing for musicians who want to distribute/promote their own content, rather than use it as a "music locker" system.
It doesn’t have smart playlists
It has the "radio" feature, which sort of works like a smart playlist, no?
Agreed. This is why I wrote a proposal to fund musicians, and it’s also why I’m adding crowdfunding support to Communick.
I read it and it's very similar to other monetisation proposals on the web! What surprises me is how people are misunderstanding it in that thread 🤔 It might help to work on mockups or diagrams to make it clearer (draw.io is good for this, but choose whatever tool you like). Honestly, I think if what you propose were also implemented in peertube, it would take off.
Good luck!
It has the “radio” feature, which sort of works like a smart playlist, no?
Sort of, but not quite. I make smartlists like "unrated songs", "unrated with musicbrainz tags", "unrated with musicbrainz tags and never played", "songs with at least 4 stars and tagged happy, summer, electro", "songs in playlist 'roadtrip 2020' or 'beach vacay 2023' or 'beach vibes' and unique artist and unique album". My library is quite large and with these playlists it helps discover music therein or play exactly what I'm in the mood for.
Navidrome, subsonic, and a bunch of other self-hosted solutions do not provide these features, and if they do, they don't support large libraries. Funkwhale might support large libraries (haven't tried with mine), but it already doesn't have smartlists, so it's a no-go for me.Again, good luck with the monetisation idea! I really like it.
Anti Commercial AI thingy
Inserted with a keystroke running this script on linux with X11
#!/usr/bin/env nix-shell #!nix-shell -i bash --packages xautomation xclip sleep 0.2 (echo '::: spoiler Anti Commercial AI thingy [CC BY-NC-SA 4.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/) Inserted with a keystroke running this script on linux with X11 ```bash' cat "$0" echo '``` :::') | xclip -selection clipboard xte "keydown Control_L" "key V" "keyup Control_L"
Maybe it is overlooked, but is that unexpected when it seems to cater to such a specific niche? I'm struggling to see why I would use it. If I want to play my own music, I can just use my local setup that uses better apps and has my playlists already. If I want discovery, I can use last.fm, YouTube Music, and other venues. If I want to share music with other people, I start to see a point, but would rather direct people to use Soulseek or a different self-hosted solution that allows downloads. Speaking of, why is there no download link on the files? The website is sharing copyrighted content either way, what difference does it make whether it's saved or streamed to my PC? At least with a download option I could see it as a Soulseek alternative.
And personally, it seems like a lot of effort to upload and reorganise my collection when I can't trust the server and my effort to still be there a few years down the line. After all, storage costs money and who knows when the server host will get bored, run out of spare cash, or get taken down for hosting licensed music. This is before we get into the fact that even the shitty opus re-encodes I keep are over 60gb (the instance I found only supports 50). Of course you'll tell me to host my own instance, but that is narrowing the niche once again as I would have to move my music to a server and learn how to host Funkwhale and would be opening myself up to legal problems.
Excuse my skepticism but I can only really see the use for either:
- Music collectors that want to share music with each other but for some reason don't want to expand their library via downloading.
- Users with a tiny or non-existent library that don't mind locking themselves into another website they don't control and can lose their data from at any moment.
the instance I found only supports 50
This was my issue with it. If you're uploading FLACs you use that up quickly.
Obviously giving everyone 100s of GiBs is a big ask for anyone hosting such a service, I understand that.
I described another case in the blog post: it would be really cool if indie labels or indie artists got together around their own instances, so that they could distribute/promote their own content with less restrictive licenses.
You're right, that's a very fair use case, and it would also boost the end-user appeal. I didn't address it as I was fully in a user mindset.
But why would i post my music on a platform i can’t make money on and that has little to no discovery features? The site can barely be used without logging in and i haven’t seen any compatibility with mastodon to take advantage of activitypub and reaching new listeners
I
don'tdidn't understand how it works 🥺Edit 2: Honestly, it just takes someone to endorse it and it'll be huge. But for me personally, I'd rather own my music.
Por que no los dos? Add a download or p2p library so if you find something cool on Funkwhale you can snag it and host it yourself. Oh shit, I just created soulseek.
I’d rather own my music.
I don't think it's an either/or proposition. Given how cheap storage is nowadays, I'm also used to just have my music collection replicated through my devices and listen locally, but being able to upload that library and share with my friends (and in turn, get access to their library as well) seems like a very nice way to discover more stuff and increase the range of available content, without losing "ownership" of anything. Unlike Spotify or the other streaming services, there is no central entity determining what should be available or not.
(Of course, this doesn't mean that is a good idea to just upload your collection to a Funkwhale instance and make it public for everyone. That will be a very fast to getting kicked out. Or worse, to be receiving a nastygram from some IP lawyer)
It is overlooked because filesharing gets you into trouble and Plex is for various reasons the much more evolved alternative.
It's pretty great!
Well, as someone who has been trying to launch a functioning Lemmy instance for nearly a year now, I can tell you, knowing not the slightest thing about funkwhale, that I would eat my hat if the documentation isn't an all but absent shit show.
My favorite part was learning that my domain was creating a completely new cert from lets encrypt with each deployment and no way of recovering them at all. So after 5 attempts, you have to wait 60 days (or whatever) for them to expire. That was awesome. I messaged the devs about that one and they literally said "we didn't think of that"... 😑
And so much shit goes tits up if you don't deploy it perfectly the very first time. Don't get me wrong, I love the fediverse, but JTFC I hate the fucking fediverse.
I don't know, maybe it seems that you are experiencing a lot of the pains that comes with learning about self-hosting, which is fine and laudable but not at all an issue exclusive to Fediverse software.
Maybe my question is: are you trying to deploy your Lemmy for this long for the learning process, or do you just want to have a server of your own? If the latter, why not just go one of the hosting providers?
Look, I hear what you're saying. And no offense intended, but people like you crow about things like fediverse not being supported... All the while, these applications are not supported by their own developers. And unfortunately, not unlike the majority of my experiences with Linux issues, every time I reach out for help I'm told the same old hat story, "this isn't meant for beginners".
And the "pains that come with learning about self-hosting" are so unnecessary and in my opinion quite apparently avoidable.
"Well, did you change the port number to this number that isn't referenced anywhere in the documentation? It's pretty obvious to anyone that's been doing this for 20 years - who would be able to recognize that it's a step everyone would need to do to deploy - so there's literally no conceivable reason why that would be included...
###IN THE TUTORIAL
...Maybe you shouldn't be doing this."
is this like a decentralised plex for music? like if i have a set of flac i can simply create an instance, upload those and use that instance with my friends like a spotify?
Ok, guess I finally have to check out what it's exactly about, then.
The first step would be understanding what portion of listeners fit the use case you’re trying to solve.
I’m an example that doesn’t. I have no interests in the social functionality but do want a large catalog of essentially everything. You’re not likely to attract someone like me, regardless of how good the project may be. So are most of role like you or most people like me?
The "problems" I am trying to solve are a bit like bug #1 on Ubuntu's Issue tracker:
- I don't want to have an Internet which is accessible to large majority of people through "platforms" controlled by large corporations.
- Surveillance Capitalism is a net negative for society. People should be able to access services without having to give up their privacy.
- The attention-based economy has caused terrible damages to civil debate, media institutions are no longer focused on factual reporting and depend on polarization, emotional manipulation of issues and only report on things that are favorable or inoffensive to the Status Quo.
- Because of increased automation, knowledge workers will be increasingly pushed out of meaningful and well-paying jobs and will be forced to try to monetize every aspect of their life. There are no more hobbies, everything is a "hustle" or a "side project".
I hoped that all the things that I've worked on with Communick were made to the sense of mitigating these problems.
- Provide open source platforms which can be self-hosted, but do not demand users to become part-time admins.
- Instead of ad-based revenue, make a honest value proposition: I offer a service, people pay to use it.
- Create a system where people can allocate a budget to support artists and free/libre developers, to foment a reconstruction of a more open culture.
Needs a mobile app
Is there an official Dockerfile?
Okay I'll set up an instance. Lol.
It's not good enough for casuals nor selfhosters.
I got kind of excited about the mention of the "social" aspect, but it turned out a bit nonexistent. Funkwhale seems to be just a way to set up a file sharing site for music.
Consider it harder.