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/
It’s not about me, it’s about sending people directly to the thing they’re reading about.
I am happy to have helped more that one person then, with my massive effort!
flashbulb handshake
Why, oh why is so hard for some people to comment without the snark?
Anyway, I updated the post. Hope that makes it easier for you to find it now.
Attitudes like this are what turns the general public away from giving something the time of day.
This is not about “the general public”. If your comment was “That sounds interesting but you didn’t put the link to the project”, you’d have achieved the same thing and you wouldn’t sound like the anti-social loser like you do now.
Dang you are super unlikeable
Straight to the personal attacks, I’m sure this can only end well.
This is not how you promote a project…
I am not affiliated with the project. The developers have nothing to do with me. Judging them by my interactions here is unfair to them and makes no sense.
Anyway, my aggressive tone was just in reaction to the initial snarky know-it-all tone from parent. I have no idea when it became acceptable to write in this tone and still be expected a polite response, but here we are.
As much as I dislike getting into stupid internet fights, I am not here to suffer these type of fools. I will respond well when interacting with civil people and I will push back if someone acts out like a bully.
Sorry, but you got offended for nothing. OP rightfully pointed out that it’s crucial to link to what you’re talking about… You taking it personally is completely misplaced.
My issue is with the tone, not the content. I think that Reddit has normalized this style of discourse, and Lemmy is unfortunately imported this as well.
Or maybe it’s a generational thing and this prevalent smugness is a way for teenagers to show detachment since everyone seems to be socialized through screens nowadays?
I don’t know, really, but it’s not something that should be considered socially acceptable.
You have made me actively avoid Project Absence of Details Given just by being associated with my introduction to it.
Calls other guy an anti social loser
Pulled out ad hominem in the same breath
Congratulations, you played yourself hahaha.
I’m getting real “people person” vibes here.
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.
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.
At least in the Netherlands this would still constitute unauthorised copying of licensed material, and therefore be illegal.
Honestly, the question in this case then becomes “how will anyone be able to enforce it?”
ISPs can be compelled to share name/address information of anyone involved in publishing licensed material through the courts. Then they’ll summon you to stop or pay a fairly hefty fine.
You’d have to first establish that the person under the IP is actually sharing copyrighted material. This is easy to track on something like BitTorrent, but virtually impossible through a regular website. You’d have to have someone pretending to be your friend, getting access to your song and then filing a complaint.
They would be able to sue the webhost in order to retrieve basically all the data if they have strong and reasonable suspicions that the website is hosting copyrighted material.
This really isn’t as foolproof in legal terms unfortunately. With torrent websites there’s still some ambiguity as the website doesn’t host the copyrighted material, just the torrent files. But here the website itself is liable, painting a massive legal target on their backs.
hosting copyrighted material.
There are so many “music locker” and “cloud storage” services out there, how come none of them are targeted like you say?
I think you are jumping from “hosting” to “sharing publicly”, which to me seems like a really big jump and, quite frankly, FUD.
They would be able to sue the webhost
Seems like another marketing point for 1984.hosting .
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.
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 streaming companies only start squeezing down on the “people sharing account passwords” for economic reasons, and I don’t recall hearing of anyone being worried about a lawsuit over a clear violation of their ToS. I find it really hard to believe that it would ever make sense for the MPAA to go after someone because they were sharing their music collection with friends/family.
Streaming companies pay streaming license deals for the content they stream.
They have distribution rights. Which you and I do not.
The RIAA is evil enough to kick a grandmother in the face because she remembered her wedding song if it meant they could make a buck.
Not the point, but arguing any further is pointless. When/if anyone gets an actual lawsuit because of their Plex/Navidrome/Funkwhale server being shared with friends and family, I’ll (sadly) concede.
Then feel free to concede…
And maybe don’t give legal advice.
And read up on your very recent history on topics before you talk about them?
I wasn’t giving “legal advice”, but okay… The article is not exactly clear about the source of the material being distributed, so perhaps the case would be different if he could have proved having bought the original movies.
Anyway, you are right. We are living in a world where people can be sued over sharing files with friends and family, so those that are afraid of it shouldn’t do it. Still, It doesn’t make it any less acceptable and we should all be sad about this being the state of affairs. Reading these articles make me want to double down on “pirating” stuff and refuse any corporate service. Copyright law needs an urgent reform, but I doubt we will see anything until we break corporation’s business models.
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 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"
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)
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.
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
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.
Registrations are closed on this pod.
Sure sounds swell.
Much like all other communick instances, registrations are done through the portal. After you register there, you can start your trial and login to it.
It is overlooked because filesharing gets you into trouble and Plex is for various reasons the much more evolved alternative.
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."
Look, this is software that has not even reached version 1.0. Of course it is incomplete. I totally understand your frustration, but if people are telling you “this is not for beginners”, maybe it would be wise to listen to it? You still haven’t answered my question: are you trying to run your own instance to learn or because you want “support the Fediverse”? If the former, it seems that you are trying to bite more than you can chew. If the latter, there are plenty of other ways to help beyond running your own instance.
You still haven’t answered my question
And I’m not going to. It has nothing to do with the point that I was making. It has nothing to do with the quip that I started with. I came neither here nor to you to get advice. I made a sarcastic comment that you literally just confirmed. Thank you.
And the consolidation and gatekeeping of resources to the few seems just a tad antithetical to the entire foundation of decentralization.
From join-lemmy.org:
self hostable, easy to deploy
“people” are telling me that this isn’t easy, but Lemmy seems to think it is. Good luck arguing your way out of that paper bag.
And the consolidation and gatekeeping of resources to the few seems
What gatekeeping? And what “few”?
According to fedidb, there are 775 Lemmy servers deployed. So you have at least a few hundred people that are not involved with the project and that have managed to deploy Lemmy. I’m among one of those, and I have access to the same resources as you did. It may not be trivial, but it certainly is within possible.
Again, sorry that you are having trouble, but there is no conspiracy here to keep you away from having your own server.
You:
if people are telling you “this is not for beginners”, maybe it would be wise to listen to it?
Also you:
I’m among one of those
So, What gatekeeping you ask? You. And what few you say? Still you.
But don’t let me be the judge on whether or not you are an insufferable prick. So take a peruse around your own post. Let’s see how you fared…
😬
Even though I don’t completely support what the other person said, the defense you are making here is dangerous. It’s not gatekeeping or anything like elitism, which is the argument of the other person. I don’t see the point of arguing with them regarding it.
So here you said ‘biting more than you can chew’. The fundamental problem I see here, which is something people say about Linux also, is that the entry barrier is pretty high. Most of the time it stems from lack of easy to access documentation in the case of Linux. But when it comes to some specific projects, the documentation is incomplete. Many of the self hostable applications suffer from this.
People should be able to learn their way to chew bigger things. That is how one can improve. Most people won’t enjoy a steep learning curve. Documentation helps to ease this steepness. Along with that I completely agree with the fact that many people who figure out things, won’t share or contribute into the documentation.
My point is in such scenarios, I think we should encourage people to contribute into the project, instead of saying there are easier ways to do it. Then only an open source project can grow.
The barrier of entry is not kept intentionally high. That’s what gatekeeping is.
I think we should encourage people to contribute into the project
Yeah, and one such way is to go through the documentation, work through the points where things are not clear and make a PR with the changes. That is much better for everyone involved than going around calling for a conspiracy to keep beginners away.
It’s pretty great!
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.
It’s not good enough for casuals nor selfhosters.
Needs a mobile app
Okay I’ll set up an instance. Lol.
Is there an official Dockerfile?
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.
