Now that Bandcamp has had huge layoffs, what about an opensource, Fediverse-friendly replacement? What can a FOSS product bring to the community and do better than Bandcamp?
- Discoverability?
- Broader selection of payments platforms? Direct transfer to avoid processors? (I’m ignorant about the processing system, plus international considerations)
- Ease of spinning up (SaaS?)
- Content deliverability (on the fly transcode from sourced FLAC or WAVs? Rich video/multi track audio?)
Average fediverse user seeing a platform undergo changes they dislike:
“Hey why don’t we just copy a website that has 800k daily visitors?”
How many daily users on twitter or reddit?
We have viable alternatives for those, PeerTube for (opt in) distributed fedi-hosting large media files as well. I don’t see what technical or scalability reasons there are against a band camp replacement.
Don’t you understand? Only a for-profit, privately held (or even better, publicly traded!) company can save us!
It seems you’re being sarcastic, but there’s some truth to it. The fediverse, to me, isn’t primarily about saving “us”. It’s about people saving themselves. If everybody saves themselves, “we” are saved.
An artist posting on LinkedIn is what inspired my post. But I suppose a for-profit private company is probably the solution to it.
For me the most important criterias are:
- ownership: I buy, I get to download (re-download) the files and use then how ever I please
- astists get a fair share: I want to maximize the share of the money I’ve spent going to the artists, and I would like the platform to be transparent, showing me with each purchase how much goes to the artitst for creating more art (if self-hosted by the artist herself/himself, this cost is then deduced)
I personally don’t care for streaming.
I would challenge “unlimited” re-download in a FOSS market. This puts the long-term hosting on the market, vs the user, and is a challenge for current platforms. Perhaps re-download for a time, and of course DRM free is the key.
Man, it’s like the good old days of buying physical media. You lose or scratch your CD, you don’t get a new one for free.
Yeah, I feel like there needs to be a solution to this. Thankfully, artists don’t generally have hugely enormous catalogs that would take up terabytes of space (my entire collection is less than 400GB, which is many, many times larger than any single recording artists catalog, even the Beatles).
One rub I have with limited downloads is that memory of broken CDs. I bought a mobile app that is about $200 and they limit the number of times you can request are-download before you have to buy another license and I think it’s messed up. I’ve had to store that APK on multiple flash drives, off-site, etc.
I would challenge your definition of streaming. I host all my own music and I stream it all the time via Airsonic-advanced (though it does get cached - and it’s constantly downloading new podcast episodes). For me it’s just the level of accessibility I consider as “streaming”.
criterias
Like ‘email’, this noun doesn’t need an ‘s’.
Right about criteria, wrong about emails.
Funkwhale is the fedi alternative for music. You should go post your feature list onto their forum.
I just took a look at faircamp, it seems nice too.
Dogmazic.net is also a music platform (centralised) made with ampache.
Yes! I was wondering how Funkwhale could be leveraged here.
I’ve been thinking a lot about this. I think a fedi-connected, self-hosted Bandcamp alternative would be huge for discoverability and helping fans keep tabs on new releases, tour dates, etc… As a musician it’d be great to be able to have fans be alerted right away when you post a new track or tour date, and as a fan it’d be awesome to be able to follow artists that you like from other fedi-compatible platforms.
I’m not a web dev myself so I don’t really know for sure, but I think the biggest challenge is probably not even content delivery but keeping track of ownership/library. It’s really nice that you can log into Bandcamp and access a library of all of the albums/songs that you’ve previously bought, and I’m not sure how something like that could be emulated in a federated way. It might be possible, I just don’t know how!
Also it’d be nice to be able to stream your library, and when your library is distributed across multiple federated servers I don’t know if that becomes more difficult to implement.
Still, I’m with you. I’d love to see a federated alternative to Bandcamp, even if it takes some years to reach maturity or feature parity.
Huge for discoverability? Mate, googling for shit that’s on Lemmy sucks. Decentralization isn’t the answer to everything.
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Or it could simply be decentralized in the sense thatb producers could take care of online distribution themselves instead of relying on third party services, or it’s perfectly fine to have centralized services for some things and it’s normal to see some of those services come and go.
I think a better solution to the current default model here would be splitting this up.
Give the artists a service where they provide their music, nothing else. They just upload the files, metadata, pricing. Only the technical side of things. Then another service is for the end user to actually listen to the music, but instead of having that content on the end-user service they only connect to the artist platform. For this to work there needs to be a default hub to which every artist service is automatically federated. (On that topic, why is it so hard to just federate entire instances everywhere in the fediverse, I get the moderation workload would be insane but it really works against the idea of decentralization)
Also another problem entirely is dealing with the payment providers, afaik they really don’t play ball with tiny platforms so getting support for those into the service would probably be a pain
Well it’s currently quite new and immature. I’ve said for a while that a decent system for searching the fediverse would be search engines maintaining their own instances purely for indexing purposes. They would retrieve posts via default federation, and if an instance wants to opt out of a given search engine, it’s as simple as defederating from that instance. They would also ideally provide links that users can open on their home instances.
This is more a scale and mainstreaming issue than a federation issue. Once the fediverse is big enough major search engines will have to adapt or be left behind.
Been using self-hosted, static website builder https://simonrepp.com/faircamp/ with satisfying results here
One thing that most reddit alumni won’t care about, but one of the nicest things about doing it decentralized is censorship resistance.
Bandcamp at some point decided that the political views of the artists on their platform are a reason to get rid of some artists.
You might not see a problem since you agree with bandcamp’s politics, but companies change their politics on a dime when it becomes useful to do so.
One problem with open source commercial sites is you’re typically going to need business partners to handle credit card transactions.
What political views did they censor?
They took down tim pools music, and recently I went to buy some mp3s of a guy who opposes covid mandates and he was banned too.
Again, lots of folks might disagree with both those people, but when it comes to shit like this you are always next.
https://thepostmillennial.com/breaking-bandcamp-removes-timcast-five-times-august-from-platform
Dim Tool makes music? That’s hilarious. Anyway I don’t have a problem with platforms removing COVID misinformation.
Does saying a false thing about COVID mean that everything you’ve ever said can now be banned everywhere forever?
Since not every one of the guys songs were about COVID, but they were all taken down.
Does this apply to disinformation like “If you get the vaccine you won’t get COVID”? How about “If you get the vaccine you won’t spread COVID to others”?
Who was going around saying those two things specifically? That sounds like either a strawman or someone misunderstanding how vaccines work, rather than deliberately spreading bad information a la Tim Pool. All respected medical professionals were saying, repeatedly, that you can still get and spread COVID after getting the vaccine, but your chances for both are lower. Also you’re likely to have a milder case after getting the vaccine, if you do end up getting COVID.
This whole things sounds like you’re wrapped up in conservative talking points.
https://www.newsweek.com/joe-biden-2021-video-saying-vaccinations-prevent-covid-resurfaces-1726900
I’ll just assume this doesn’t count so I won’t bother finding those clips of Fauci, Wallinsky and countless other officials.
Yo I’m not going to defend something dumb that Biden said, but he’s not a medical professional – he was trying to sell people on vaccines. You can find me the clip of Fauci saying that if you want. Fauci also had really poor messaging about masks at the beginning of the pandemic, so I don’t fully doubt that he said something stupid about vaccines.
Not sure why you’re getting downvoted, because you’re making a ton of sense. It’s not about Tim Pool, who is a dumb incel POS. It’s about the HUGE dangers of giving a company unilateral power to ban someone based solely on speech.
What if Bandcamp’s new owners are more like Facebook? They could ban work that promotes women’s rights and abortion access, which is exactly what Facebook has done.
What if Bandcamp’s new owners (or the owners after them) are more like Twitter? They could ban antifascist activists or journalists.
It truly doesn’t matter how you feel about one person. It matters how you feel about principles.
At the end of the day, what you’re talking about is exactly right.
It feels like a win if people you don’t like get silenced, but it’s a two sided sword that rarely ends up back in the scabbard without tasting friendly blood – as you’ve shown.
Take a look at this project started with many of those goals in mind: https://code.communitymedia.network/MountainTownTechnology/aural_isle
Sounds good, tho they’re not finished yet, hope it works out for them.
Has there been any purchasable content in the Fediverse so far?
Good question, I don’t know. I know I’ve seen people selling things in Mastodon but that’s been my extent of experience.
Do you know this: https://radiofreefedi.net/
Excellent link, thanks!
All of these ideas are great and all but at the end of the day I will be forced to use what ever the scene I am into decides is best and therefore I can find the biggest selection of music to buy.
Currently band camp is the defacto for most releases (except for some idiotic vinyl only bullshit) within the scene I am into, but even if a great alternative is made if they don’t start selling the music I want on there then it’ll be impossible for me to use.
I think as much effort to expose a band camp alternative to artists is needed as there is needed to create the thing so people and artists can come together in said place.
Time to go back to limewire
Perhaps some sort of collectively owned service.
Or a non profit like Wikipedia that all it does is host and sell music.
Whatever it is needs to be resistant to the standard shifty capitalism problems. It should focus on providing a good service and making enough money to support itself. Not infinite profits forever.
A shame this is now defunct.
Wait, hear me out. Direct buy from artists using crypto. Then you don’t have to deal with payment processors.
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You don’t need to use an exchange to get paid in crypto or use a crypto with a pubic ledger
Monero is far more private than letting a credit card processor have your information. Ethereum doesn’t use mining anymore so the electricity used for it is less than paying with credit card. It also takes a few seconds to process.
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Ethereum is not an organization, you don’t need to use NFTs or smart contracts if you don’t want to
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@ttmrichter @iopq seems I remember them as well as a ‘money exchange’ never used them but the name rings a bell from a few years ago then I may be wrong?
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RemindMe@programming.dev 1 year
I just looked up Monerun
Monero is not doing “printing currency”. Some exchanges that promise to pay you monero may not hold it. That’s the same what your bank does. The bank seldom has enough dollar bills to pay all of its depositors money.
But again, this is between an exchange and its customers. You can gasp use another exchange and withdraw your money immediately after using it
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That’s not how that works, you prove your claim that monero has coins created in excess of what the protocol allowed. You can’t just make shit up and expect me to debunk it
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why though? Direct buy sure but why crypto? Just because you can send Disney bucks directly to someone?
Just use Kofi or Patreon and you are golden.
If we are going down that route: why Kofi or Patreon? Just use bank transfers. Payment via SEPA is commonplace, FedNow is already a thing. Even “third-world”, “backwards” countries like Brazil and India have digital payment networks.
That Indian payment network won’t be able to deliver money to an American band
Then use Wise.
Doesn’t support every country and currency pair
Neither does Patreon, Ko-Fi, or any payment processor out there. ;)
Ah, I see. You are making the case for cryptocurrency by trying to justify on the general exception instead of the practical rule… I tried that before, didn’t go so well.
Just use bank transfers. Payment via SEPA is commonplace
I mean, yeah, that would work as well. But would you trust any stranger/on the internet with your IBAN which is tightly linked to your person?
What can people do with an IBAN? They are not meant to be sensitive/protected information.
Because I’ve tried getting money from countries like Kazakhstan and it’s not straightforward
Sure, if you have a merchant account and want to pay 3%+ on a credit card purchase it would work, just set up visa and Mastercard
But for the smaller band, they would not be taking credit card payments themselves
The payment processors take a big fee, like 3% + $0.30
You can’t just sell one song for a penny.
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If you think that’s too much, use a different crypto. I’ve exchanged some crypto with a friend for local currency and it cost me less than a penny to make a transaction.
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It depends on what crypto you use, they all have upsides and downsides. Bitcoin cash has incredibly long confirmation times like Bitcoin, you can only sell cheap stuff with no confirmation because it’s not safe (you can double spend if you’re a miner)
I exchanged Bitcoin cash with extremely low fees for moving it. But I don’t know if it actually has a future, most people are not really bullish on it. Cryptos have to be used as a form of exchange to have value on the market. I thought Nano with no fees had a future, but that’s a feature most people didn’t care about
But you don’t have to choose, offer bch, monero, Bitcoin lightning, etc. and let the user decide what crypto they want to pay with
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