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?)
  • donuts@kbin.social
    17·
    8 months ago

    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.

    • Kecessa@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      19·
      8 months ago

      Huge for discoverability? Mate, googling for shit that’s on Lemmy sucks. Decentralization isn’t the answer to everything.

        • Kecessa@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
          1·
          8 months ago

          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.

          • Neshura@bookwormstory.socialEnglish
            1·
            8 months ago

            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

      • Excrubulent@slrpnk.netEnglish
        12·
        8 months ago

        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.