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:
An artist posting on LinkedIn is what inspired my post. But I suppose a for-profit private company is probably the solution to it.
“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.
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.
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.
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.
Been using self-hosted, static website builder https://simonrepp.com/faircamp/ with satisfying results here
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!
Time to go back to limewire
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.
A shame this is now defunct.
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.
Wait, hear me out. Direct buy from artists using crypto. Then you don’t have to deal with payment processors.
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.
