Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Funkwhale might be the most overlooked Fediverse project

raphael.lullis.net

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 34 posts

Re: Funkwhale might be the most overlooked Fediverse project

#11

Post by kej »

bhaney wrote: post #2

> it seems that Funkwhale would be the easiest one to get people out of Spotify/Apple Music/Youtube Music/etc, and I am trying to figure out what is missing to get more people interested and using it As someone who's subscribed to Apple Music despite thinking it's overpriced and would love a good alternative, I guess I can be a case study here. I use Apple Music for roughly three situations: - I'm driving and want to…

>subscribed to Apple Music despite thinking it's overpriced and would love a good alternative

It's not perfect, but a YouTube Music subscription also gives you ad-free regular YouTube. That's a pretty nice bonus if you're going to be paying for music streaming anyway.

Re: Funkwhale might be the most overlooked Fediverse project

#12

Post by bhaney »

kej wrote: post #11
bhaney wrote: post #2

> it seems that Funkwhale would be the easiest one to get people out of Spotify/Apple Music/Youtube Music/etc, and I am trying to figure out what is missing to get more people interested and using it As someone who's subscribed to Apple Music despite thinking it's overpriced and would love a good alternative, I guess I can be a case study here. I use Apple Music for roughly three situations: - I'm driving and want to…

>subscribed to Apple Music despite thinking it's overpriced and would love a good alternative It's not perfect, but a YouTube Music subscription also gives you ad-free regular YouTube. That's a pretty nice bonus if you're going to be paying for music streaming anyway.

I think I would much rather just stop streaming music entirely than make a Google account and pay them for their music streaming service.

Re: Funkwhale might be the most overlooked Fediverse project

#14

Post by rglullis »

itishappy wrote: post #6

> I think that its main problem is that no instance provides a “public” catalog of songs that can be streamed/downloaded by its users, but its “social aspect” is really cool. You can, e.g, connect with your friends and choose to share your private libraries with each other. 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 u…

If you upload it and make it public, you will very quickly get kicked out of the instance as soon as someone reports your library as containing copyrighted material.

If may try to be coy about it and abuse the "invite-only" mechanism to share with lots of people, but you are still risking getting reported.

There are also moderation tools in place that can let the instance admin see beyond the "privacy sharing" settings, so a more zealous admin would be the first to want abusers out of their servers.

Re: Funkwhale might be the most overlooked Fediverse project

#17

Post by rglullis »

Fremololni wrote: post #10
itishappy wrote: post #6

> I think that its main problem is that no instance provides a “public” catalog of songs that can be streamed/downloaded by its users, but its “social aspect” is really cool. You can, e.g, connect with your friends and choose to share your private libraries with each other. 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 u…

It's probably not legal. What would happen? Nothing until it becomes a thing than it gets sued into oblivion. They didn't find a magic loophole.

There is no magic loophole, but I don't see how this would get "sued into oblivion". There is no "central instance", so even if someone sets up a server which starts to make copyrighted material available publicly, only that server would receive nastygrams and/or be ejected by the hosting provider.

And those that really want to circumvent the law could just set this up in a place which offers more protections. If someone sets up an instance on 1984.hosting and uses a domain from njal.la... how would anyone be able to take it down?

Re: Funkwhale might be the most overlooked Fediverse project

#18

Post by PaulHoule »

bhaney wrote: post #9
PaulHoule wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Funny I lean on YouTube for music discovery but mostly listen out of my own library. The worst problem I have managing it technically is that M.F. Doom hasn’t recorded two albums under the same name.

What does your process look like for discovering music on youtube and then getting that music into your personal library? If you're not discovering while you're typically listening, then you must be setting aside some separate time for discovery, and then curating those discovered songs, acquiring their files somehow, and integrating them into your library, right?

Basically yes.

If I was smart about it I'd get one of those YouTube downloader scripts and attach it to something that puts on metadata and do it all in one step.

I do it in bursts and frequently it is motivated by reading something about music, then looking up the music on YouTube and listening to it there for a while before I decide something is worth putting in the library.

For what it's worth I am not particularly interested in music that came out in the last year or so, not like I am fundamentally opposed to it, but given that the event horizon for decent music recordings is roughly 1965, I think there is more older music than I haven't heard yet than there is new music.

Also my approach is album and discography oriented partially because I really like listening to albums and partially because it's often easy to get a whole discography. So it is not like I am keeping track of tracks I like as much as it is albums and artists that I like.

Re: Funkwhale might be the most overlooked Fediverse project

#19

Post by bhaney »

rglullis wrote: post #8
bhaney wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well that makes the problem pretty clear. People are sticking with Spotify/Apple Music/Youtube Music because those platforms enable algorithmic discovery of new music that they want to listen to. Somewhere on my hard drives, I have hundreds of gigs of flacs comprising my "old" music library that I used to maintain, because that's how I used to interact with music. I haven't accessed or updated that library in 5+ year…

I don't think I was clear. If you already have the music collection, your "job" will be mostly about uploading it, but after you do that you will be able to enjoy similar features as the ones you are describing. The "radios" are meant exactly to give some "algorithmic generated playlist" that requires very little input from the user.

I think you're being perfectly clear, but I also think you're missing my point. "If you already have the music collection" is the deal breaker. If I want to listen to my own music library, there has always been plenty of solutions for that. Long before any modern music streaming service existed, I was making streamable radio stations of my personal music library available with software like IceCast. But these days I don't want to listen just to music I've already discovered myself, or even just to music that me and a collection of friends have discovered ourselves. I want exposure to essentially all music, whether I or anyone I know has ever heard of it before. I don't seem to be able to get that with services like FunkWhale, and I'm not willing to go back to limiting my music exposure to only songs that me or a select few others have personally discovered and added to our libraries on our own. Mass discovery is the killer feature, while being able to listen to music I own (in whatever presentation) is unimpressive table stakes. And I want that discovery to be happening while I'm listening to music normally, not have to set aside time to discover new music before adding it to my library so my normal "music listening" sessions can pull from it.

Re: Funkwhale might be the most overlooked Fediverse project

#20

Post by rglullis »

bhaney wrote: post #19
rglullis wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think I was clear. If you already have the music collection, your "job" will be mostly about uploading it, but after you do that you will be able to enjoy similar features as the ones you are describing. The "radios" are meant exactly to give some "algorithmic generated playlist" that requires very little input from the user.

I think you're being perfectly clear, but I also think you're missing my point. "If you already have the music collection" is the deal breaker. If I want to listen to my own music library, there has always been plenty of solutions for that. Long before any modern music streaming service existed, I was making streamable radio stations of my personal music library available with software like IceCast. But these days I…

> I don't seem to be able to get that with services like FunkWhale

The problem is not with Funkwhale. The problem is with archaic IP laws and our collective unwillingness to fight for copyright reform.

If you don't mind straight out piracy, there is a ton of solutions that could give you a virtually infinite music collection and just get the algorithms to select the songs for you.

Post reply on HN