5 ms·

Funkwhale might be the most overlooked Fediverse project

29 points by rglullis 3y ago

bhaney 3y ago
> 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 listen to music. Usually a mixture of music I hear all the time and like, and new music that is similar to the music I already know I like - I want a random assortment of chill classical music to lull me to sleep or get into a relaxed mood - A song comes up in conversation and I want to quickly pull it up ("oh, you think that noise we just heard sounds like that riff from song X? Let's check. Hey siri, play song X") I'm not very well informed about Funkwhale's feature-set, but I'm under the impression that it wouldn't do any of that well, much less all of it. Am I wrong?
- rglullis 3y ago
  The main difference from Funkwhale to the "streaming" services is that you need to "build" your music catalog, either by uploading your own music collection and/or following other people's libraries. So, "out of the box" you are not going to get any music available unless you join some instance which has an extensive catalog of copyright-free music or gives public access to songs they own copyrights. For your use cases: > I'm driving and want to listen to (...) mixture of music Yes, Funkwhale can create "radios" which generates playlists like what you describe. You can choose to generate the playlist according to how often you listen to it or whether it is your "favorites" list or not. > I want a random assortment of chill classical music to lull me to sleep or get into a relaxed mood. If you have already access to this music, the radios can be set according to a specific genre. > A song comes up in conversation and I want to quickly pull it up That will depend on whether this song is available to you on the instance.
  - bhaney 3y ago
    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+ years now because manually maintaining a personal music library completely fucking sucks for the casual music listener, even with perfect interfaces. It's a lot of effort, and the end result is that you get to listen to the same songs over and over again and are completely on your own for finding any new music that you want. Compared to algorithmic discovery services that can cut through the monotony of repeat plays with fresh songs that I've never heard or barely remember but am still very likely to enjoy, it's no surprise that a lot of people are moving away from manually curated libraries. I don't want my music listening to be limited only to songs that I've previously discovered myself - I want something that has awareness of more or less "all" music to pick good songs for me without having to lift a finger, and existing services have gotten pretty good at that. I recognize that for copyright reasons at the very least (not to even get into technical issues), projects like funkwhale can't possibly provide this functionality. That's okay and understandable, but it's also the reason why people aren't switching to it.
    - PaulHoule 3y ago
      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.
      - bhaney 3y ago
        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?
- kej 3y ago
  >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.
  - bhaney 3y ago
    I think I would much rather just stop streaming music entirely than make a Google account and pay them for their music streaming service.
KoolKat23 3y ago
Good idea, 15 years too late.
itishappy 3y ago
> 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 up with a pretty extensive library. This makes it a decent (and legal) alternative to sneaker-net piracy. This sounds like it shares a lot of the UX of piracy, so I'd be interested to know the bounds of it's legality. What happens when I join the largest instance and upload Universal Media Group's catalog?
- Fremololni 3y ago
  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.
  - rglullis 3y ago
    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?
    - Fremololni 3y ago
      Same way they did it the last 20 years. They don't need to understand the fediverse to sue everyone and than everyone will disable the feature or adds some filter
      - rglullis 3y ago
        They can't "sue everyone". BitTorrent is a lot easier to track and prove illegal sharing, yet it still continues to work.
_def 3y ago
Recently I keep thinking of things like this because of the ongoing enshittification of Spotify.
baku-fr 3y ago
I tried Funkwhale but I'm having a very hard time moving out of ten years of daily Subsonic usage.
scotty79 3y ago
Why not just Popcorntime just for music?
andrewshadura 3y ago
Funkwhale is super annoying to set up, compared to the alternatives such as Navidrome.
hagbard_c 3y ago
One of the problems with Funkwhale is that it only works well when all files fed to it are correctly tagged with artist, album and track data which is not the case with many 'discovered' tracks. Untagged (or badly tagged) tracks are hard to impossible to find in Funkwhale while e.g. Airsonic has no such problems since they have the option to navigate the collection through the file system. Add to that the fact that 'sharing' music - which is part of the concept of Funkwhale - has been demonised and sometimes criminalised and suddenly there seem to be few upsides to running a 'Pod' (which is how a Funkwhale collection is supposed to be called). I've been following the project for years and have been running an instance on and off but always went back to one of the Subsonic forks.

29 points by rglullis 3y ago

> 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 listen to music. Usually a mixture of music I hear all the time and like, and new music that is similar to the music I already know I like - I want a random assortment of chill classical music to lull me to sleep or get into a relaxed mood - A song comes up in conversation and I want to quickly pull it up ("oh, you think that noise we just heard sounds like that riff from song X? Let's check. Hey siri, play song X") I'm not very well informed about Funkwhale's feature-set, but I'm under the impression that it wouldn't do any of that well, much less all of it. Am I wrong?

rglullis 3y ago
The main difference from Funkwhale to the "streaming" services is that you need to "build" your music catalog, either by uploading your own music collection and/or following other people's libraries. So, "out of the box" you are not going to get any music available unless you join some instance which has an extensive catalog of copyright-free music or gives public access to songs they own copyrights. For your use cases: > I'm driving and want to listen to (...) mixture of music Yes, Funkwhale can create "radios" which generates playlists like what you describe. You can choose to generate the playlist according to how often you listen to it or whether it is your "favorites" list or not. > I want a random assortment of chill classical music to lull me to sleep or get into a relaxed mood. If you have already access to this music, the radios can be set according to a specific genre. > A song comes up in conversation and I want to quickly pull it up That will depend on whether this song is available to you on the instance.
- bhaney 3y ago
  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+ years now because manually maintaining a personal music library completely fucking sucks for the casual music listener, even with perfect interfaces. It's a lot of effort, and the end result is that you get to listen to the same songs over and over again and are completely on your own for finding any new music that you want. Compared to algorithmic discovery services that can cut through the monotony of repeat plays with fresh songs that I've never heard or barely remember but am still very likely to enjoy, it's no surprise that a lot of people are moving away from manually curated libraries. I don't want my music listening to be limited only to songs that I've previously discovered myself - I want something that has awareness of more or less "all" music to pick good songs for me without having to lift a finger, and existing services have gotten pretty good at that. I recognize that for copyright reasons at the very least (not to even get into technical issues), projects like funkwhale can't possibly provide this functionality. That's okay and understandable, but it's also the reason why people aren't switching to it.
  - PaulHoule 3y ago
    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.
    - bhaney 3y ago
      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?
kej 3y ago
>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.
- bhaney 3y ago
  I think I would much rather just stop streaming music entirely than make a Google account and pay them for their music streaming service.

KoolKat23 3y ago

Good idea, 15 years too late.

itishappy 3y ago

> 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 up with a pretty extensive library. This makes it a decent (and legal) alternative to sneaker-net piracy. This sounds like it shares a lot of the UX of piracy, so I'd be interested to know the bounds of it's legality. What happens when I join the largest instance and upload Universal Media Group's catalog?

Fremololni 3y ago
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.
- rglullis 3y ago
  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?
  - Fremololni 3y ago
    Same way they did it the last 20 years. They don't need to understand the fediverse to sue everyone and than everyone will disable the feature or adds some filter
    - rglullis 3y ago
      They can't "sue everyone". BitTorrent is a lot easier to track and prove illegal sharing, yet it still continues to work.

_def 3y ago

Recently I keep thinking of things like this because of the ongoing enshittification of Spotify.

baku-fr 3y ago

I tried Funkwhale but I'm having a very hard time moving out of ten years of daily Subsonic usage.

scotty79 3y ago

Why not just Popcorntime just for music?

andrewshadura 3y ago

Funkwhale is super annoying to set up, compared to the alternatives such as Navidrome.

hagbard_c 3y ago

One of the problems with Funkwhale is that it only works well when all files fed to it are correctly tagged with artist, album and track data which is not the case with many 'discovered' tracks. Untagged (or badly tagged) tracks are hard to impossible to find in Funkwhale while e.g. Airsonic has no such problems since they have the option to navigate the collection through the file system. Add to that the fact that 'sharing' music - which is part of the concept of Funkwhale - has been demonised and sometimes criminalised and suddenly there seem to be few upsides to running a 'Pod' (which is how a Funkwhale collection is supposed to be called). I've been following the project for years and have been running an instance on and off but always went back to one of the Subsonic forks.