6 ms·

Show HN: Rocksky – Music scrobbling and discovery on the AT Protocol

117 points by tsiry 5mo ago

JMiao 5mo ago
last.fm scrobbling outliving cbs interactive has been unexpected. does anyone know if scrobbling attracts new people, or just keeps the existing user base happy?
tsiry 5mo ago
https://rocksky.app https://rocksky.app
- ssl-3 5mo ago
  Thanks. From the FAQ, https://docs.rocksky.app/faq-918661m0 https://docs.rocksky.app/faq-918661m0 > What is Rocksky? > Rocksky is a decentralized, open-source music tracking and discovery platform built on the AT Protocol. It works like Last.fm but publishes your listening history directly to your Bluesky account. - Can we start a trend where we tell people what the thing is and what it does without making them dig around to find it? I don't use Bluesky and don't plan to start. Rocksky really isn't for me. While it's not like it was on display in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying 'Beware of the Leopard,' this whole experience could have been concluded a lot faster if the project page simply described the function of the thing in a forthright fashion.
  - MajorTakeaway 5mo ago
    Instead of a line by line command copypaste, they really could have used a single post where users can just copy the commands and paste the set to terminal.
    - herewulf 5mo ago
      This is better so you think about the commands that you're pasting into your terminal before you do it, rather than just one blob of who-knows-what. However, what I don't understand is why there isn't just a single Dockerfile that does it all. `docker build` is step 4 or something.
  - jamilton 5mo ago
    I thought "A decentralized music tracking and discovery platform" and the features list was plenty descriptive. I don't think you have to use Bluesky to use this, I think Bluesky is like the backend, and otherwise it's a Last.fm alternative?
    - ssl-3 5mo ago
      Yeah. I don't know, either. And that's kind of my point: The description of what the thing does is so brief that neither of us can figure it out. Afterward, there's a ton of instruction on how to install it. Including a link to use it on...someone else's sandbox, I guess? Which sure is neat and that may be a platform that I want to play with for my own purposes, but... the point isn't a sandbox, is it? Or is that the point? Who could tell? Anyway, I'm not installing new-to-me software that is so detrimentally-vague about what it is actually meant to do as this is. (I mean: I already know about last.fm -- I've known about last.fm for decades now and even used to give them a few dollars every month. I still don't know what this thing is supposed to be, or why it exists, or what real advantages it might have. I strongly suspect that it could all be summarized very well in one or two decently-written paragraphs, and it seems very lazy to not simply write them.)
      - jamilton 5mo ago
        No, sorry, I was saying I do know what it does based on the description.
tuvix 5mo ago
Super awesome! I credit last.fm with showing me a lot of the music I love, it’s the perfect recommendation model and still the best social music platform so I’m definitely rooting for you to improve on it!
- tsiry 5mo ago
  Thank you! Last.fm was a huge inspiration for Rocksky. I still think scrobbling and social listening are some of the best ways to discover music. Hoping to bring a more open and modern approach to it with ATProto.
  - embedding-shape 5mo ago
    If you can a find a way of A) getting live scrobbles from Last.fm into Rocksky without having to change the clients that are all using Last.fm already and/or B) get historical scrobbles out of Last.fm into Rocksky, I'd think you could potentially take over the ecosystem relatively quickly :)
    - tsiry 5mo ago
      Yes, interoperability is super important to me. I don't want users to rebuild their entire setup just to try Rocksky.
matteomrj 5mo ago
Finally an Atmosphere app on HN, and it's also a very cool one!
- embedding-shape 5mo ago
  Two if we're being pedantic, Tangled.org where this git repository is hosted it also a Atmosphere app ;)
tamimio 5mo ago
Lovely, will give it a try later today! I ditched all music services and now navidrome+narjo combo, works perfectly well, flac, and with reverse proxy exposing the server there’s no need to vpn or anything, it’s a drop in replacement, and free.
phyzix5761 5mo ago
Can you add a youtube video of the song so it plays it on your site?
- jazzyjackson 5mo ago
  A lot of commercial music refuses to be played within an iframe
jbk 5mo ago
So you can scrobble and it gets you new music? But so, how can you listen to that new music?
- CharlesW 5mo ago
  You scrobble to record your listens, and then based on your listening history, there are many ways (in scrobblers and services that integrate with them) to get recommendations. Example: https://resources.onestowatch.com/how-lastfm-recommends-new-music/ https://resources.onestowatch.com/how-lastfm-recommends-new-...
- tsiry 5mo ago
  Rocksky itself isn't a streaming service, it tracks what you listen to from other apps/services and builds discovery/social features arround that listening history.
CharlesW 5mo ago
Tonight I'll be adding support for this in an app (Poppy.fm) that already supports both Last.fm and ListenBrainz. Apologies if I missed this, but am I understanding correctly that users must get a Rocksky API key? (In other words, there's no OAuth support for native iOS users who'll expect a "Sign in with Bluesky"-type flow?)
- tsiry 5mo ago
  OAuth is possible, but the tricky part is not really the auth flow, it's the client-side ATProto write logic. To scrobble properly, the client needs to keep enough historical scrobble state to avoid duplicates, and Rocksky doesn't only publish a scrobble record. It may also need to publish related records like artist, album, and track metadata. So I'd like to make the integration easier, but it needs a bit more than "just OAuth".
  - CharlesW 5mo ago
    Understood. If you need a guinea pig for that, please reach out! (see HN profile)
DonsDiscountGas 5mo ago
I really hate the word scrobble. I'm pretty tolerant of weird language as long as it can be understood, but this can't. Everybody who uses the word seems to think it's a normal word that everybody already knows or can figure out from context (so they never define it), but "scrobble your music" could mean a million things.
- tsiry 5mo ago
  That's fair honestly, "Scrobbling" is such an old Last.fm-era term that people already in that ecosystem forget it sounds weird to everyone else. In practice it just means automatically tracking the music you listen to (songs, artists, albums, listening history, stats, recommendations, etc.). I should probably explain that more clearly on the repo/site.
- herewulf 5mo ago
  It's no worse than things like blog and vlog. Words that took me at least a decade to come to terms with.
  - ericyd 5mo ago
    I disagree, blog and vlog are combinations of existing words, scrabble is entirely made up.
j1elo 5mo ago
You truly know that you're totally out of the loop with some topic when you read "Music discovery on the AT Protocol" and think how the heck did they manage to build such thing with just AT Commands against a GSM modem [^] ^ https://ozeki.hu/p_3653-at-command-guide-for-gsm-modem-network-registration-and-sms.html https://ozeki.hu/p_3653-at-command-guide-for-gsm-modem-netwo...
- Linux-Fan 5mo ago
  I don't know why you are being downvoted, but I totally thought about that AT protocol first. Apparently, the OP refers to <https://atproto.com/ https://atproto.com/> per the FAQ at <https://docs.rocksky.app/faq-918661m0#what-is-the-at-protocol https://docs.rocksky.app/faq-918661m0#what-is-the-at-protoco...>
- Cockbrand 5mo ago
  Same here, and I was somewhere between puzzled and intrigued.
pierdoio 5mo ago
[dead]
frantathefranta 5mo ago
Hopefully Plex (PlexAmp specifically) will support this at some point.
- nighthawk454 5mo ago
  I’m running MultiScrobbler to scrobble from multiple sources (Spotify/PlexAmp) to multiple sinks (Last.fm/ListenBrainz/Maloja). Looks like they already support writing to Rocksky! https://github.com/FoxxMD/multi-scrobbler https://github.com/FoxxMD/multi-scrobbler
  - frantathefranta 5mo ago
    Very nice, I was looking for something like this to scrobble to both Lastfm and listenbrainz.
edgardurand 5mo ago
The ATProto angle is compelling, but I think frictionless migration will be key. If users can import Last.fm history and keep their existing scrobbling clients, this could be much easier to adopt.
cfunderburg 5mo ago
So, the app I'm working on now supports scrobbling to both last.fm and ListenBrains. With the former, I build the app with my own API_KEY and SHARED_SECRET, then the actual user has to add their username/password, which gets stored in the Apple keychain. With the latter, I don't need a API KEY built into the app, and they just login with a username and a token. Would I be right that I could just duplicate the listenbrainz code with that new endpoint and it would work the same way?
- tsiry 5mo ago
  Mostly yes, but with one important detail. Rocksky has a minimal ListenBrainz-compatible API, so duplicating the ListenBrainz integration and pointing it to the Rocksky endpoint should work for basic auth + submit/scrobble. The current limitation is that Rocksky doesn't implement the full ListenBrainz API yet, so anything beyond auth + submitting listens may not work the same way. I'm trying to keep this path as simple as possible because compatibility with existing scrobblers is important for adoption.
Hamuko 5mo ago
>Rocksky will also try to normalize songs metadata. If it cannot find a matching track, it will skip the scrobble. So it's unreliable by design? There's no way I'd switch from Last.fm or ListenBrainz to something that will /dev/null my scrobbles at its discretion.
- embedding-shape 5mo ago
  Yeah, that doesn't sound great. Sounds better than it'll scrobble the wrong song, that'd ruin more things, but probably would be best to at least save the attempt rather than fully skipping it.
herewulf 5mo ago
I would like to see some option to offset the scrobbling times for privacy. I've cooled on Last.fm in recent years because I've realized that it's a very good, public indicator of when I'm at my desk. Self hosted may be the way forward but maybe someone wants the best of both worlds. Yes, I've become paranoid in my old age.
eddy-sekorti 5mo ago
Congratulations, the real power of last.fm is its recommendation model. What are you using for yours? is there any AI involved. I think if your recommendation engine is as good as last.fm then there is a good chance it will become big. But overall nice work and I wish you good luck, this is cool!
- tsiry 5mo ago
  Thank you! I completely agree, the recommendation/discovery aspect is probably the most important part of platforms like Last.fm. Right now Rocksky is still relatively early and most recommendations are based on listening similarity/social data rather than heavy AI models. The nice thing with ATProto is that the social graph and listening history are open, which makes it possible to experiment with different recommendation approaches. There's definitely still a lot of work to do there.
rzzzt 5mo ago
Greatly off topic, but does anyone else read these service names in their head as Slavic last names?
LAAGU 5mo ago
Looks cool
cfunderburg 5mo ago
So, I've integrated this into my player natively and I've got to say, it's fun and quite impressive. I think the project has a lot of potential. That said, I'm forced to use it's quite limited v1 API as the v2 API (and its documentation) needs a substantial bit of work to make authentication user-friendly. I look forward to evolving with it as it moves forward.
leonulicnik 5mo ago
[flagged]

117 points by tsiry 5mo ago

JMiao 5mo ago

last.fm scrobbling outliving cbs interactive has been unexpected. does anyone know if scrobbling attracts new people, or just keeps the existing user base happy?

tsiry 5mo ago

https://rocksky.app https://rocksky.app

ssl-3 5mo ago
Thanks. From the FAQ, https://docs.rocksky.app/faq-918661m0 https://docs.rocksky.app/faq-918661m0 > What is Rocksky? > Rocksky is a decentralized, open-source music tracking and discovery platform built on the AT Protocol. It works like Last.fm but publishes your listening history directly to your Bluesky account. - Can we start a trend where we tell people what the thing is and what it does without making them dig around to find it? I don't use Bluesky and don't plan to start. Rocksky really isn't for me. While it's not like it was on display in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying 'Beware of the Leopard,' this whole experience could have been concluded a lot faster if the project page simply described the function of the thing in a forthright fashion.
- MajorTakeaway 5mo ago
  Instead of a line by line command copypaste, they really could have used a single post where users can just copy the commands and paste the set to terminal.
  - herewulf 5mo ago
    This is better so you think about the commands that you're pasting into your terminal before you do it, rather than just one blob of who-knows-what. However, what I don't understand is why there isn't just a single Dockerfile that does it all. `docker build` is step 4 or something.
- jamilton 5mo ago
  I thought "A decentralized music tracking and discovery platform" and the features list was plenty descriptive. I don't think you have to use Bluesky to use this, I think Bluesky is like the backend, and otherwise it's a Last.fm alternative?
  - ssl-3 5mo ago
    Yeah. I don't know, either. And that's kind of my point: The description of what the thing does is so brief that neither of us can figure it out. Afterward, there's a ton of instruction on how to install it. Including a link to use it on...someone else's sandbox, I guess? Which sure is neat and that may be a platform that I want to play with for my own purposes, but... the point isn't a sandbox, is it? Or is that the point? Who could tell? Anyway, I'm not installing new-to-me software that is so detrimentally-vague about what it is actually meant to do as this is. (I mean: I already know about last.fm -- I've known about last.fm for decades now and even used to give them a few dollars every month. I still don't know what this thing is supposed to be, or why it exists, or what real advantages it might have. I strongly suspect that it could all be summarized very well in one or two decently-written paragraphs, and it seems very lazy to not simply write them.)
    - jamilton 5mo ago
      No, sorry, I was saying I do know what it does based on the description.

tuvix 5mo ago

Super awesome! I credit last.fm with showing me a lot of the music I love, it’s the perfect recommendation model and still the best social music platform so I’m definitely rooting for you to improve on it!

tsiry 5mo ago
Thank you! Last.fm was a huge inspiration for Rocksky. I still think scrobbling and social listening are some of the best ways to discover music. Hoping to bring a more open and modern approach to it with ATProto.
- embedding-shape 5mo ago
  If you can a find a way of A) getting live scrobbles from Last.fm into Rocksky without having to change the clients that are all using Last.fm already and/or B) get historical scrobbles out of Last.fm into Rocksky, I'd think you could potentially take over the ecosystem relatively quickly :)
  - tsiry 5mo ago
    Yes, interoperability is super important to me. I don't want users to rebuild their entire setup just to try Rocksky.

matteomrj 5mo ago

Finally an Atmosphere app on HN, and it's also a very cool one!

embedding-shape 5mo ago
Two if we're being pedantic, Tangled.org where this git repository is hosted it also a Atmosphere app ;)

tamimio 5mo ago

Lovely, will give it a try later today! I ditched all music services and now navidrome+narjo combo, works perfectly well, flac, and with reverse proxy exposing the server there’s no need to vpn or anything, it’s a drop in replacement, and free.

phyzix5761 5mo ago

Can you add a youtube video of the song so it plays it on your site?

jazzyjackson 5mo ago
A lot of commercial music refuses to be played within an iframe

jbk 5mo ago

So you can scrobble and it gets you new music? But so, how can you listen to that new music?

CharlesW 5mo ago
You scrobble to record your listens, and then based on your listening history, there are many ways (in scrobblers and services that integrate with them) to get recommendations. Example: https://resources.onestowatch.com/how-lastfm-recommends-new-music/ https://resources.onestowatch.com/how-lastfm-recommends-new-...
tsiry 5mo ago
Rocksky itself isn't a streaming service, it tracks what you listen to from other apps/services and builds discovery/social features arround that listening history.

CharlesW 5mo ago

Tonight I'll be adding support for this in an app (Poppy.fm) that already supports both Last.fm and ListenBrainz. Apologies if I missed this, but am I understanding correctly that users must get a Rocksky API key? (In other words, there's no OAuth support for native iOS users who'll expect a "Sign in with Bluesky"-type flow?)

tsiry 5mo ago
OAuth is possible, but the tricky part is not really the auth flow, it's the client-side ATProto write logic. To scrobble properly, the client needs to keep enough historical scrobble state to avoid duplicates, and Rocksky doesn't only publish a scrobble record. It may also need to publish related records like artist, album, and track metadata. So I'd like to make the integration easier, but it needs a bit more than "just OAuth".
- CharlesW 5mo ago
  Understood. If you need a guinea pig for that, please reach out! (see HN profile)

DonsDiscountGas 5mo ago

I really hate the word scrobble. I'm pretty tolerant of weird language as long as it can be understood, but this can't. Everybody who uses the word seems to think it's a normal word that everybody already knows or can figure out from context (so they never define it), but "scrobble your music" could mean a million things.

tsiry 5mo ago
That's fair honestly, "Scrobbling" is such an old Last.fm-era term that people already in that ecosystem forget it sounds weird to everyone else. In practice it just means automatically tracking the music you listen to (songs, artists, albums, listening history, stats, recommendations, etc.). I should probably explain that more clearly on the repo/site.
herewulf 5mo ago
It's no worse than things like blog and vlog. Words that took me at least a decade to come to terms with.
- ericyd 5mo ago
  I disagree, blog and vlog are combinations of existing words, scrabble is entirely made up.

j1elo 5mo ago

You truly know that you're totally out of the loop with some topic when you read "Music discovery on the AT Protocol" and think how the heck did they manage to build such thing with just AT Commands against a GSM modem [^] ^ https://ozeki.hu/p_3653-at-command-guide-for-gsm-modem-network-registration-and-sms.html https://ozeki.hu/p_3653-at-command-guide-for-gsm-modem-netwo...

Linux-Fan 5mo ago
I don't know why you are being downvoted, but I totally thought about that AT protocol first. Apparently, the OP refers to <https://atproto.com/ https://atproto.com/> per the FAQ at <https://docs.rocksky.app/faq-918661m0#what-is-the-at-protocol https://docs.rocksky.app/faq-918661m0#what-is-the-at-protoco...>
Cockbrand 5mo ago
Same here, and I was somewhere between puzzled and intrigued.

pierdoio 5mo ago

[dead]

frantathefranta 5mo ago

Hopefully Plex (PlexAmp specifically) will support this at some point.

nighthawk454 5mo ago
I’m running MultiScrobbler to scrobble from multiple sources (Spotify/PlexAmp) to multiple sinks (Last.fm/ListenBrainz/Maloja). Looks like they already support writing to Rocksky! https://github.com/FoxxMD/multi-scrobbler https://github.com/FoxxMD/multi-scrobbler
- frantathefranta 5mo ago
  Very nice, I was looking for something like this to scrobble to both Lastfm and listenbrainz.

edgardurand 5mo ago

The ATProto angle is compelling, but I think frictionless migration will be key. If users can import Last.fm history and keep their existing scrobbling clients, this could be much easier to adopt.

cfunderburg 5mo ago

So, the app I'm working on now supports scrobbling to both last.fm and ListenBrains. With the former, I build the app with my own API_KEY and SHARED_SECRET, then the actual user has to add their username/password, which gets stored in the Apple keychain. With the latter, I don't need a API KEY built into the app, and they just login with a username and a token. Would I be right that I could just duplicate the listenbrainz code with that new endpoint and it would work the same way?

tsiry 5mo ago
Mostly yes, but with one important detail. Rocksky has a minimal ListenBrainz-compatible API, so duplicating the ListenBrainz integration and pointing it to the Rocksky endpoint should work for basic auth + submit/scrobble. The current limitation is that Rocksky doesn't implement the full ListenBrainz API yet, so anything beyond auth + submitting listens may not work the same way. I'm trying to keep this path as simple as possible because compatibility with existing scrobblers is important for adoption.

Hamuko 5mo ago

>Rocksky will also try to normalize songs metadata. If it cannot find a matching track, it will skip the scrobble. So it's unreliable by design? There's no way I'd switch from Last.fm or ListenBrainz to something that will /dev/null my scrobbles at its discretion.

embedding-shape 5mo ago
Yeah, that doesn't sound great. Sounds better than it'll scrobble the wrong song, that'd ruin more things, but probably would be best to at least save the attempt rather than fully skipping it.

herewulf 5mo ago

I would like to see some option to offset the scrobbling times for privacy. I've cooled on Last.fm in recent years because I've realized that it's a very good, public indicator of when I'm at my desk. Self hosted may be the way forward but maybe someone wants the best of both worlds. Yes, I've become paranoid in my old age.

eddy-sekorti 5mo ago

Congratulations, the real power of last.fm is its recommendation model. What are you using for yours? is there any AI involved. I think if your recommendation engine is as good as last.fm then there is a good chance it will become big. But overall nice work and I wish you good luck, this is cool!

tsiry 5mo ago
Thank you! I completely agree, the recommendation/discovery aspect is probably the most important part of platforms like Last.fm. Right now Rocksky is still relatively early and most recommendations are based on listening similarity/social data rather than heavy AI models. The nice thing with ATProto is that the social graph and listening history are open, which makes it possible to experiment with different recommendation approaches. There's definitely still a lot of work to do there.

rzzzt 5mo ago

Greatly off topic, but does anyone else read these service names in their head as Slavic last names?

LAAGU 5mo ago

Looks cool

cfunderburg 5mo ago

So, I've integrated this into my player natively and I've got to say, it's fun and quite impressive. I think the project has a lot of potential. That said, I'm forced to use it's quite limited v1 API as the v2 API (and its documentation) needs a substantial bit of work to make authentication user-friendly. I look forward to evolving with it as it moves forward.

leonulicnik 5mo ago

[flagged]