this post was submitted on 30 Oct 2023
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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?)
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[–] sirfancy 51 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Average fediverse user seeing a platform undergo changes they dislike:

[–] CluckN 6 points 1 year ago (3 children)

“Hey why don’t we just copy a website that has 800k daily visitors?”

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[–] thisisawayoflife 5 points 1 year ago

An artist posting on LinkedIn is what inspired my post. But I suppose a for-profit private company is probably the solution to it.

[–] synapse1278 43 points 1 year ago (4 children)

For me the most important criterias are:

  • ownership: I buy, I get to download (re-download) the files and use then how ever I please
  • astists get a fair share: I want to maximize the share of the money I've spent going to the artists, and I would like the platform to be transparent, showing me with each purchase how much goes to the artitst for creating more art (if self-hosted by the artist herself/himself, this cost is then deduced)

I personally don't care for streaming.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I would challenge "unlimited" re-download in a FOSS market. This puts the long-term hosting on the market, vs the user, and is a challenge for current platforms. Perhaps re-download for a time, and of course DRM free is the key.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Man, it's like the good old days of buying physical media. You lose or scratch your CD, you don't get a new one for free.

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[–] [email protected] 34 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

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.

[–] thisisawayoflife 2 points 1 year ago

Yes! I was wondering how Funkwhale could be leveraged here.

[–] [email protected] 19 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 20 points 1 year ago (2 children)

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

[–] ttmrichter 4 points 1 year ago (8 children)

Indeed, discoverability is the largest problem for people in the Fediverse and there doesn't seem to be a simple solution for it.

Perhaps what's needed is a charitable, non-profit foundation (properly registered) whose sole purpose is to give artists an opt-in place to register their social links, samples, etc. Then the content can be on the Fediverse in various forms (depending on medium and artist desires) but where catalogues can be easily scanned and followed.

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[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 year ago

Been using self-hosted, static website builder https://simonrepp.com/faircamp/ with satisfying results here

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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.

[–] rigatti 6 points 1 year ago (9 children)

What political views did they censor?

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[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 year ago (1 children)
[–] kalkulat 5 points 1 year ago

Sounds good, tho they're not finished yet, hope it works out for them.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Has there been any purchasable content in the Fediverse so far?

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[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago (1 children)
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[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

Time to go back to limewire

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

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.

[–] molotovbliss 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)
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