Funkwhale might be the most overlooked Fediverse project
raphael.lullis.net
raphael.lullis.net
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
Yeah, as I mentioned a couple posts up: "I recognize that for copyright reasons at the very least, projects like funkwhale can't possibly provide this functionality." But at the end of the day it doesn't matter what the source of the problem is or whether or not it can be reasonably fixed. The problem exists, and it makes FunkWhale a non-starter for people like me, as unfair as that is.
> If you don't mind straight out piracy
I don't at all. Pretty much the entirety of those hundreds of gigs of flacs I mentioned earlier are pirated.
> 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
The thing about getting the algorithms to select the songs for me is that if I'm doing that, the service has already bundled a very convenient way to actually play those songs as well, so I don't have any reason to maintain my own library. I'm paying for the service primarily for its algorithm, and the service just happens to also cover the trivial case of actually listening to the music it recommends, so I don't really need another service to handle that part. Even if I did have a reason for wanting to separate out the discovery from the playback, I don't think it would be possible to do without significant friction, and I've found that any suggestion to the contrary usually just ignores or minimizes any use cases that the suggester doesn't personally value.
Of course they are connected. You may be right that Apple would be largely unaffected by a small group of people dropping them, but you also need to look at the other side of the market. If a small-but-meaningful minority puts a strong signal that they refuse to pay for corporate-controlled services but do want to pay for "independent" alternatives, then you have the right incentive for some player to show up and satisfy this demand.
You'll be "degrading your experience" only in the beginning, but with continued support the alternatives would be surpass the incumbent. It could be seen as an investment.
It's not that different from the "Linux on the desktop" case. Yes, using Linux over Windows was "difficult" in 2008-2012, but if it were not for the people willing to drop Windows then we would never had companies like Canonical and Valve willing to make a bet on it. And Linux might have ~4% of the desktop share, but you'd have a hard time to argue that Windows is objectively "better" and today it's more likely that people will migrating from Windows to Linux than the opposite direction.
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.
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?
What would happen? Nothing until it becomes a thing than it gets sued into oblivion.
They didn't find a magic loophole.
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?
They don't need to understand the fediverse to sue everyone and than everyone will disable the feature or adds some filter
People moved to Usenet providers but that traffic is much less than it was 5 or 10 years ago.
As soon as the industry gets wind about this practice people or servers or companies will get sued (there is after all nothing else these companies can do) and as soon as this happens some people in the line will try to protect them.
Could be server hosting company, the server hosters, source code Providers etc etc.
Btw that doesn't change the law: dependimg on your country there are already clear legal rules regarding lending digital copies to your friends.
They might fake users and start collecting data through those etc.
But only if it becomes a thing.
I think the main reason I'm not seeing anythinguch about lawsuits today is due to streaming services and the amount of legal media traffic compared to things like torrent.
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.