this post was submitted on 30 Oct 2023
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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.
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.
The issue is "discoverability". Producers "taking care of online distribution themselves" are dealing with, you know, the very problem that they are not discoverable. Unless they're on a third-party service, of course.
A commercial centralized discoverability service would enshittify REALLY quickly because of the profit motive. First they'd make everything nice for both listers and consumers. Make themselves indispensable to listers. Then lock the listers into an abusive relationship with no viable means out. (Kind of like bandcamp, come to think of it!) And once they've squeezed every last ounce out of the listers, the consumers get the screws next since there's no viable option for them to escape to.
A non-profit foundation has no profit motive (by definition) so has no incentive whatsoever to enshittify.
The. Advantage. Is. Discoverability.
If you can't figure out from there what the issue is, you're on your own Sparky. Maybe talk to an artist struggling with the current system and tell them they just have to "take care of it themselves". I'd advise not saying it in person, though, or you'll wind up getting ... ah ... bruised. Slightly. Ever so slightly.
You asserted it multiple times, yes, but substantiated nothing.
Go off and waste someone else's feed, Sparky. I've got better things to bang my head against than brick walls.
I think a better solution to the current default model here would be splitting this up.
Give the artists a service where they provide their music, nothing else. They just upload the files, metadata, pricing. Only the technical side of things. Then another service is for the end user to actually listen to the music, but instead of having that content on the end-user service they only connect to the artist platform. For this to work there needs to be a default hub to which every artist service is automatically federated. (On that topic, why is it so hard to just federate entire instances everywhere in the fediverse, I get the moderation workload would be insane but it really works against the idea of decentralization)
Also another problem entirely is dealing with the payment providers, afaik they really don't play ball with tiny platforms so getting support for those into the service would probably be a pain