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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[–] [email protected] 50 points 2 years ago (2 children)

Average fediverse user seeing a platform undergo changes they dislike:

[–] [email protected] 7 points 2 years 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.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 years ago (1 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 years ago (1 children)

How many daily users on twitter or reddit?

We have viable alternatives for those, PeerTube for (opt in) distributed fedi-hosting large media files as well. I don't see what technical or scalability reasons there are against a band camp replacement.

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

Don't you understand? Only a for-profit, privately held (or even better, publicly traded!) company can save us!

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[–] [email protected] 41 points 2 years 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] 3 points 2 years 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 2 years 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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

Yeah, I feel like there needs to be a solution to this. Thankfully, artists don't generally have hugely enormous catalogs that would take up terabytes of space (my entire collection is less than 400GB, which is many, many times larger than any single recording artists catalog, even the Beatles).

One rub I have with limited downloads is that memory of broken CDs. I bought a mobile app that is about $200 and they limit the number of times you can request are-download before you have to buy another license and I think it's messed up. I've had to store that APK on multiple flash drives, off-site, etc.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 years ago

I would challenge your definition of streaming. I host all my own music and I stream it all the time via Airsonic-advanced (though it does get cached - and it's constantly downloading new podcast episodes). For me it's just the level of accessibility I consider as "streaming".

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[–] [email protected] 35 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years 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.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 years ago

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

[–] [email protected] 19 points 2 years 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] 13 points 2 years ago

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

[–] [email protected] 12 points 2 years 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.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 2 years ago (9 children)

What political views did they censor?

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[–] [email protected] 11 points 2 years ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 years ago

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

[–] [email protected] 10 points 2 years ago (1 children)

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

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[–] [email protected] 8 points 2 years ago (1 children)
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[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 years 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 2 years ago

Time to go back to limewire

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