Where I put in writing everything I have thought about this potential platform to create newsletters about social music. From here, I have two or three tasks:
Super happy this works “as intended”, this was a ton of work to make sure the player would work regardless of the form factor it’s embeded in so this makes me really happy.
Officially started, and I will stop spamming here. Thank you very much for all your feedback and I hope you find the actual selectehs interesting (first one to be published in September).
Btw, is there any way at all we could use our existing Fedi accounts with this? I have a growing number of accounts that never get updated or signed into … bookwyrm & neodb come to mind: although I love them, it’s just way too much admin for me atm
actually come to think of it, Neodb could be an alternative to Ghost for Selectah…?
Ah, I didn’t follow up here, but I just thought to call everything “selecteh”. It’s what people already do with other brands. I have used this option on the website already and I think it works well.
Do you mean to log in as a selecteh publisher? There is no support for “Fediverse login” in Ghost as far as I know. But well, if someone wants to start a selecteh they are committing to publishing a new selecteh every month or whatever is the periodicity they choose. There is also the possibility to post on the Fediverse but it is optional, up to the person to decide. But maybe I’m not understanding the use case behind your question.
Neodb is good at being Neodb, which is about rather horizontal collections and reviews, anytime by anyone. This is great but not what Selecteh is after. Selecteh’s reference is closer to a music magazine. This will become clearer in a few weeks when I publish the first Electre Selecteh. Meanwhile, maybe this helps (it requires some imagination right now): Guidelines.
Fairplayer won’t be of use for this. For one, any music that is not Faircamp, you are better served now by the original sources (at least while they are a handful and self-installations don’t proliferate…).
As per our role as a point of “Faircamp aggregation” (you also have the Faircamp webring for that, which BTW has many more nodes)… The release dates are not available in published Faircamps (you can only indirectly know what is newer because they are sorted, newest first). So we don’t really know. The encoded songs ID3 tags in general don’t seem to include that either.
You may have noticed Fairplayer has the concept of “recent joiners”, but that is about discovering music that has recently joined Fairplayer, regardless of original publication date. Not what you are after.
The Selecteh project is about featuring newly released music. This is something most listeners will want to filter by at times, so it’s worth any fair music platform figuring out how to make that possible.
@simonrepp and @keef both have some involvement in FairCamp, any thoughts on how to make release dates easily discoverable?
@fluffy is this something Canimus/ Chorus can help with?
I’m not entirely clear on what role it would play, or what this project even is (as the thread is quite long and the site itself doesn’t really tell me anything about what they’re trying to build).
One long-term goal for Chorus is that it would allow the publishing of playlists and discovery feeds and such but it’s not part of the protocol at present. But it’d be pretty far down the road right now.
For discovery of new music, there’s always following the various music blogs like NHAM, and I think they in turn basically just follow a bunch of hashtags on Mastodon and the like. Also, the existing Canimus feed that Mirlo publishes could theoretically be used to discover new releases but it’d not be the most efficient way of going about it. Does Mirlo have a public RSS feed of new releases?
I’ve had discussions with Simon about including release dates in the RSS feed for Faircamp and he’s very resistant as he thinks it doesn’t gel with what his idea of date in RSS should be.
I think someone even submitted a PR to implement this but he turned it down. So doesn’t look likely to happen, sadly.
@fluffy Selecteh is about selecting new music published on fair platforms and them publish a well presented selection every month. More on About Selecteh
For this, it is very useful to check what is new in these platforms. With Mirlo and Bandwagon it is easy: they have an RSS feed for new publications and a “release date” field to triage truly new music from music released in the past somewhere else.
I’m trying to figure out the most efficient way to know about new music across Faircamp instances. I know about NHAM, tags, etc. I just wanted to know whether there is a less subjective and more reliable way to cover new music from the Faircamps.
@keef thank you for the details about the lack of release date in Faircamp by design. I will do my best to follow fresh music from the Faircamps manually.
Okay so yeah if you want to know about every fair-trade music release to happen, your best bet is to collect as many RSS feeds as you can from as many such sites as you can find. Unfortunately there’s no centralized way to discover all of them, but you can use various things like following appropriate hashtags on Fediverse/Mastodon, following NHAM, monitoring the fair-trade music webring and any sites which appear on it, and so on.
Oh, and another overlooked fair-trade music platform is itch.io (which got a pretty big surge of interest when bandcamp first got acquired, although it didn’t have much staying power). They have an entire category for music although unfortunately I don’t believe they publish any sort of release feed that could be used for discovery.
Has @simonrepp written this up anywhere? It seems like other projects like @bandwagon have taken quite a different approach, and it would be good to at least figure out where the different takes us. A standard protocol approach to surfacing new release data seems like low hanging fruit for making a social music network more useful to people; music bloggers like those on Selecteh, people from indie music zines looking for review subjects, etc.
Intriguing. I was familiar with itch.io as an indie game platform, but didn’t know they hosted music too. I wonder what their ownership structure and funding look like these days, and whether they have any interest in interop? Would it be worth adding them to the list of missing projects to invite to the forum?
Unfortunately, those are two places where itch really suffers; the company is basically just the pet project of a single person who has a small number of employees (estimates vary but it’s usually stated as being around 1-2), and it’s been basically in “maintenance mode” for quite some time, with no indication that they’re improving interop at all. There’s been a few requests for better API support that have all gone unanswered. Several people are growing concerned about the overall bus factor.
There are some RSS feeds but they’re not documented anywhere, inconsistently-supported, and there’s never any appropriate <link rel="alternate"> discovery headers either.
However, the consistency is quite variable; a lot of things are just sample packs for use in games, many don’t have audio previews at all, and there seems to be a LOT of AI slop. Sigh.
