Discoverability on the Fediverse and Thought Dump

General
,
21

Thanks for mentioning Subjam, I’ve poured my heart into this project for many years.

There’s definitely a lot of potential here for collaboration. I talked with Simon yesterday and got a good idea of what Mirlo is trying to accomplish, and it’s astonishing to me that it fits so perfectly with the sentiment of Subjam and its social purposes (It’s organized as a “Social Purpose Corporation / SPC” and have outlined specific social purposes in our charter). I personally am a decades long F/OSS advocate, open media / anti-DRM advocate, and also am looking for the perfect way to support musicians/artists/bands without having to submit to the music industry’s status quo. It’s great to be in like company here and I’m excited to talk more about possibilities.

Regarding local - This is what I’m focused on: building and supporting local music communities. Musicians/artists/bands, music fans, independently owned venues, labels, record and instrument shops, nonprofit music focused efforts and collectives, everyone who works in this space (sound engineers/lighting/booking/etc.)… Subjam is going to be a one-stop-shop for all of these people to meet up, coordinate, promote and socialize. It just so happens that I’m starting with live audio broadcasting, like a community radio station network.

I love how the Fediverse operates and I’ve thought more than once how great it would be to integrate what Subjam does into the Fediverse. The whole architecture is wonderfully distributed and resilient, while its parts are at the same time so intimately connected. Just like the Mirlo folks though, money is the challenge to overcome. Money is the necessary evil to grow and maintain a platform like this that would integrate well into the Fediverse. I’m very inspired by Dan over at Pixelfed though, he’s had great success so far with raising money.

5 Likes
22

Found another one that looks pretty cool (owing to the use of different colours and sizing), using KEXP’s Song of the Day data.
https://public.tableau.com/app/profile/midora.dubose/viz/KEXPGenreExplorer/KEXPGenreExplorer

1 Like
23

There’s definitely a lot of support for projects like this on the Fediverse! Might be worth starting a thread for Subjam on here and getting some of the folks that do live-streaming to give feedback, like @Mel, @AxWax and @KristofferLislegaard? Would also be cool to see an in-depth demo of how it works (and link to your fedi platform on the contact page of the website to help people find you).

3 Likes
24

Posted by @stefan earlier.

1 Like
25

thanks for tagging me on this, it looks super interesting!

1 Like
26

Maybe openverse (https://openverse.org) could be motivated to add another category to its search, one for music. I use the image search quite a bit. Though they only do CC and public domain stuff.

3 Likes
27

Just wanted to crosspost @timglorioso’s comment below:

Promotion and discoverability do feel at odds with federation and decentralization. The Web broke something, now it’s expected to be able to see everything globally. Or maybe it was already broken by the recording industry. Every one of us only has so much attention to give, and so many possible things to give it to. I think Step 1 of addressing discoverability is setting expectations for what discoverability means and what artists are really trying to do. We are so used to being endlessly spoonfed by corporate platforms that we don’t even know what we want.

3 Likes
28

Also saw these mentioned in a recent music newsletter I follow, which are interesting takes on the visual discovery theme (but slightly cheesy and not federated). I feel like they’re zooming in on what people liked about MySpace in terms of the customisation and being able to display things like your top eight as an expression of your community group or music taste.

1 Like
29

oh cool, thanks for sharing that link… they do support audio search but in a rudimentary way

but your comment about “though they only do CC…” made we want to comment

…for musical (and other) artists who have only ever done “all rights reserved” kinds of things before and are apprehensive about releasing CC licensed or public domain works…

please consider this: it feels EXTREMELY liberating to do so!

you don’t have to take existing works and re-release them CC or public – you can make a decision to purposefully make something with the original intention of releasing as CC licensed content and you may be amazed at the results

knowing you are going to release it into the commons (whichever CC license you choose) takes so much out of the picture and leaves behind only the creative process

try it, at least once

a secondary benefit is – this allows you to post the material freely into spaces you might not have considered before (due to licensing worries) and into spaces that only allow CC licensed materials (like the link above) – and the net gain for you personally is a bit more exposure – people in those spaces may come to know about you and backtrack to your other material, you might gain (appreciative) fans

if you choose to allow derivatives and also require source attribution (CC BY-SA or CC BY-SA-NC) you may get more exposure when others expand on your work

i have a mix of licenses in my stuff and that allows me to be in more places but honestly creating something with the intention of CC release feels good

btw, i’ve done several derivative works of other artists’ CC licensed material and I always ask first and give them the right to listen and refuse if they hate it. not required but it feels correct to do this, to me… so far nobody has refused, they all seem to appreciate the work (unless they are just being kind) – and it feels win-win to me

1 Like
30

These folks just open sourced

6 Likes
31

This looks very interesting indeed and think @limebar might appreciate the MusicBrainz link…

2 Likes
32

Also should see if they’d support Mirlo links being posted in the feed…

1 Like
33

thanks, interesting!
i wonder if they plan to federate and/or become a web scrobbler target – that might be an interesting combo

2 Likes
34

To me, unified search, across any audio hosting/ social music services artists or audiences choose to use, is the most obvious benefit of a federated approach. So glad to see this being enthusiastically explored here.

From an audience POV, I know I’m always drawn back to the bigger search portals (BandCamp, YouTub) because I’m most likely to find something like what I’m looking for. Diversity of hosting choices has many upsides. But searching dozens of niche sites one by one, and finding mostly tumbleweeds, isn’t a sticky experience. It’s not that much fun for DJs and audiences, and doesn’t do much to help artists get discovered by potential future fans.

So let’s say there’s a federation of audio-hosting and social music services. Each with a search tool that can search across the whole network. But what happens if people search for an artist that isn’t hosted within the network? Rather than tumbleweeds, what kind of results could they get that would respect consent (and thereby copyright), but still be useful?

Let’s say the federated search space included a complete index of all released music, with links to all the places I can hear it, and buy it. Existing release index projects (eg MusicBrainz, Discogs), and music information projects (Wikipedia pages, AudioCulture.co.nz) could be integrated into the search space, if their custodians are wiling, or new ones could be set up for the purpose, with their index under a pro-sharing open data license.

That way, if I go to a FunkWhale or BandWagon service, or to Mirlo or whever, and search for an artist or album hosted within the federation, I could get the detailed profile curated by the artist, with the music right there to listen to. But if I search for Rage Against the Machine, instead of getting nothing, I could at least get a copy of some publicly available information about them, and links to some places I can listen to or buy their music.

Maybe with a set of ‘if you like … you might also like’ links to artists hosted within the network, chosen by genre tags, newest to oldest (or vice-versa, or randomised). Or if you want to get really experimental, by an algorithm that looks at what people say they’re listening to across the federation, sees that people who listen to RATM also listen to artists A, B and C, and lists them under ‘you might like …’. Or the person could toggle between these 2 serendipity modes, and maybe others.

The downside of this, for anti-corporate radicals like me, is that sometimes patrons and their money would leak out, back to the corporate platforms. But I think this is more than counterbalanced by the fact that searching on services in the federation would always be useful to audiences. So we’re much more likely to keep coming back, to a place where independent music results present less friction than corporate ones.

4 Likes
35

I’ve advocated for a sevice like https://openverse.org which already has an audio search expand to do music searches.

3 Likes
36

Yeah, that doesn’t work for most of us. I still wonder how hard it is for the current social platforms (or someone else) to offer a tweakable feed like Soundcloud or Bandcamp, based on artists, tags, other users followed. I don’t know you, but these feeds are my primary source for discovering and following new artists.

1+ hour mixes a bit, too, but starting to listen to one is quite a commitment and also many don’t have the list of tracks mixed, and even when they have, it’s not easy to find the track I want to identify, the artist might not be in the platform and I can’t follow them anyway…

Social music feeds are imho the way to go.

2 Likes
37

I’m cautious about qualities like “sticky” and “frictionless” as they are what corporate platforms use to get us, well, stuck. The tools we make might instead be useful and complementary. We might provide a “step down” from the slick experiences corporate platforms hooked us on. Ask what would happen if we excluded a feature, or if we included it, how it might impact community and culture. For example, the expectation of seeing everything from one place. Spotify already does this. What would that future look like for federation? What behaviors might result? Would we end up with another capitalist-inspired algorithmic battleground? I don’t have the answers, but in my opinion the Web as the “one place” gets us far enough. I’m betting on people to organize and collaborate in ways that limit competition (some analogy about sizes of ponds and fishes) and deepen connection.

Somewhat-relevant story time. I go to this chain of franchise media stores called The Exchange to get DVDs and video games. A couple times now I’ve ended up ordering something they didn’t have at the location I visited. It’s kinda like a library network, where you can get something from another branch sent to yours. When I’ve ordered something, it feels like cheating. It takes the fun out of finding an physical copy of an album or movie. I think there’s a parallel here with finding something at an indie web shop versus through a portal to all the federated things. I got what I wanted, at the cost of turning it into another mindless transaction. But did I really get what I wanted? Wouldn’t it be better to strike up a relationship with an independent store owner in my community instead of using a detached provider of anything I desire? Sometimes friction seems like the better option.

4 Likes
38

We are talking about discovering… music. Very important for those who like to discover new music but… just music in the end. Maybe professional DJs, labels, and dedicated hobbyists can find the time and the patience to make discovering music their main activity. As of me, I listen to new music mostly when I’m doing routine house tasks. I listen hands free, and when I like something, I’ll look who is this, like, maybe follow – actions that will fine tune my feed.

I’m doing this on Soundcloud because the features are there, and the big community / source of music makers is there too. In the end, for 90% of artists on Soundcloud their mindset is not that different than on the Fediverse or here.

I’m looking forward to switch to a TSMN-friendly alternative, but it needs to be hands-free with likes and follows or equivalent. I won’t stop house work because discovering new free/social music requires my focused attention and my hands.

3 Likes
39

I’d say Spotify could end up being less and less the “everything” place. A lot of artists are pulling their stuff over the “Daniel Ek, AI Warmonger Scumbag Startup” thing.

4 Likes
40

I appreciate the out-of-the-box thinking. Seem like you might appreciate my random idea for an in-person media store app.

And sure, if a musician wants to go waldenponding, and opt out of putting their music online, that’s their business. If they only make their tunes available on 8-track reel-to-reel at the one surviving record shop in their town, or make a single copy on vinyl and bury it in a time capsule, that’s an artistic statement in itself.

But most musicians, especially those who want to make a bit of coin out of their creative work, are interested in being discoverable. That’s why record shops and music venues exist, instead of bands waiting in their garages for passers-by to stumble upon them.

Now I take your point, in that any federated search ought to be opt-out. Or even opt-in, depending on the participating service. If a musician wants to set up a FairCamp site and make it undiscoverable on our hypothetical artist-centric search federation, again, that’s their business. But …

And how do most people search that one place? Goggle, and other centralised, DataFarming general-purpose search gatekeepers. And if robots.txt is used to exclude that unfederated FairCamp site from those too, how is anyone going to find it? I mean, sure, they could put the web address on their merch, or a QR code pointing to it on their posters, but that means the only visitors to their website are people who have already discovered them.

Worth keeping in mind too that it’s a lot easy to be discovered by serendipity if you live in a big city than a small town. For the same reason it’s easier to meet a suitable person to ask on a date if you live in a big city.

Here’s hoping :wink: But I think what @icaria36 and I are driving at is that because of network effects, there’s always tends to be an “everything place” portal for each thing people want to do online. YouTub for video. GritHub for code. BandCamp for music sales.

It seems like the only way to avoid everyone being herded into one big place, controlled by corporate DataFarmers, is to interconnect many smaller places. The most fundamental piece of glue that makes many places into one place, is federated search, that can find our work regardless of where we choose to host it, accessible from whichever app we use to look for it.

OpenVerse is great, as is search.creativecommons.org, and a number of other CC search portals, including LibreFM and open.audio for music. These could all be linked into the federated search system, selecting only those results that are marked as being under CC licenses. Other music discovery sites like Discogs and MusicBrainz, Hype Machine and Libre.fm, could both feed into and get results from the federated search if they chose, regardless of license.

The fundamental idea here is not to create a new music search portal, but to use protocol plumbing to link as many existing discoverability systems as possible together. So they work better for both artists and audiences.

4 Likes