Thanks for the perspective. Personally, I tend to listen to music actively (not as background) and discover through journalism and community such as Hearing Things. And I’m content to write on a piece of paper whether I want to dig deeper or buy a physical copy. A recommendation feed is of no interest to me.
I suggest that we do this by our own volition rather than with protocol plumbing. I’m skeptical that programmatically linking discoverability systems is better than getting to know one another and establishing relationships. The challenge then is initial exposure. I find gossip (e.g. friends of friends) to be a more organic starting point in our designs. Even technology like radio broadcast is best-case curated by humans, despite the limited relationship between curator and listener.
@strypey I’ll check out your random idea. I appreciated the IMC essay you linked in your introduction post, and enjoyed reading some of your reflections on Indymedia. I’m guilty of some soft waldenponding, but my hope is that anyone might help bend the arc of our relationship with computers rather than accept its trajectory as inevitable.
All this said, an ActivityPub-based aggregator does feel inevitable at this point. I’m not convinced it’s as good for music and musicians as it seems.
We started with a world of record shops and many small websites. If that was adequate to the purpose, the DataFarming platforms would never have taken hold in the first place. It’s now cliché to point out that those who do not learn the lessons of history are doomed to repeat it. But I’ve seen it happen.
All that said, it doesn’t have to be an either/or.
I think you’re right about the first part, because it already exists in the form of FunkWhale and BandWagon. In fact the whole fediverse and AP happened to some degree because Matt and co wanted to federate GNU FM (and Christine and co wanted to federate GNU MediaGoblin). There’s clearly a demand for this, and has been some time.
But I’m open to other suggestions, and I’d love to see other experiments being run in parallel. What could this community add to awareness days like NetLabel day, or events along the lines of the FediVision Song Contest and CC Music Awards? Or Record Store Day, which my random idea about geogating releases could tie in with for example.
These are conversations that probably need their own topic, but they’re definitely worth having.
The publications you regularly read are a recommendation feed. I think what you’re really criticising here is the nudging machine that all the big platforms have enshittified into. I don’t think anyone is advocating decentralised search plumbing that works like that.
Maybe let’s turn the discussion in a more fun direction by getting into the weeds of what kind of federated search we do have in mind. I’ve laid out my ideas and talked a fair bit here, so I’m going to shut up for a while and see what the discussion so far brings up for others : )
I contend the success of DataFarming platforms is due to the stickiness and frictionlessness of their commercial design, not because they are better for music and musicians. We knowingly and unknowingly choose stuff that’s bad for us in daily life. Like when I want a cookie. I eat the cookie and it tastes good, even though I know it’s bad for me. If I eat a dozen cookies everyday, I acknowledge that my health may be negatively impacted. In terms of culture and community, choices are more complex and their potential effects are harder to foresee.
Feed or not, what I’m trying to do is shed light on the choices in front of us and get us thinking about why we might or might not want them. And you’re right, it doesn’t have to be either/or.
Great idea. As a federation noob, I have some questions. Is there a separate website for searching or could you search across servers from any place that supports federation? Do servers manually declare which servers they can search? I don’t use Mastodon, curious how it works there.
Yeah, this is my thought on it. I love the app idea, but get annoyed with being connected to the online world too much - and where I live doesn’t exactly have loads of record shops and venues to opt into something like this (the ones that do exist are slightly spread out). Made me wonder if there’s a meeting point between both - as in, if I don’t pick up my phone for an hour, it unlocks a track, or if I walk 100 steps, does it show something cool? It could even be something as simple as sharing something unlocks part of a larger musical puzzle and builds community that way. Maybe there’s a meeting point between the intentionality and conscious listening and blended online/offline discovery?
And with the federated concern, I think we’re all burnt out from what we’ve been offered previously and whilst it’s right to be skeptical of it solving every musician’s problems, it’s probably the most exciting option to me right now because it’s giving a bit more autonomy in terms of being able to take my profile with me somewhere else in the Fediverse if needs change and it’s a welcome tonal shift from being an algo and ads slot machine (like Facebook, where I could pay to access my own audience and still not feel that I have any real transparency in the results). I agree that it needs careful consideration though to not turn into more of the same and be privacy respecting if using location-based info (as Loki rightly pointed out in a conversation about it via Mirlo).
Anyway, these are all really interesting ideas from all corners! Also sent the dev of freq.social an invite but they’re taking a well-earned break over the summer - fingers crossed they’ll join in at some point and add to this. It’d be interesting to get Glenn McDonald involved too (mentioned this before here), but not sure how yet.
Really important point!!! Of course as @timglorioso says there are other perspectives as well, and those are important too, but very often in fora like this there’s a self-selecting sample of people who are (a) really interested in music and (b) have time to invest (otherwise we wouldn’t be posting here!) so as a result there are a lot fewer “casual users” than in the rest of the world.
And great thread in general, including the tension between “frictionless” as on the one hand something that people want but also what corporate platforms use to get people stuck.
Or pulling their work because of all the other, especially AI, things that Spotify is doing to devalue creators and creative content. I know I’m looking to pull my catalog from Spotify and have already stopped using Spotify as a platform.
<a href="//https://www.anumberfromtheghost.com">A Number from the Ghost</a> is one person's site but what if there was something showing fedi musicians videos in this kind of way? Or as floating images in a "constellation" (to use @Alex's terminology) that are scattered around and clickable.
Hi there, I made the above site, and just wanted to stop by and say it's a really interesting conversation! There are lots of potential avenues for ways to discover music outside of Spotify. I think my solution is probably too bespoke to be applied widely (in terms of a completely custom world for each track of music), but the potential to wander and discover music in a virtual environment could work well.
