Lines of flight: tools for escaping the torment nexus

[unspeaker]

In continuation of:

@unspeaker

@Mel

Strategies & advocacy efforts for leaving Big Social & Big Streamers. (Is it possible for everyone? Can we make the case to funding bodies that we have an alternative that works? DO we have an alternative that works, currently?)

Do we have an alternative for listeners to leave big social/big stream? How can we incentivize and facilitate them? Say, I travel around, chat with people, say how I’m not too big on surveillance/ad based cultural economy. “Okay,” they say, “what should I use instead?”

“You shouldn’t use”, perhaps I ought to say, “you should participate!”

My point of reference is a perhaps imaginary past where everyone in the village played an instrument. But they have not even that point of reference.

The “FOSS alternative” approach (e.g. “just” use Krita or GIMP as substitute for Photoshop) only gets us so far.

It works for certain types of self-contained things; but does not account for network effect (“critical mass”) which is something that turns out to only have been bootstrapped by a mixture of naive technooptimism and capital infusion.

How do we solve for network effect on a grassroots basis?

I’m hoping here we can collect and discuss tools, networks, and methodologies which:

• are past the prototypal stage (i.e. things we’ve confirmed to work);
• are ready to be promoted to users as ethical alternatives to mainstream cultureware;
• are capable, over time, of nudging people out of a passive consumer mentality.

[bandwagon]

Please forgive this rambliing response. I’ve thought about this a lot, but still only have 1/3 of an answer. In the end, there may not be a perfect one.

You have hit the nail on the head. “Open” only gets you so far. The general population doesn’t care if you’re “open” or not, so a winning solutions must be a tangible, structural advantage over their competition.

Add to that, open source is stereotypically less user-friendly than for-profit solutions. There are many reasons, but I think this holds up most of the time.

FOSS Advantages

Small companies often beat their larger competitors because they’re more responsive, more adaptable than the entrenched giants. I believe that “listening to end user feedback” should be a strength, and focus of FOSS software.

Data ownership is still important to some people, as is the lack of tracking and surveillance capitalism. Though, there’s an upper limit on this, so it can’t be the primary benefit.

Speaking of the network effect, I believe the Fediverse itself is a key selling point. There are something like 13 million users there today – not all active, but it’s still a good number starting point. Nobody wants to join an empty party, but if we’re bootstrapping on top of a party with 13 million people there already, then any tools/tech/communities have an added benefit of reaching that otherwise exclusive audience.

A Starting Point..

To expand on your third bullet point, I believe the right goal (for now) is not to replace, but to coexist with the corporate/for-profit communities. This cuts deep into my own beliefs, and the work I’m doing. Very few people will throw out whatever they’ve been using simply because there’s a newer (possibly less refined) alternative out there that says it’s “open.” But they might try it out side-by-side with their existing tools, if they have enough incentives. THAT ITSELF is the win. Once newbies are in the door, then the goal is to grow that relationship, and slowly wean them off of the “passive consumer mentality” that you mentioned.

So, what brings people to a new platform? Not the widgets and gadgets on the website. It’s the content. If there’s good content, people will join. If only to check it out during their daily scroll. That’s what Bandwagon is for: to bring cool, new content to the Fediverse. And hopefully, other kinds of art and culture will follow in the future, too. The content doesn’t have to be exclusive to the Fediverse (for now) – it just has to be a new and possibly more direct way to interact with bands and their music. If that gives some newbies an incentive to make a new Mastodon account, it’s a win.

[unspeaker]

Thanks! Do please ramble on, I was starting to feel a liitle alone in the rambling

A thing crossed my mind while discussing fountain.fm with @anon15453463 on Social music distribution in one click? - #13 by setto which is a little more general and belongs here.

Recency bias. I got it, you got it, they all got it because everyone keeps wanting to be on the new shit. But suppose I publish a song and want it to be discovered – I will want it to be discovered just the same in 1 year! It’ll be the exact same song (and probably exactly as unheard, too )

There will simply be more music published in the meantime, that’s OK – but how to correct for the extra recency bias introduced by latest-first? I’d be all for people having to listen to the oldest music so that they can better appreciate the newest, but that’s just the same problem upside down.

Maybe one way in which our platforms would be fairer for both artists and listeners, is to ensure near-equal exposure to the back catalog? Would that be a good idea in your opinion, how would it work?

[anon15453463]

Now i am unsure where to answer, when in that thread you link i say fountain.fm is a sovereign spotify, i mean that in all it’s glory and gloom. While it allows you to put any feed in there as long as it is indexed by the podcastindex.org (hence why diskspace is delegated for audio/video data). (You can even push livestreams.) I’m not super interested in that particular app, because of the spotify side of it. The source is not open, and not even Dog knows how their recommendation bonanza works. They do the usual capitalist thing: put themselves in the middle. They can make all the promises in the world, nothing can concretely stop them from using that middle position to pivot into pure BS.

But it gives some cool ideas about what can be done.

[unspeaker]

@anon15453463

But it gives some cool ideas about what can be done.

Certainly does! Fact I just hallucinated some sort of standard “label-in-a-box” software distribution that’s made out of the things that everyone’s been building. And some others that nobody has thought of yet

It would integrate with Fedi as well as with micropayment-oriented spaces, maintain a boundary between the two, take care of making content available on all networks – like that https://ditto.pub/ you recommended me!

Of course that’d be for existing label-shaped entities. I was kinda hoping there would be a client that posts the song release to Fedi (for clout) and Nostr (for sats), maybe even adds some metadata to the post so it’s all marked as the same thing.

Pipe dream? What if I put it in a pipe and shmoakt it – maybe by forking GNOME Social? But if the protocols don’t already enable that sort of actually pretty basic thing, hell knows if I’d be able to pull off the political work to get 'em to add it, if their design allows for this at all…

I’ve just learned some cool tricks for making development with qemu-kvm easier, so now I’m imaging the “labelware” delivered as VM image for commodified VPS… But of course that’s hammer nails

[bandwagon]

@unspeaker

Recency bias. I got it, you got it, they all got it because everyone keeps wanting to be on the new shit. But suppose I publish a song and want it to be discovered – I will want it to be discovered just the same in 1 year! It’ll be the exact same song (and probably exactly as unheard, too )

I want to account for this in the followable search engine. It’s not fully fleshed out, but would be something like this:

1. when a person follows a particular search, any new albums/tracks that match the criteria are sent to their inboxes immediately.

2. If their inbox hasn’t received an update in some period of time (1 day?) then a pseudo-random match is pulled from the archives, starting with albums/tracks they haven’t seen in the past.

Do you think soemthing like this would be useful?

[unspeaker]

Yes! This is definitely in the right direction.

As a minimum I’d suggest to have in mind:

• Making the interval configurable. I have no opinion whether 1 day would be the best default for everyone; personally I’d be happy to get new stuff in my inbox daily, but then again my email doesn’t get a whole lot of action! I guess this could be A/B tested – or even better, people on here could just say what value they think everyone would be most comfortable with Granularity would be cool – allowing users to enter “48h” instead of just picking from 1d/1w/1m ought to cost you comparatively little extra effort.

• Making sure you’re not recommending things that the user has already acknowledged having seen. You may want to pull like 3 things from the archive and engage the user with the choice; in that case, the occasional repetition should be totally fine, as people may engage with a release from the 2nd/Nth time. But showing them something they’ve already gotten, or something they’ve explicitly passed on – now that would be pretty bad IMO.

FWIW, some online marketplaces that I occasionally buy e.g. music gear from also have this “email notifications for saved searches” feature; so I assume it’s something people are familiar with. Of, course on a marketplace for physical goods, the “from the archives” feature doesn’t work – but for music it’s absolutely a great idea!

[unspeaker]

Further thoughts, driven by some of the good ideas from Last.fm:

Are you considering a social graph element to the search engine? Where people can “friend”/“follow” fellow listeners or favorite artists – perhaps not built-in to Bandwagon at all, but rather outsourced to a linked Fediverse profile?

Because then, the emailed recommendations could feature a little element of social proof – “as bought by your friends X and Y”, “as recommended by your favorite artist Z”, etc.

This would differ from extant centralized recommender systems by:

• Being consent-driven: X, Y and Z could opt in to/out of this system via setting.

• Not biasing the randomness: things liked by your friends would only be marked as such, but certainly not actually shown to you more often. This would avoid amplifying popularity bias, while still enabling music discovery as social activity.

[bandwagon]

These are great suggestions and I need to dig into your ideas deeper to figure out how they all fit together.

One important point though is that bandwagon search results don’t show up in your email, they show up in your Fediverse timeline. So you can like and follow other music listeners straight in mastodon or any other Fediverse software.

I think this already encompasses a lot of the social features of Bandcamp or last.fm using the open web. Pushing this further, will take a lot of thought, but I think it will be well worth it.

[unspeaker]

@bandwagon

One important point though is that bandwagon search results don’t show up in your email, they show up in your Fediverse timeline.

I seem to have misunderstood that, thanks for the correction! So, basically, it works by DMing the user? Awesome!