Protocol options for interoperation of music hosting services

[strypey]

Hey @LLK I detect a note of frustration here, even anger. If I’ve said something provocative or unreasonable, please let me know. I’m autistic, so I’m not always good at reading the room, and I have a tendency to infodump without realising it. Because I’m trying to clearly explain the logic behind the points I’m making, rather than just waving my hands in general directions.

@LLK

To be clear we didn’t get the funding to Federate “over AP”

My apologies, I didn’t realise I was talking to a member of the Mirlo team. Having checked just now, I can see you mentioned it on the Introductions page. But FYI I can’t see anything in your profile to indicate that affiliation, which might be helpful, along with putting the @names of team members who are here next to the Mirlo entry on the Who is missing? Who should we invite? page. Just to avoid people like me making assumptions and teaching grandma to sucks eggs

Comments from other team members (@simon maybe?) gave me the impression Mirlo is actively working on an AP implementation, as did that GritHub issue. The NlNet grant at that link is titled “Federating Mirlo”, so I thought it was a reasonable assumption it was for that. My apologies again if I misunderstood.

@LLK

We do integrate AP where we think it makes sense

Cool. I was planning to add Mirlo to the fediverse.party watchlist (rebuilding this is very much WIP right now), and that seems to confirm I’m on right track, so I’ve done that. Again, feel free to clarify if I’ve misunderstood.

@LLK

The funding is to create a decentralized streaming ecosystem and build protocol with other like minded services that can be used across many different music streaming approaches … For that task, AP isn’t great

Care to expand on why you think that?

I don’t want to assume it’s because you don’t understand AP. So I’m assuming you know all this, but just in case anyone else reading this thread is interested …

Obviously AP isn’t the One Ring to rule them all. Even in existing fediverse software, WebFinger, RSS, Zot/Nomad, OAuth, and other protocols are all used where they’re useful. The whole Social Web sits atop web protocols (primarily HTTP), which in turn sit atop deeper layers of net protocols (DNS, BGP, etc, and at the base of it all TCP/IP).

But people often have a limited view of what AP is, based on how Mastodon uses it. Which is a bit like defining what the web is, by what motherfuckingwebsite.com can do. There’s much more to both. For anyone interested, I recommend Reading ActivityPub by Hometown dev Darius Kazemi, which aims to walk new AP devs through how to make use of the Activity Vocabulary defined in ActivityStreams, to do a much wider range of things with AP server-to-server federation than is often realised. Another aspect of AP that’s often underappreciated - and I think very relevant to the music hosting use case - is what can be done with Linked Data in AP federation.

@LLK

the “gains” of how AP is being used are marginal and using iframes embed is just as good, at which point AP isn’t even needed at all

This confuses me, because I explained a number of benefits of using AP federation in the OP. Let me dig them out of my wall of text for you;

@strypey

it allows 2 totally different styles of discovery to happen within a unified network; BrandCramp style browsing, and organic discovery in the wider social web. A few thoughts on each.

BrandCramp style browsing. Ideally, I’d be able to go to whichever of those 65+ music hosting services provides me the most convenient search tools, and find music from any of them. The cross-service search portal maintained by @kidlightbulbs at unstream.stream is a Proof of Concept for this kind of unified search experience. It may or may not be the current reality in AP-federated music services, but if not, that points to UX work - and maybe protocol work - that needs to be done.

Organic discovery. Word-of-mouth in the fediverse/ threadiverse outside the music publishing services. As above, but without The Algorithms of the platforms putting their thumbs on the scale. Because artist publishing accounts exist in the social network itself, and their music releases and announcements are posts in that network, they’re easy to reference (via @mentions and fedi-links) and browse, and they can easily find and take part in the chatter about their music. Organic discovery can be boosted by existing social web tools like searches on hastags, following artist accounts, etc.

You seem very committed to the position that AP isn’t the right protocol for connecting music hosting services. Since as I’ve said, I’m not assuming lack of familiarity with the relevant specs, I can only presume it’s because you’re bullish on another approach. So again, what would you propose we use instead? Seriously, infodump on me, I’m keen to learn!