September 2025
Howdy Wagoneers!
It’s been a crazy few months here at Bandwagon HQ, what with the world on fire and all. Add to that, the enormous schedule of updates that we’ve been releasing, and you can start to see why this blog has been extra-special quiet, recently. But, it’s time to share some cool new updates that are now live on Bandwagon.fm. I hope they spark joy for all of you.
Embeddable Player
Bandwagon launched with a media player that was… fine, really. It played all the songs in your albums, and it usually highlighted the song playing. Cool. But sophisticated musicians have sophisticated needs, so I’m really excited to roll out a much-improved media player on every album.
In addition to closing the loop on some basic features (like a scrub bar) the best part is that you can now embed and play your music on any website. Just use the new Embed button on your album to get a snippet of HTML code. You can put this on any website to add a little player widget right to the page.
About Bandwagon Premier
The embeddable player currently works with ALL albums, but I’m planning to make this exclusive to the paid “Bandwagon Premier” service that’s still on track for late 2025 / early 2026.
So, when we do transition to paid Bandwagon Premier accounts, you’ll need to have a paid “Premier” account for this embeddale player to continue working as-is. For free accounts, this embedded code will work differently: clicking “play” will return your visitors to the Bandwagon site where the content is hosted.
Inbox Updates
I spent a lot of time with Sean Tilley (of We Distribute fame) in August and September, working on improvements to the “user experience” (UX) of the inbox. And we’ve already delivered some pretty cool results.
We’re moving Emissary away from its “RSS Reader” roots, and towards a more modern “social inbox” style. To try it out, go to any folder in your inbox, click the “Folder Settings” button, then set the layout to “Social”. This makes your folder work a lot more like Mastodon and other social feeds, with the latest items on top, and a more recognizable layout.
And, clicking on posts now gives you new tools to explore dense conversations, helping you see nested discussions as an expandable tree or in straight chronological format.
As always, there’s always more we can do, but this our next step towards building a truly universal Fediverse server.
Better Federation
Now that online album sales are FINALLY out the door (with organic sales actually happening!) it’s been nice to take some time to clean up dozens of lingering issues that kept Federation from being “A+” work. Little things start to make a big difference, like: improving support for alt text, or reworking the way news articles are represented on Mastodon, and a bunch of similar enhancements to make your posts on Bandwagon look and function at their very best, across the entire Fediverse.
Like the UX updates above, this will always be an ongoing effort. So please let me know what you see when you post, like, or share Bandwagon content, and what you think we could do to make it shine even brighter.
Improving Cross-Site Interactions
This is a whole thing, and it gets very technical, very quickly. For non-techies, the bottom line is that Bandwagon members are leading the way in connecting every Fediverse server more closely together. The follow, like, and share buttons on Bandwagon work differently than on other social platforms, allowing regular people to take those actions even if they’re not members on the Bandwagon site themselves.
You’d think this would “just work” on every Fediverse server, but alas…
And, to dip our toes into the technical details, what I’m talking about is Activity Intents (FEP-3b86) the technical proposal that makes this cross-site wizardry function. It requires each Fediverse server to implement some small changes in their code, which means we need buy-in from a lot of different developers to make this really take off.
Fortunately this is already happening.
My undying thanks to PieFed, Streams, and Mitra for including support for Activity Intents in their code.
Changes on the Fediverse seem to happen slowly, and only in direct response to real content and real needs. I’m going to keep working to move this forward, and I want every one of you to know that your music is the reason that changes like this get attention. People see stuff on Bandwagon and want to interact with it. Activity Intents make this work, and developers are starting to pay attention.
Code Audits
You’d never see this if I didn’t mention it, but I’ve also set up a number of manual and automated code audits, with the goal of catching and preventing potential bugs before they make it to production. I’ve also been working with open source security analysts to proactively find and fix security issues in the core software.
This is just to say, I’ve always been proud of how Emissary is built, and functions, and am now putting it under the microscope to make sure this open source software is absolutely bulletproof.
Support for Nivenly Foundation
Along these lines, I’d also like to give a shout out to the Nivenly Foundation and their Fediverse Security Fund which helps to identify security issues on the Fediverse by paying bounties to open source security researchers who find problems in projects, including Emissary. I’ve made a donation to their work, and you should too.
Next Up: Account Migration
And last, a quick look ahead at my plans for October and November. The last big item on our roadmap is to give you a way to migrate your accounts to any server you want, with 100% fidelity. I’ve spent a lot of time on this already, and have started working with the W3C LOLA Account Portability team to figure out how to accomplish this. The standard is still evolving, but there’s enough there for us to move forward, so let’s move forward.
I’ll be spending October (and probably November) building account migration into Bandwagon. It’s a huge step forward for all Wagoneers, and for the Fediverse as a whole.
And, though Account Migration will be the primary focus, it won’t be the only thing we do. I’m still saving some time for smaller projects. You can track our progress by looking at the “October” column in the Bandwagon Release Calendar. Feel free to comment, or to add your own requests. This is a community effort; and everyone’s opinions are important.
Until next update. Rock on 🤘🏻
This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://bandwagon.fm/68d6edc663b841edd7441bb6