From what I’ve read, it aims to be an alternative to Bandcamp, being a cooperative - means, you can join and co-own Subvert, take part on dicisions etc. as far as I can tell
There’s also a Zine about Subverts model of cooperative ownership (unfortunately hosted on google):
Seems like a nice project, definitely great that it’s a co-op. Compared to Mirlo, I like that Mirlo profiles are federated, so you can eg. follow @stefan@mirlo.space from a Mastodon server, no need to sign up for a new service as a fan.
There is also Bandwagon as an alternative to Bandcamp, which is also federated, so you can follow me as @stefanbohacek@bandwagon.fm .
Im on subvert. Theres various benefits but at the moment it seems quite clunky.
Benefits include (i hope) more safety.
For example, on bandcamp, ive had another “artist” make parodies accounts of me. Diss songs that reference my private life. And bandcamp ignored all my reports even when I was receiving threatening emails about my day job and direct harrassment via their message system.
A few months in, can Subvert be considered a fair platform?
Today, a musician asked me why About Selecteh doesn’t include Subvert, and the only answer I have right now is the quote above, which is not a great argument.
Ok, I have read a bunch of public docs by Subvert and I have joined as an artist to gain access to the forum and learn more. All very interesting!
Here is a quick assessment welcoming more insights and opinions:
Cooperation: their organization is rather complex, with a “cooperative” at the forefront and as their main selling point. I still need to understand how much of this is a legally constituted cooperative with members and how much is “virtual”, extending the cooperative values to an international online community. There is a corporation who contracts staff, owns IP, etc, that is “owned” by the cooperative (again, I still haven’t learned about the legal details), and there is a board formed by different constituencies elected (fully? partially? I need to learn more here too). All in all OK in terms of internal cooperation, interesting experiment, and let’s see how it goes. BUT in terms of external cooperation, so far… they seem to be focused in themselves? Maybe logical since they have been focusing in their launch. To be seen.
Transparency: a lot of the documentation is public and a lot more is accessible to cooperative members – and joining the cooperative is easy for artists. Good.
Open source: There is no open source code currently, and no declared plans to open any code. But there has been a discussion about this on their forum, and this position probably captures the current consensus of the members about costs, benefits, and value of having the codebase managed as an open source project. There seems to be openness to revisit the topic. Not open source, but with a reasoning supported by their membership.
Peer-production: the actual production is done by the corporation, which as of today is a small organization with just a few staff. How horizontal is their internal work, no idea. And as said, there doesn’t seem to be much peer collaboration outside but maybe this is just my lack of information.
Decentralization: Subvert is designed and implemented as a centralized platform. I don’t think decentralization is something they are aiming for.
Federation: There has been a bit of conversation about ActivityPub and other interoperability protocols, mostly brought by motivated members more than the staff, and nothing has been planned so far. So nothing yet.
All in all, a very interested and promising project, and the number of members on paper is already bigger than the magnitudes we are used to see in Bandcamp alternatives. There are many question moving forward, and they can only be answered as they move forward.
I wish they would join TSMN, and I will ask them eventually, unless someone does it before. I think it would be beneficial for the network, and for them too, if they want to participate in wider networks beyond their internal community.
great that fairness to artists is at the core of it.
it’s great that it’s a coop!!
but there’s also a corporation that will take venture money, (if the board or coop members agree? - or something like that?)
it’s not open source
it’s not peer-produced
it’s not designed to be decentralized
it’s not federated
today they sent me an email that mentions “artists class”, “labels class” and “listeners class”. very unfortunate choice of words - even if it’s meant just to distinguish between some irrelevant features. why class? haven’t they heard of “class struggle”? now they are creating classes.
i also don’t like that their zine from 2024 was titled “Plan for the Artist-Owned Internet”. why? because this title from the get go shows they don’t know what internet is. and this false understanding that it’s just a bunch of apps on your phone or apple mac they promote further. today i also read more about that zine: (cw: substack link, sorry: Subvert's Plan for the Artist-Owned Internet; Reach Reads #1 )
I wonder what will happen when subvert corp. will want to do things their own way because they will be bound to venture capital and the subvert coop will be against it? and then corp will say we cannot sustain the project anymore, what will the coop do? i might be very wrong about all this, but it’s just sus on number of levels.
i believe in genuine good faith by everyone involved in this project, but the way it’s been started (huge hype with AI-produced zine, unusual combination of corp and coop) and it is going now I just have mixed feelings. that’s all.
In the past weeks I have spent a lot of time (a lot) reading on the Subvert forum and listening to new releases. I’m very grateful for the amount and breath that they are attracting. The range goes from literally the same people we know publishing on Mirlo etc to independent artists with more or less professional intention that are looking beyond Bandcamp / Soundcloud for the first time. The community activity on the forum (including the moderators) is driven by genuine curiosity, collaboration and friendliness, there are all kinds of topics discussed (including the Fediverse etc) and I bet for many it is also the first time (at least in a long time) that they have these kind of interactions outside of the big corporate “social” networks. All this is very good.
BUT
After all this, I still have mixed feelings about the direction, the core, which makes me wonder whether all the rest is sensibly trusting them (I mean, bootstrapping all that takes a lot of effort, even more with the current level of success, and the core team seems to be rather small) … or they / we are all being rather naive.
I personally still give this project a chance, my trust. Presumption of innocence, habeas corpus. I am meeting very interesting music and musicians there, and I only wish more of them make the next step also trying alternative social networks. If anyone here knows them and wantsa to invite them to join TSMN, great. Otherwise I might send them an “official” invite (I already shared on unofficially, but it was buried in the Introduce Yourself long topic.
I am meeting very interesting music and musicians there, and I only wish more of them make the next step also trying alternative social networks. If anyone here knows them and wantsa to invite them to join TSMN, great. Otherwise I might send them an “official” invite (I already shared on unofficially, but it was buried in the Introduce Yourself long topic.