The Social Music Network has started its outreach in the Fediverse, which is our comfort zone. All good, but most (aspirational) professional music makers and related creators are not here yet. How do we reach out to them?
How can we help existing members bring people from their circles?
Are there associations or other types of collectives we could invite?
How do we approach the corporate platforms where many of these people can be found?
Are there other outreach channels we should consider?
I think a big part of the conversation is how do we create something that builds on the years long efforts of all current actors, most of which have already sunk in thousands of hours of work into understanding tech related issues, social issues, money exchange issues, governance issues and so on and so forth.
I think what we need is more conversation about how to convert all that wealth of knowledge, tools, and expertise for it to not turn into a winner takes all race to the bottom, but rather something that can meaningfully reward all these efforts and turn them into a collaborative project that can actually materialize into something useful.
The more there’s one big space to handle that conversation, the more likely it is that we align eachother where it counts, and differentiate eachother in ways that are useful to all.
One last footnote however : This space needs to not become somewhere where the “community at large” (Fedi or otherwise) puts pressure on the tool builders to answer their questions, etc. I think one essential thing to keep in mind is how burnout prone this work can be, and that by its very nature as a place where we aim to build alternatives, it means money is scarce, fundings are close to inexistant, and business models relly a lot on goodwill and volunteer energy.
Aw LLK, I can tangibly feel your burnout through that post!
Totally agreed. I see this place as a possible hub of coordination between all the diverse indie platforms, artists, and other music workers. My particular areas of interest here are:
Another benefit for this spot would be a place for collective knowledge…a repository for useful ideas, technology, tools, etc. Things that people find practical and useful. The exact opposite of all the music industry or DIY “gurus” promising to give you the keys to endless success and a career…once you buy their course.
IMO, that makes it a place for people to come for things that will help them along the way, instead of another place online for them to argue about stuff. (I also think moderation will play a large role in that as well).
Ok, thank you for your feedback. Here is an imperfect summary of the discussion so far, focusing on the outreach:
We need to host conversations that our core audience of music makers and projects supporting them consider beneficial, useful to them.
We need to invite the projects and communities already working on fair music distribution and exchange.
We need to build on the existing knowledge of all these actors, which is currently spread and hard to find.
We need to promote cross-project collaborations with specific common goals that actually materialize into something useful.
We need to offer a space that (aspirational) professional music makers and related project roles feel safer, productive, and rewarding – not another place where “the community at large” puts pressure on them for support and features.
Even more condensed:
focus on high quality discussions for our core audience
continue inviting projects relevant for these discussions
build a knowledge base capturing what we know and supporting discussions about what we don’t know yet.
I fully agree with all this, and will prioritize related work on Betatesting TSMN accordingly.
At the same time, are you saying… If you build it, they will come? Because so far nobody has mentioned outreach-outreach activities beyond reaching out to friends and to projects in our immediate neighborhood. It’s fine! Not complaining, there is enough to do for starters. Just checking that this is what we (collectively) mean.
Oh my… I started to write a small proposal and Discourse recommended some similar topics and I clicked on this one, from 20 days ago, and, uh, how did I miss this?
Thanks so much for these really throughtful comments. They feel profound and pertinent.
I came here, tho, with the idea to start a wiki page/post with “recommended” fediverse instances (for micro/mezzo blogging) that accept new members (immediate or under review) and have a strong moderation policy. Maybe not even music releated (or maybe separated into sections).
I would be really happy to see also reasons or short descriptions of those instances, their particularities etc.
The problem I see with such list is that the fedi-landscape of servers keeps chaning - many instances come and go, so this list should be kept updated.
There’s also another consideration - consent. We know (“our”) part of fedi is big on consent. Do you think recommending some instances here would be non-consensual?
I also had a thought while reading ideas above, to preface such a list with few considerations - one of them would be also “consider expenses (in hours and money) of running an instance and make sure you donate to the admin”.
I’m dogfooding here, because in my effort to promote fediverse to my own local community I keep coming back to some napkin-sketches of such a list and it feels so often that I’m starting from scratch.
I think it is a very good idea! You can start it, we turn it into wiki, and then add it to the Knowledge base index.
But why just micro/mezzo blogging only? We could open it to other fediversal platforms as well, PeerTube, etc.
Maybe in separate sections, yes, and then people can choose based on their priorities.
Ideally, at least the admins / members of the music-focused instances should be aware that this page exists, they appear there, and they can keep the information updated if they wish. We can also have a disclaimer at the top encouraging people to improve and update the page if they see anything outdated or missing.
EDIT: forgot to mention that I would be happy to reach out to admins of instances mentioned in the first version of this wiki page.
We haven’t talked about labels / netlabels. Do they have a role in social, fair, autonomous music distribution, and therefore in TSMN? If they do, how do we reach out to them?
