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I've been using this for a little over a year and like it a lot but it lacks the music discovery features of commercial platforms (which becomes important when you have terabytes of music) and takes a lot of effort to organize music and create play lists. The music onboarding process typically starts with organizing metadata with Musicbrainz Picard then import the collection into Funkwhale's DB via a cli admin tool. I have funkwhale hosted at home attached to my own music collection. There is an unofficial mobile client called Otter that makes listening to music on Android very pleasent. Admin overhead aside, this program has become a part of my daily life and I greatly appreciate the developers efforts.
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I cannot upvote Funkwhale enough. I've had the need for something like this for a long long time now. A decade ago I was lucky to have my own desktop computer (before it was a shared one with my brother, before that I had just my parent's from time to time). Nowadays, between the smarphone, the work laptop, my desktop and my laptop I cannot possibly have all my music available all the time. And I don't like using spotify where I don't feel I own the songs and they get dropped from my lists. I used to be a fan of grooveshark, but that went down. Now I can have my pod and share it with my friends? On my own server? Accessible everywhere? I'm in. Where can I donate some money?
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> Where can I donate some money? (not affiliated with funkwhale, just found the link from their site)
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> I've had the need for something like this for a long long time now. Note that there are a few projects like this one, for example Subsonic or Mopidy. (Funkywhale certainly looks nice though!)
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Subsonic went closed, and the rebrand to LibreSonic had some unrest with the maintainer, so Airsonic is leading the way in the line of *Sonics.
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> There is an unofficial mobile client called Otter that makes listening to music on Android very pleasent Is there some reason servers like this require a special client? Can't you just provide URLs to m3u8s which in turn have URLs to mp3s? Is it just that there isn't an agreed-upon protocol for listing directories? Or maybe auth concerns?
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How big is your collection and how well does it work with it ( and what resources does it consume)?
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Which music service's discovery features actually work? For me the only one that worked was Google Play Music. The rest have been total and utter crap at discovery.
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I use Spotify and have great luck there. Playlists:
Discover Weekly tends to result in ~3-5 (new to me) musicians/week that I hadn't heard of that I would actually listen to. That's a pretty high ratio IMO. Release Radar tends to result in ~1 (new to me)/week. Granted, it's supposedly mostly ones I listen to, but still has several I've never heard of. Daily Mix 1-6 are a mixed bag and sometimes result in something new, but mostly just things I like (and may have forgotten about too).
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Discover Weekly was rather boring for me. It was about 6 weeks before I heard a song I hadn't heard before and only one musician I hadn't heard before in the 3 months I used it. I had much better success with Pandora when I tried it, but it still wasn't exactly deep cuts.
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If by Music Discovery we mean finding music that's new to us as apposed to finding particular music we already have / own, I have two main sources: * Freeform radio stations (preferably with live playlists): WMFO, WFMU are my favorites. Even people who are immersed in music can't help to hear something new every hour. For me, it's a constant wave of new-to-me music. Many free form radio stations are also layering tracks, interviews, noise, and other audio treats that make for unique experiences that may never (or should never, haha) happen again. Just under free form radio there are countless excellent LPFM and college stations around the country - Hollow Earth Radio, nearly every college radio station from Boston to Milford PA. * I also use Bandcamp for getting deeper into a genre or trying out new ones. They write up articles that profile maybe a dozen artists that represent the boundaries of a style - whether you read them through or just listen, it's an amazing value. Easily on the level of what the New York Times does for classical music. Bandcamp is obviously growing like a weird and wonderful weed the last year - I would really like them to add a few more features for building random playlists within a few criteria. |
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Spotify is outstanding in this regard. "Go to radio" from any given track or album; works every time. For even more passive discovery, their "discover weekly" and "release radar" do a good job of surfacing things too.
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"discover weekly" was okay, but it is now completely broken to me. It suggests 80-90% of songs I already downloaded, and the remainder are always the same. Also discover weekly stops after, what, 2-3hrs of listening. Then the list is done and apparently Spotify thinks there's no more to discover. Luckily indeed there's the radio feature.
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Sorry but Spotify is absolutely horrible in this regard. At least for me. Every group I like pick "Radio" and with in 2 to 4 songs it's playing completely unrelated stuff. The rest has all been crap too. "discover weekly" has never once suggested a single thing I'm interested in ever.
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When Pandora first did discovery based on the attributes of the music you're listening to, it was amazing. Then it became trendy to provide discovery based on what other people who listen similar things like. Not so amazing ever since. Not _bad_... just not great. I haven't found any (even GPM) that do a good job at pulling together suggestions that fit into my eclectic listening habits.
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Spotify is quite great at the Daily Mixes (I don't check the other playlists that much). I go through phases where I deep dive into genre's. Each Daily Mix ends up representing one of the genre's I've been listening to lately pulling in music that I like and other songs that I may like. That being said, that may be due to the fact that I deep dive into genres that don't have that much of a cross over, e.g. Japanese Hip-Hop & Lo-fi beats, R&B, 90's indie rock, etc. Still, the Daily Mixes are a great way to listen to music I like separated by genre. Last.fm's discovery feature is pretty neat too. I don't use it as much as Spotify's because I don't listen to music on Last.fm but I think the key feature of Last.fm over other music discovery tools is that it has a profile for many artists. Spotify, Apple Music, etc. are limited by what music is on their platform. If an artist isn't on Spotify, then they won't have a profile. Last.fm isn't limited that way so you can find even more artists, including artists that may be more underground or niche.
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> Which music service's discovery features actually work My best experience has been talking with people or listening to artist interviews on influences.
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>The rest have been total and utter crap at discovery. Strongly agree that music discovery is, in some sense, generally 'broken' across most platforms and not very good. I have been deeply dissatisfied with just about every system. I found Google Play music to be okay. My best luck these days is what I would call a "brute force" search through record labels, last.fm similar artists, bandcamp pages for genres, sputnik listings for particular genres, etc. It's very hit or miss, but I feel like it leads to me to my occasional lightning strikes, which are what I really want. These discoveries are quite different from the guesses put forward my recommendation engines, which seem to smooth out the interesting edges and signatures of personality and gradually draws toward a lowest common denominator, with no lightning strikes.
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I have been reasonably happy with Spotify’s discovery. It hasn’t been impressive as YouTube recommendations, but it’s still the primary way I find new music. Their generated "Discovery Weekly" playlist is a favorite of mine.
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I personally enjoy Spotify discovery a lot, the "Discover Weekly" and "Release Radar" playlists made me discover some bands I would have otherwise missed.
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GPM worked very well for me and I've used it since the beginning; it was great for new releases and finding new music I like. I ditched it recently due to the YouTube music thing and moved to Spotify. I find im always listening to the same playlist because I just can't find anything I want to listen to on Spotify unless I search explicitly.
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I would pay the monthly spotify fee for their "discover weekly" playlist alone.
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I think it depends in personal taste. Spotify and amazon give me mostly boring mainstream ... . The only discovery algorithm i keep enjoying is pandora. due to semi effective geoblocking in my vountry, I, however , hesitate to go for the ad-free subscription.
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I love Spotify’s. I discover new stuff every week because of it in a very broad range of musical categories
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> Which music service's discovery features actually work? It depends on what you mean by "work". Discovery capabilities have certainly gotten vastly better. 10+ years ago, the only decent one was the now (effectively) defunct Last.fm. These days, they're all pretty good. Spotify, pandora, google music, and now youtube music will do a good job of giving you recommendations based strictly on what you've been cue-ing up. But the recommendations from these services are the equivalent of going into a record store and getting advice from a dim-witted and disinterested employee. You'll get all the obvious stuff, maybe things you forgot about, and if you happen to like popular stuff the recommendations will work OK. But you won't get challenging, provocative recommendations that expand your taste. You'll get cloying recommendations that try to cater to your taste like it was a static attribute. Oh, yeah, and there's "the surveillance capitalism thing" which happens to be the centerpiece of all these services. Is that a problem? Yes. The best "discovery algorithm" is still HUMAN BEINGS. |
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> These days, they're all pretty good Your experience is vastly different than mine. Youtube music seems to be recommending nothing but what's popular. Justin Bieber is being recommending to me. I've never listed to him or anything remotely related. No good recommendations on any of the others. Maybe you have a different definition of "good" Good to me means "sounds similar and in the same genre as what I'm currently listening to". It does not mean "people who liked this song also liked that song"
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> It does not mean "people who liked this song also liked that song" Actually, yes, it does (and many other things too), but to be fair "good" is a highly subjective judgment which is going to be different for everyone. I don't think, at this point in time, we have recommendation engines that can do much more than fling out recommendations based on an unknown convolution of your listening history combined with music meta-data combined with social network data and a mix of paid stuff courtesy of your surveillance capitalism purveyor. I know it's possible to capture some characteristics from the music track itself, like bpm (perhaps usable for EDM DJ's?). The "holy grail" would be to have a system that can truly assess the nature of a piece of music based on audio and use it make "interesting" and non-obvious recommendations. We are very far from doing that in software, but humans are still very good at it.
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The problem with "people who liked this song also liked that song" is that very often I don't want to listen to that song now even if it's something I really love. If I'm listening to ambient music I don't suddenly want to be ambushed by something uptempo. If I'm listening to e.g. Debussy, you might be excused for suggesting something vaguely new age in a similar mood and tempo, but certainly not rock. Another problem is that you can't just take raw overlap in tastes, because some people like "everything", and the fact their tastes overlap with mine does not mean I'll like everything else they like. I've yet to hear a recommendation system that chooses music I want to listen to reliably enough that I can generally stand to listen to them for more than a few songs at a time without it turning into an endless annoying sequence of skipping. Respecting genre (segues need to be gradual, if at all), respecting mood and tempo needs to come first. Then you can consider what others who likes the same songs within those constraints also likes within those constraints. Honestly if I have to choose between personalised recommendation and precise control of genre and mood/tempo, I'd take genre and mood/tempo over personalisation any day. Another pet peeve of mine is lack of visibility into how to teach a system what I want. E.g. if I dislike or skip a song, will it get that it doesn't fit my current mood or what I want to listen to now, or will it wrongly infer I don't like the song at all? Sometimes it feels as if the people designing these systems don't use them.
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> you can't just take raw overlap in tastes, because some people like "everything", and the fact their tastes overlap with mine does not mean I'll like everything else they like. I think that these recommendation systems, especially youtube's, are much more nuanced than you're suggesting. And I say this as someone who finds these recommendation systems lacking and of limited utility compared to discovery from reading Pitchfork, for example. They're trying to balance quite a lot of inputs and actually somehow make money from it. Also, "genre" and "mood" of a piece of music are not easy to define, let alone measure. You're asking for a lot and I don't think what you're asking for is realistic from a piece of software.
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DJs should be in your list -- downloading tracklists from sets that I like is my #1 method for discovering new music Find a couple DJs you like, download everything you can from their soundcloud or mixcloud, then give it a listen. Keeping Shazam close by is also helpful
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Spotify has gotten worse. They don't want you to listen to too much music, they want just enough to keep you subbed.
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all depends on how niche or diverse you previous listening history is
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Looking at the website, I cannot fully understand how it works. Is it somewhere between BitTorrnet (peer2peer content sharing) and Mastodon (decentralized social network)? How does monetization work?
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I just gotta say I love the name. From groove shark, to sound cloud, to funk whale. Cannot wait for slimy eel.
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I'm holding out for Bassbass.
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groove shark, now theres a name I have not heard for a long time...
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Grooveshark was awesome! From the brand, the UI, the service. RIP Grooveshark.
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Check this out, if you want to know a little about the internal history of Grooveshark: https://sharklore.org/
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They really were the best, and they had obscure music that I would have never expected they'd have. Old SNES game OST like the super mario rpg soundtrack was there. It felt like if I could think it, I could find it. Ad-free and flawless free experience. Truly a gem.
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I was using it at my job when it went down. Music stopped, things weren't responding, reloaded the page and knew it wasn't coming back. I was using it way back when you could use their Java Applet to upload your music. Had my entire library on it!
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Yes! And there were the deep cuts of songs too. It was a wild ride. I am so fortunate to have been there for the time that I had. Appreciate the love everyone's been sending in the comments. It's good to not be forgotten :)
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If you're looking for that specifically and weren't aware of it already, there's a ton of old videogame OSTs archived on KHinsider.
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Indeed. I was a paid user, hoping for the site to get some legitimacy. Unfortunately we need to change the copyright system for music to require a uniform fee only if we ever want to see another groveshark.
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I must admit I did read the title somewhat incorrectly at first and had a good old laugh, it's a solid title.
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Groove Shark was the tits. At the time, it was an excellent way to discover hard to find and rare tunes.
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I had never heard of Funkwhale. How does it compare (usability wise) to Ampache? Also decentralized, as in you can link databases with others [1] |
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I see it supports Raspberry Pi installation. Can anyone speak off-hand to what the performance is like on a Pi, or what generation minimum is recommended? I'm assuming my original Pi Model B might be a little long in the tooth, and my Pi Zero might be under-speced. But I could see myself setting this up on a newer Pi and plugging in my 1.5TB external into it to share out all my music with my family. Right now I've got a Samba share on my Windows HTPC for my internal network, but something the rest of the family can use would be sweet.
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Could you not use a Pi to mount the samba share for funkwhale and expose funkwhale/ the pi that way?
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There is one Spotify feature I started enjoying lately: Seamless playback between all connected players (including Chromecast) and every instance works as a remote for the other players. Just great!! Any FOSS service with this set of features?
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I was a longtime Subsonic user and was mostly pleased. For some reason, I stopped using it after moving to a new server. These days, I have been very pleased with https://radioparadise.com. It is an eclectic mix with a couple of different channels. This station offers familiar tunes mixed with new ones. It is a nice gem that I love to tell other music lovers about. Note: I am in no way affiliated with Radio Paradise. Just a listener/fanboy.
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For those interested, I also write an open source web-based music player with an Android app that uses youtube and soundcloud as the backing for tracks (iframes on desktop, youtube-to-mp3/soundcloud mp3s on Android): Planning on removing the Google auth dependency it uses right now for syncing and song searching.
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This is great! I used to run a Subsonic server for myself but it kind of fell apart because the licensing in version 6 kind of broke the community around it. But it looks like this supports the same Subsonic protocol, which is pretty great. It's cool to not only take inspiration from predecessors but to also support and build on the same ecosystem.
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Airsonic is what I went for after the licensing woes, recommended if you liked the server-side UI and want to keep the old data. If you think you won't miss accessing your tracks by directory, navidrome (written in go) has a smaller footprint and is quite actively developed (but the web UI is rather awkward)
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I can recommend Navidrome on yunohost; Airsonic install kept breaking for me.
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This looks nice! I am really interested in this space because I have a long build collection of mp3s and I'm not as interested in yielding to Spotify but I'm not always at the same computer or building for the accessibility. Thus far I've been using mStream https://mstream.io/ with decent success. You can federate collections with your friends. My tries with NFS or SSHFS doesn't work reliably on windows/mobile hosts, especially across the (mobile) internet. I know there is at least a few other projects in this space, some mentioned in the comments (Ampache.)
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mStream does look very nice and straightforward. Is there any better UI for seeing all your music than what appears to be just a file dialog?
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I switched recently from Airsonic to Gonic, mainly due to how resource-heavy Airsonic was. I primarily use 2 clients: Clementine/Linux and play:Sub/iOS. I also tested a audiobook-only-installation against BookSonic/Android. Notes: - Gonic doesn't support many routes. The *sonic protocol supports special routes for Podcasts/Audiobooks/Radio Stations for eg. [0] details missing routes - It heavily uses `folder.jpg` as the album art. Doesn't work well always. I used sacad[1], but it wasn't perfect. - Not all players will work perfectly with Gonic. I use play:Sub and it had some issues with album names being blank because Gonic used `name` field in album info while keeping title blank (I think). This is now fixed mostly, but I still have a few blank albums that I need to investigate - I liked the transcoding options on the server side. You can set it per-client and that client will forever get MP3 for eg. - It doesn't do artist art. Not sure why I haven't faced any breaking-issues other than the blank album names so far (and that was fixed). |
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Do you mean it doesn't automatically fetch album art? It does serve it to the client in my experience.
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Other players would use images embedded in cover-arts. Gonic only works with folder.jpg. I had cover.png files which Gonic ignored, so I had to hack around things. |
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hey thanks for your feedback! though it's strange that the scanner missed your artwork files. it should support lots of filetypes |
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Will check and create an issue.
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Been using it for about 6 months running on a PI. Very happy with it and I just opened a PR to add rating support(which was the only thing I wanted that it lacked).
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I really like this. It seems like the federated model is gaining traction among the decentralized community (Mastadon, peertube..) but I'd love to get to the point where self-hosting is as accessible to internet users as signing up. My vision for music (and other things) sharing is your personal library is on your personal private server, and you can give access to whoever you want individually. Now your streaming source is your library and your friends library--and if a friend likes one of your tracks they can "save" it to their library and give access to their friends. I've been trying to build this for status updates (like a Facebook alternative) as a simple private blog+rss[1] that's easy to self-host (raspberry PI or AWS) but I can see a world where everyone has their own server enabling an amazing multitude of distributed usage--music sharing, personal restaurant recomendations, the ability to post and share things with only your friends without a mega-corp in between is a future I would get really excited about. |
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I would push it even further. All these isolated, unstandardized and closed silos are really horrible. I want that in some future we will own all of our networks, not just the data. So, your social graph private and professiinal, your knowledge graph (which could include music) and when you meet someone, that person could grant you access to his graphs. "Stand on the shoulders of giants" would then also be true for your close private family, where you would have access to e.g. your fathers knowledge.
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Everytime I read about solid I just can't see it working out. It's HARD for someone to host something themselves, and when you talk about decoupling the data from the interface that means any user needs to deal with two system when they used to deal with one. Ease-of-use is one of the most important things for broad adoption--that's everything is "signup and we take care of everything" instead of "run this code on your computer".
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I've just used a samba share for the past.. 20? years, it's worked great always.. On the desktops, it's mounted with cifs, on the phone I access it via openvpn and play music from it via vlc, on the media-center, it's also just mounted with cifs.
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wow, totally support decentralized stuff like this. wonder how long will this get taken down like popcorn time?
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It uses the ActivityPub protocol, so all someone has to do is spin up another instance in the fediverse (there are already many) if one gets taken down.
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Dot audio domains - $300/yr!
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And forum software that you pay per user, with only a 33% discount for being open source.
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Not sure if you’re saying that’s cheap or expensive, but I am tempted to get <myfirstname>.audio just for this
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That's expensive for domains.
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I like it - keeps the squatter away. I just checked, many top-notch names available.
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How do musicians get paid on this platform?
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I’m guessing when people purchase the music as it’s not a streaming service. With that said, it appears there is the ability to share music socially - which seems like p2p sharing.
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> With that said, it appears there is the ability to share music socially - which seems like p2p sharing. Which is fine as there is plenty of music that is allowed to be shared free.
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That wasn’t their question. We all get that there is music available to be freely distributed.
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They get paid from whatever service you bought your music from - be it from CDs, MP3 sites like Amazon or Google Play (RIP), etc. Scary thought, being able to purchase music these days rather than a streaming service lease, I know...
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If I am only sharing with my family, then fine. But it looks like this software allows you to create a pod and share with whoever you invite. Which my purchase doesn't cover, right?
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Be sure you soundproof your home/apartment, and don't turn it up too much in the car. Don't want to accidentally leak any copyrighted joy to your neighbors without payment!
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Seems like you are being sarcastic, but yes, if you play loud enough and to a big enough audience you do indeed owe royalties. In fact bars and restaurants are required to pay for this exact reason.
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Exactly. Most often this is covered by the fact that the restaurant or bar is playing satellite or other radio which bears the broadcast permissions. And, the obvious—most people aren't horrible selfish goblins. There's a definite difference between providing atmosphere in a restaurant, and providing the content as some sort of production, or providing others with broadcast-quality copies from a single master without permission of the artist.
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I am aware of ASCAP and the RIAA's (and friends) claims; I just don't uncritically accept them, let alone act as a volunteer copyright-cop for them. You are free to do whatever you like with your free time, of course.
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> I just don't uncritically accept them, let alone act as a volunteer copyright-cop for them. It seems like you are implying I am. When all I'm trying to do is make sure musicians get fairly paid for their work. So yeah, I'm not super concerned about playing music loud in my car as you sarcastically suggested I should be. I am concerned about joining a music platform where something I purchased can be shared for free to millions of people with the musician getting nothing. If there is a service that pays musicians directly and cuts out ASCAP and RIAA, then even better.
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> It seems like you are implying I am. You are here talking down the tool and implying software you have not used is not legal while uncritically repeating their claims, which are more aggressive than many copyright lawyers believe is accurate. I'm sorry if you find my flip characterization uncharitable. If you need a less off-the-cuff one, you are uncritically lending your voice to the legacy copyright cartel's continuing attempts to monopolize music distribution. That does do several things. Promoting fairness for musicians is not one of them.
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> you are uncritically lending your voice to the legacy copyright cartel's continuing attempts to monopolize music distribution. Especially when I said this, right? "If there is a service that pays musicians directly and cuts out ASCAP and RIAA, then even better."
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OK, that does require an apology; I missed that, and it does change the tenor of your argument. It is unclear to me how to combine supporting musicians' abusers with supporting musicians, but this is not a productive conversation, so I'm dropping it.
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> a music platform where something I purchased can be shared for free to millions of people That doesn’t seem to be the intent or reality of how Funkwhale is used. All of the public pods I saw had less than 200 members. I imagine you’d run into scaling problems with larger pods.
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> cuts out ASCAP and RIAA The sad thing for me, is that even if something like that were to function, and no matter how well, people would find another reason the artists don't deserve payment. So as it stands, organizations like that are how artists get paid at all. And not as any hard defence of the RIAA in all aspects, but it's not like they don't do anything. They did help set the standards for effective vinyl mastering and playback...
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If you are suggesting people to buy the CD then you are not contributing much to artists.
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Depending on what they're playing and how, friendly ASCAP employee.
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> Which my purchase doesn't cover, right? It most certainly does in my country (and probably in most of Europe I would hasard). The only thing you can't do is public performance and distribution but sharing it with your friends is definitely legal.
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Without even looking at the law I'm going to guess there's some kind of clause about "within reason". As in, you can't reasonably claim that all 350,000 people who've downloaded the music you uploaded can be classified as "friends". That would certainly fall under broadcast or distribution licensing and legal terms.
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Did your purchase cover your family? Why should your spouse and children be allowed to listen to music licensed to you?
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My goal is that musicians get fairly paid for their work as opposed to making sure I am following every subtle licensing technicality in my own home, which is only an exercise in pedantry and accomplishes nothing practical for musicians. I don't talk with the attorneys who create these complex licensing rules at Amazon, iTunes, etc. I talk to musicians. None of whom have ever had a problem with listening to their music with a small group of friends or family. The problem is with a platform that allows me to fire up a server and then invite thousands or millions of people to listen to someone's music for free.
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Do you remember CDs, cassettes, records, etc.? Is it illegal to let family listen to those?
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I want to be surprised by how controversial this simple question seemed to be, and yet I'm not. I'm disappointed, though.
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This isn’t a platform, it is software you install and run on your own client and server.
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"Funkwhale is a community-driven project that lets you listen and share music and audio within a decentralized, open network." From the top of their landing page.
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Donations I think. They should be able to add links to their homepage, PayPal, patreon, etc. Or maybe that's an upcoming future, I can't remember exactly.
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If this is an existing feature, or when they add it, the platform becomes way more interesting to me. I'd love to pay musicians directly instead of the embarrassingly low payouts from services like Spotify.
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A feature would be nice to have, but right now you can just go to an artist-friendly shop (such as Bandcamp or Qobuz) and buy an album of the artist you'd like to support.
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What about quality of this platform? If I self-hosted Hi-Res music, can my friend also play Hi-Res?
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Yes. Iirc there are transcoding options too.
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Wish I would've known about this before I spent hours and hours transferring my GMusic library to Plex on a rpi in my house. Oh well, I'm too lazy to change again. Gonna stick with Plex for now.
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name is a nod to grooveshark? ;)
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Site seems to have had the HN hug of death.
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If I were to self host this on a big cloud provider, I'd be worried about the outbound bandwidth costs.
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So don't host it on a cloud provider. You can host it from home, or somewhere else. For example I rent a cheap dedicated server with a 1TB hard drive and unmetered 1Gb bandwidth, for £8 a month, which would work great for something like this and there is no chance of unexpected costs.
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I'm looking for something similar (large storage, low bandwidth, hopefully with a VPS). Can you point me to the provider?
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https://www.serverhunter.com/ and https://en.metadedi.net/ are useful resources for that. Though search for more information before signing up for anything expensive and/or long term as there are some truly crap hosts out there. There are some pretty good budget hosts in the mix though. If you can wait until the end of the month you might find black friday offers from some providers. They usually get discussed in places like https://www.lowendtalk.com/ (I'm not sure how quickly such short term offers are reflected on the above server search sites, if at all). Again, do research on the hosts you chose lest you buy a lemon.
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OVH's kimsufi series (https://www.kimsufi.com/) has very cheap dedicated servers. I have a KS-2 and am quite happy with it. The servers are very low-end and have old hardware, though. Not a problem for me but you should be aware of it.
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I think Hetzner's Server auction (https://www.hetzner.com/sb) has better offers if you can wait a bit for a good deal and you're looking for a little bit more performance. A while ago I saw an i7 4770 with 32 GB RAM and 2x 2TB HDD for ~26€. Their servers also come with an unmetered 1 GBit connection instead of just 100 MBit.
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Mine was from OneProvider. I think they're resold Online.net servers.
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I know this kind of thing might not be very popular on HN, but I like their anti-meritocracy statement: |
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> Being respectful of differing viewpoints and experiences. > Gracefully accepting constructive feedback. > Showing empathy and kindness towards other community members. Yada yada, seemingly inclusive and tolerant then goes on to add a catch all list where every possible action can be deemed unacceptable, getting you expelled everywhere and "identification of the participant as a harasser to other members or the general public." Anti meritocracy is a cover for the most intolerant.
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Which of the actions they've listed would you like to be able to do without fear of repercussion? This sounds an awful lot like "No Shoes, No Shirt, No Service? So much for the 'tolerant left.'" > Anti meritocracy is a cover for the most intolerant.
The Paradox of Tolerance indicates that a society that is infinitely tolerant will eventually be overrun by the least tolerant. Having a written set of guidelines that define the behavior expected seems like...I dunno, a good idea?
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Me too! I used to frequent their Matrix room a year or so ago and it was a very nice place. Very refreshing to find a tech community that made me feel like I could say what I wanted without being interjected by STEM and debate lords. Unfortunately life drove me away from the project, especially now that I work remote and barely leave my home, but every now and then I feel like contributing again just because of how nice everyone is.
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Well, they banned folks for really minor reasons from their Matrix channel, e.g. saying "Hi guys, I have a question about ..." can get you banned. So no, this CoC leaves a very bitter taste in my mouth for the entire project.
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I have no memories of that happening. They'll probably tell your not to use the word "guys" in that context though, which is fair imo.
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You like an ANTI-meritocracy statement? We truly have gone backwards.
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Here's the issue with meritocracies: They pursue individual excellence at the expense of group excellence. We know[1] that a more diverse group creates better group outcomes than a non-diverse group where specific individuals may have better performance. Even from a wholly selfish perspective for the people running a project, prizing diversity of qualified individuals over a pure meritocracy is the right play. From a "making the world a better place" perspective where some altruism is shown, it also helps to acknowledge that not everyone has all the same advantages and tailwinds so that it is fundamentally more difficult for them to have had all the same opportunities and advantages, and providing those opportunities and advantages to them gives them that chance to even the playing field. The amount of unconscious bias built in to humans also means it is difficult for us to be effective judges of ability for those that are not like us. You don't have to be racist/exist/homophobic/transphobic/etc. to have built in biases - you just have to be human. They're difficult to overcome without explicitly stating goals around it. |
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I agree with the last paragraph of your comment. However, the "wholly selfish" economic argument for "diverse" workplaces is management consultant bullshit which is not supported by the evidence. Here’s an excerpt from the first article that comes up in those Google Scholar search results: > The result of [social] categorization processes may be that work groups function more smoothly when they are homogeneous than when they are more diverse … This analysis is corroborated by findings of, for instance, higher group cohesion (e.g., O'Reilly et al. 1989), lower turnover (e.g., Wagner et al. 1984), and higher performance (e.g., Murnighan & Conlon 1991) in more homogeneous groups … > In contrast to the social categorization (and similarity/attraction) perspective, the information/decision-making perspective emphasizes the positive effects of work group diversity. The starting point for this perspective is the notion that diverse groups are likely to possess a broader range of task-relevant knowledge, skills, and abilities, and members with different opinions and perspectives … Corroborating this analysis, some studies find an association of diversity with higher performance and innovation (e.g., Bantel & Jackson 1989). > In their simplest form (a main effect of diversity), neither analysis is supported. Evidence for the positive effects as well as for the negative effects of diversity is highly inconsistent (Bowers et al. 2000, Webber & Donahue 2001, Williams & O'Reilly 1998) and raises the question of whether, and how, the perspectives on the positive and the negative effects of diversity can be reconciled and integrated. The case for workplace diversity needs to be argued on social justice principles, because there isn’t enough evidence for the economic efficiency argument.
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The word 'meritocracy' was coined as a derogatory term about the education system in England in the 50s in a satirical text. It mocked the idea that such a thing could exist because the system obviously wasn't designed for it. If you value "intelligence", but only give rich people access to good education, then you've just created a two-step process that selects for rich people.
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I don’t think this is an accurate summary of the book. The satirical history of the "modern education system" in chapter 3 describes how funding for public education was increased, and students were aggressively streamed into different schools based only on IQ tests. Eventually expensive private schools went out of fashion because they were attended only by students who couldn’t get into the best public schools, so they no longer conferred academic prestige. Early in the book, capital levies are introduced which prevent the building of new fortunes, and in chapter 7, an Equalization of Income Act is passed so that all citizens receive the same basic income. The meritocracy is transformed into an aristocracy not because "merit" is a proxy for heritable wealth, but because "intelligence" (as defined in the book: "the ability to raise [economic] production, directly or indirectly") is also heritable, and in the book this effect was amplified through eugenics. You can find a more modern and less satirical take on this argument in Fredrik deBoer’s The Cult of Smart.
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Ok, so what? It's not used in that context anymore. It's the same pitfall as the master/slave/blacklist/whitelist/etc. arguments: people have a problem divorcing historical meaning from present-day usage. Meanings change and evolve over time. If we follow this stunted logic, then there's going to be a lot of other English words/phrases that need to be banned as well. The only people associating them with their historical meanings are those wanting to ban the phrases. These etymological fallacies do nothing but pointlessly divide people. It needs to stop.
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The term was coined in a derogatory manner because the person who coined the term thought it was a ridiculous concept. No one is saying ban the word meritocracy, but people are saying that if you're arguing for one, you've missed the point.
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The concept that was considered ridiculous was only giving rich people access to the resources to make it in a meritocracy. But for a while, the UK actually didn't do that. New universities were created, "grammar schools" were mostly replaced, new hiring practices adopted, and the stranglehold of the establishment was broken a little bit, for a little while. That was because as ridiculous as the original idea might have been, good people with good intentions started to believe in "meritocracy", and used the idea to make changes.
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The present-day usage of the term still refers to an impossibility.
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it's not like what their doing is rocket science And, yes, I believe the world would be a better place if we followed these rules with many projects regardless of the field. |
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> We have an ethical responsibility to refuse to work on software that will negatively impact the well-being of other people. Such as creating a platform for people to listen to music for free by sharing it with others without paying the artist?
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Does BitTorrent fall under that? Or YouTube? Plex? Google Drive?
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BitTorrent, yes. YouTube, no. They take down videos with copyrighted material.
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So by extension browsers allowing file downloads also falls under that? That's just what BitTorrent is after all.
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You can also say it benefits the artist because it makes it easier to listen to them, which incentivises people to give them money to support them. This is more or less the entire model of Bandcamp.
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You can indeed say that - and people who demand artists work for "exposure" often do. But there's no evidence it's factually correct. And Bandcamp's model is based on selling tracks and albums with free previews, which is entirely different to free listening.
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Right, and Bandcamp is probably the most pro-artist of the major music platforms, I would say. The project also benefits the artist but creating an infrastructure not controlled by Youtube or Soundcloud.
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> We have an ethical responsibility to refuse to work on software that will negatively impact the well-being of other people. Except musicians apparently
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A free, decentralised and open network with an enforced code of conduct? I cannot reconcile these 2 concepts.
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I'm guessing the code of conduct primarily concerns the software development process?
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Doesn't seem so: > If a community member engages in .... up to and including expulsion from all Funkwhale spaces
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The maintainers have no power over federated instances. The code of conduct is pertaining to the repository and official Funkwhale communities (such as the Matrix chat and discussion boards).
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IIRC you can't just kick out an instance from a federation by switching a button?
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Yeah, I don't like it. It says making wrong jokes is an offense. On the plus side, it doesn't yet say that failure to report someone else for making wrong jokes is an offense.
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To include some important information you left out: It says that sexual harassment is bad and that racism is bad, and using jokes to "ironically" do things like that is also bad.
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Problem is, making accusation of such is a breeze. > Intentionally posting or disseminating libel, slander, or other disinformation. Let's face it. It's just a policy that allows them to expel anyone that doesn't fit their views, whatever that may be.
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Which community have you been a part of, online or otherwise, where "flagrant violation of the norms" doesn't carry the potential for expulsion? Without a written code of conduct, there are still values, views, and norms, usually created and run by the most disruptive members who are free to behave in any way they see fit and ostracize those who that behavior hurts.
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>that doesn't fit their views, whatever that may be. Their "view" is that sexual harassment is not something they want on their platform.
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(deleted, I was overreacting a bit)
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Americans come from a country where, in living memory, having a different colour skin removed whole areas of your legal rights. Interracial marriage was banned in several states until roughly the time of the moon landings. This is why Americans are rather touchy about people making light of racism.
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There is a middle ground between "sending people to camps for a wrong joke" and "no one should be held accountable for any of their actions if they claim they are jokes"
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A joke is not an action. It can never bring harm to another person.
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Here's an NIH paper going over the harms this brings to other people: |
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"Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will really hurt me"
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There is no yet identified metaphysical difference between speech and other actions, and freedom of expression laws frequently also protect non-speech actions such as burning flags.
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>someone else's wrong joke >punishing people for jokes Again, we're talking about sexual harassment and racism. It's important not to leave that part out.
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It's still a dangerous territory. Do you remember when Adria Richards overheard two guys talking about dongles and forking at a conference, assumed it was offensive/sexual and got them fired, before we learned that... they were talking about dongles and forking?
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We can agree both things are bad. People shouldn't use jokes as a cover for racism, sexism, etc. We know people do this. We should do things to stop it. No one is saying you can't make whatever jokes you like in private with people you know won't be offended, but they are saying that those jokes can be harmful to people they want to have in their community, and that you can't say them in that community. It's their right to do so. People also shouldn't try to get others fired over things like people talking about dongles and forking, assuming they're actually talking about dongles and forking. If someone approaches you and makes a joke about how they want to fork you with their dongle, well, it's pretty obvious what they mean. If you overhear someone talking and hear the words fork and dongle, well, it's not so obvious and we probably shouldn't get them fired. That being said, it sounds like the joke was at least in part actually a sexually charged joke about a "big dongle" - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5398681 - though the forking seems to have not been intended to be sexually charged. This is perhaps another reason that people should consider their words - if you just made a joke about a "big dongle" and then immediately say "I'd fork his repo," there's a chance it's going to be interpreted in a sexual manner because of the context. Making a joke about "big dongles" in public is probably not something you should do. Someone being offended doesn't automatically mean they're right, but it's also not a high bar to not make dick jokes around thousands of other people that you don't know and don't know how they'll take it.
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So on the one hand, we have a massive systematic problem across virtually all online platforms. This problem involves (at least) thousands of new examples every day and so far has proved nearly impossible to control. And next to that we have a different problem based largely on idiosyncratic examples, and extrapolations from those idiosyncratic examples to hypothetical worst case scenarios. I find this way of engaging with the problem to be profoundly misguided in two ways. One, it's a failure to correctly evaluate the relative scale of the two problems, and to consistently think and speak clearly about them in terms that reflect their relative scale. And secondly, it mistakenly sets up the two problems as being in a relationship of interference with one another, such that talking about one is used to mean we should stop talking about the other. Instead of saying "this statement that racism is bad and sexual harassment is bad is a statement I do not support" it would be more helpful say "yes, that is a problem, I agree, we need to solve it. And meanwhile here's this other thing, but don't let this other thing detract from the importance of the first problem or imply we don't need to actively work on the first problem."
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How ironic that this statement of inclusivity is preceded with this one: >We're sorry but funkwhale.audio doesn't work properly without JavaScript enabled. Please enable it to continue.
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JavaScript is a choice. Inclusivity generally refers to things which are not a choice.
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Is it a choice if my browser freezes up on a simple site with JS enabled, and there is only a global JS toggle?
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> The registered office is located at 92, rue Consolat, 13001 Marseille, France
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Anti-meritocracy just sounds to me like you want to be judged or given privileges by who or what you are, not by what you contribute. It pretty much goes against equality but is being presented as a means to equality. Am I just misinterpreting it or do people supporting it just not thought more deeply about what it is they're supporting?
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> The field of software development embraces technical change, and is made better by also accepting social change. Really? All social change is good for the field of software development? Utter nonsense. This product itself is, if anything, a rejection of the social change towards centralized ad-supported streaming services. > We understand that working in our field is a privilege, not a right. I don't have a right to work as a software developer? Last I checked, I lived in a free country where I can do what I want. This is some authoritarian language, implying that people should be ejected from the industry if they don't play according to one person's set of rules.
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You don’t have a "right" to work in any particular field. Harvey Weinstein has no right to work in the movie industry because of his actions. For that matter, coal miners have no right to continue being coal miners - those jobs are outmoded. You have a right to earn a living, but not to any particular job.
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In the absence of a licensing authority for software developers, we have the freedom to work for anyone who will hire us, or for ourselves. No one has the right to work for a particular employer, but also no one can kick a person out of our industry altogether.
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Honest question, how is this legal? It looks as if there is the ability to share your music online. Can someone explain the difference between this and say Napster, Limewire, Kaza, etc? Rather than storing it locally, it’s just online... or am I missing something here?
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For example one of nodes : We are are a curated Funkwhale music server promoting libre audio - usually released under Creative Commons licenses and through netlabels. So this should answer your question. It's legal because it's not illegal.
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Not just that. Sharing access with a friend would fall under fair-use. I've been meaning to deploy this at my home server, but then with Covid and WFH my need to have it available outside has been reduced dramatically.
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Which copyright law are you talking about? My impression is that streaming a reasonably large collection of copyrighted music (say 10,000 tracks) to a reasonable number of friends (say 10) would not be considered fair use by U.S. courts. The RIAA doesn’t sue people for this because it’s hard to detect and the damages are too small to cover legal costs, not because they accept it as fair use. In the Betamax case, the Supreme Court said that it would not be fair to use copyrighted works in a way which "if it should become widespread … would adversely affect the potential market for the copyrighted work." Time-shifting was not considered to adversely affect the market for commercial TV. But surely a tool like Funkwhale, "if it should become widespread," would adversely affect the music streaming industry?
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How is this different from the case of a dude with a big CD collection and a copier who tell his friends "bring blank cds and burn copies if you want anything"? Who would they sue, how would they monitor the usage and how would they enforce anything? With torrents and big sites it's easy to show who is distributing what and the distribution can be done by anyone. This is a decentralized tool that can have its access controlled. The only you could get sued is if you have a really shitty friend who goes to court and brings evidence showing you distributed too many songs.
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One difference is that blank CDs cost money. In the Betamax case the cost of blank tapes was one reason why time-shifting was not seen as a serious threat to the market that copyright laws are intended to support, because it made it hard to build up a big library. But in any case, I think the RIAA would say that both the CD dude and the Funkwhale dude are infringing copyright, and U.S. courts would agree. It’s true that enforcement is a practical challenge. However, the developers of the Funkwhale software are probably not as decentralised as the operators of Funkwhale pods. Copyright holders could potentially get future development shut down on the basis that the service implicitly authorises or encourages copyright infringement, as they are trying to do to youtube-dl. The details depend on where the developers live, but this strategy has worked for some tools like Napster, KaZaA, and some BitTorrent trackers, while failing for BitTorrent clients. Which side of the line will Funkwhale fall on?
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From my understanding it's legal for the same reason Apache, nginx, curl, etc. are legal. The software can be used to violate copyright, but that doesn't make the software itself illegal.
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Tell that to youtubedl. Embrace for stricter control from copyright groups because they don't like the tools either.
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There is music you are allowed to share, e.g. music licenced under some Creative Commons licences. It's up to whoever hosts a Funkwhale instance to ensure that it only hosts legal music, I'd assume.
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Lots of confusion in this question. Where do I even start ... First of all, what do you mean by "this"? You mention Napster and Limewire. These are things. Things cannot be illegal. Actions can be illegal. A certain action is illegal if there is a paragraph in the applicable jurisdiction that forbids it. It might be illegal to manufacture, own, fake, destroy or distribute a thing. But a thing on its own cannot be illegal. What would that even mean. So who did what, which jurisdiction is applicable and which paragraph forbids it?
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Let’s start with number one. By this, I mean the act of publicly posting music for others to listen to for free without paying the artist. Edit: You have since edited your comment but let’s still start there.
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Uhh, is youtube-dl a thing?
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Yes. Much like the RIAA, you are confusing distribution with ownership.
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As others have said. There is nothing inherently illegal about the software. As long as you are licensed to share the music you host in the instance there is nothing illegal going on. Though the RIAA might see it differently, as they have with other open-source software in the past (ref the recent DMCA takedown requests of youtube-dl GitHub repositories). They might argue the software is designed for copyright infringement and as such should be blocked.
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I don't understand your confusion. Are you under the impression that the very act of sharing music online is illegal?
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Yes, maybe that’s where my confusion sits. If I take a bunch of music and put together a playlist and post it on, say YouTube or my own site, that is perfectly fine?
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This depends on both the music in question and your jurisdiction. There is nothing inherent about "music" that makes it illegal to share it with others. Is it Taylor Swift or something your friend recorded? It makes a big difference. This is a tool to satisfy the use case of sharing music with others. Sometimes such sharing will be illegal, but at other times it won't.
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Couldn’t the same be said for youtube-dl? Again, I don’t know.. just curious.
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People seem to assume that, just because youtube-dl got a single takedown request from a prospective plaintiff, it’s now as illegal as cocaine. The reality is that youtube-dl is a perfectly legal tool, and it will continue to be so at least until a judge rules otherwise — and even then, only in a specific jurisdiction. Should you be considered a child-molester just because I accuse you to be one?
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Wow, you got real dark with that one.
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Exactly, youtube-dl is a legal tool. You have to expect that everyone is trying to game the law and push the scales in their favour. In that case, it is in RIAA's best interest that everything is locked down and they maintain exclusive control over as many things as possible. It is also in their favour to make the public view anything related to sharing of media files as suspect. That doesn't mean this position is reasonable and valid.
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Yes, the same could and has been said about YouTube-dl. It depends what you do with the tool. If you are using it to download videos that specifically allow this, then there is nothing illegal about it. It's the same thing with a hammer. You can use it for legal or illegal actions, but that doesn't make the hammer an illegal tool...
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By watching videos or listening to videos, you make a non-digital copy of it in your mind! Is that legal? If you hum the song, is it illegal reproduction? If you describe the video to a friend, is that unauthorized reproduction? If you formulate a critique of it, is it an illegal derieved work? Who gets payed in these cases?
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Here comes the hilarious twisted language to justify 'sharing'.
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Yes, as long the musician licensed his/her work in a way that let you do it.
In some cases you also allowed to reuse that music in your work. Take a look at: |
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I’m not talking music that is under a CC license - I’m talking lil bow wow and the spice girls.
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It's the same.
It's not "who is?", it's "have you a license to do it?". If you have a license to reshare spice girls works, and you want to use funkwhale, well, you can. Nine Inch Nails have CC licensed albums. So "being famous" and "music that is under a CC license" is not mutually exclusive...
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I don’t think there is anyone on HN confused on that. I’m sorry if it slipped beyond you but I’m specifically talking music people don’t have permission or the rights to sharing.
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The problem was with how you phrased your original comment. You implied that it (the tool?) is not legal because it offers "the ability to share your music online". This is why people started replying in this sense.
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It depends on who you are sharing with and the context. I could setup a server with my music collection and give access to my friends. That is fair-use.
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Well, as much as you can make software freely available, you can also make music and podcasts freely available. However, there is no such thing as "Github for Music". I like the decentralized approach.
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Have you ever seen an <audio> element on a web page? That also has the ability to share your music online.
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Same great area that plex lives in i guess
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If it's decentralised, then I guess it doesn't have to be legal...
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the same way as Youtube or Bittorrent are legal
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Didn't we do this and wasn't it called Napster?
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Yea, imagine what kind of Napster we could build today, with ~20 years advancement in bandwidth and storage. This looks super interesting. EDIT: Never mind. It's another "pipe curl into bash" type of app, since nobody knows how to package software any more.
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> It's another "pipe curl into bash" type of app, since nobody knows how to package software any more. According to https://docs.funkwhale.audio/installation/ , the curl|bash is only one of the ways to install it. They also provide an ansible role, install instructions on Debian and Arch without the curl|bash, an AUR package, a NixOS package, a Yunohost package, and a Docker image
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They don't provide, those are all third party packages.
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It's open source. Is there such a difference between "third-party" and "application developers who focus more on developing a web application than packaging it?"
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Okay, let me rephrase: When a project puts `curl | sudo bash` front and center as their primary method of installing that software, that's a planet-sized red flag. Not just because piping to bash is a terrible idea, but because it's an awful and silly way to install software, and it makes me suspicious of the way the rest of the project is being made. First impressions matter. curl>bash is a bad first impression.
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> it makes me suspicious of the way the rest of the project is being made This is why we can't have nice things. Because the developer rather focus their time on developing the project instead of the arcane packaging of the various repositories, the entire project deserves to be dismissed? Piping curl to bash is basically the same as if you download the tarball/clone the repository and running `make`, but no one bitch about that. They rather cargo-bitch about "piping curl to bash is obviously always bad and your entire project is bad if you even include curl | bash as one method of installing". Long gone are the days where projects are judged by the quality of the project itself, and today we want to get outraged as soon as possible, at every little detail.
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On the one hand, I agree. It is not good practice to blindly download and install through curlbash. On the other hand, that particular method of installation is ubiquitous nowadays. Hell even Rust presents it as the suggested method of installation[0]. Would you suggest Rust is a low-quality project? I don't think you can completely disregard something based on whether it suggests bashcurl for downloading and installing it. Of course, in the ideal world, that's not the way it should be, but such is the reality we live in. |
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I have opinions about Rust, but I already get downvoted enough as it is. :) But Rust doing it doesn't make it a good practice, and as you say yourself, it's not the way it should be. I'm just resisting the move towards an inferior standard. EDIT: I triggered HN rate limiting with my lukewarm takes, so to the post above suggesting I'm not fun at parties: At the parties I go to, we do not talk about software packaging best practices for Linux. Thankfully.
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`curl | sudo bash` is for the non-technical people who may have just sshed into a server for the first time. If you don't put it front and center, they will be lost. The experienced sysadmins such as you and I can skip the paragraph and find an alternative we like.
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Non technical people are not going to run terminal commands to install software.
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We were all non-technical people once, and many of us learnt by doing just that.
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If you're setting up a home server, particularly on something like a Raspberry Pi, which they mention, then you're already "slightly technical," and should know about the terminal. Indeed, for many people setting up a home server might be the first time they're dealing with the terminal. So this is a "non-technical step into being technical."
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They are, and they're going to also do a lot more worse.
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You must be fun at parties. Tell me if you don't mind how many web applications did you get released with the "proper" way to install again? Yeah, I don't like curl > bash either, but it's a distributed application that may run into many different platforms. It makes sense for them to not worry about the packaging specifics of each and let the community pick up the slack. If all you can do is criticize an open source project that does not worship your sacred cows, the only bad impression I am left with is your project management skills.
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Would you be willing to contribute code to fix the problems you see?
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"Hi, we're Funkwhale. We use cool words like decentralized, self-hosted, music, server, and of course, funk & whale. If we named it more honestly, then our defunding of musicians and creatives that depended on sales wouldn't get any love (not publicly anyway), plus the ethically vacant developers would have to work on it secretly. And to be sure, we ourselves do not create or rely on income from artistic endeavours, we only make software to cut out the middle part." I love coming here, lots of interesting articles, but the most fun is reading the twisted english as people convince themselves digital theft is somehow not to be equated to physical theft.
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> ...as people convince themselves digital theft is somehow not to be equated to physical theft. Do you honestly thing the two are in any way equivalent? If I steal a physical item from you, you no longer have that item. If I download a copyrighted item that I never would have purchased, and you are entitled to royalties from then you lose nothing. If I download 100 items and I otherwise would have bought 5% of them, then you lose 5% of it. Note also that libraries work similarly. I have checked out many hundreds of books out from the public library and read them. That also cost authors money, but we do not equate that to stealing. I have bought 100s of used CDs. I saved a lot of money and the record companies and artists collected no money for that either. I also object to the concept that a creator has any moral right to monopolize their creations. There is no such moral right. The US provides for granting such a monopoly for a limited time in order to encourage people to create things. This has somehow morphed into the belief that someone creating something intangible has an indefinite monopoly on its use. Such policy is actively harmful to the arts to the point of being detrimental to creators! Disney's Sleeping Beauty was a delightful film, if not a box office hit, but it would never had happened if the copyright laws (that Disney lobbied for!) we have today existed then, because Tchaikovsky's ballet would still have been under copyright.
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Like many arguments defending wholesale sharing, they start at the end products and look forward, instead of being even a tiny bit cognisant of the process by which those items came to be. The thinking is along the lines of, look at this car and look at this mp3, they're so different. But obviously they share important similarities, those being that both needed ingenious human thought plus plenty of physical objects for them to come into existence. True, how they are sold is another question. How they are received. How are they shared. How they function. What is their purpose? Let's swap funkwhale to carwhale - yes, I can, because one day in the future, we will be able to push a button and have an exact copy of any car just by pointing a scanner at it. Suppose you worked on that car, all your life, in the hope others could enjoy it, and love it the way you have. And if you got it right, might be compensated for your time and efforts. But no, this is not in the future because everything should be free. Everything? Or just the mp3s? Just digital? Who's going to make that music? Or that car? Or perform your heart op? Most people, sadly here, are not respectful of creativity and its worth, I feel its more important than that car. And throughout history culture has been the most important aspect of any society; its strength and survival depend on it.
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I certainly don't intend to devalue creativity. Like many (most?) on HN I have a career where I get paid for my creative work. However, creative outputs are qualitatively (and legally) distinct from physical outputs and to pretend otherwise is only going to be a hindrance in properly creating a system to nurture cultural output. Let's start with the car example. I can buy a car, modify it and resell it. I can buy a cassette, modify it and resell it. Legally I can't buy a digital download, remix it and resell it. There's already a difference here. If I come up with an improvement to someone else's car design, am I allowed to print up one for myself on carwhale? Am I allowed to sell the new design? Am I allowed to describe my changes to someone else? Where do we draw the line? 100 years after the first car is printed from car-whale, does the estate of the person who designed the base model that the cars we are now printing hardly resembles still get royalties because the design before the design before ... the design before happened to use their car as a quickstart convenience? With physical objects it's clear. The person who built the car gets paid once and we don't have to debate 100 years later over ship-of-theseus questions. With creative outputs its far less clear. Just because we agree that it is a Good Thing for creators to be rewarded for their work doesn't mean that copying their work is equivalent with theft. It's its own unique thing and coming up with a framework to handle it correctly is quite challenging and to just say "digital theft is still theft" is a way to ignore those challenges rather than trying to meet those challenges.
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Ok, ignore the part about physical things being needed for creativity to happen. I don't feel we're pulling in opposite directions. You make points I agree with. I definitely want to understand more. Time limits, profits limits, distribution caps, all important and debatable facets. All I ask is you really try to put yourself, and only you can do it, in the shoes of a someone who's very existence depends on what you are casually, or strongly, or passionately, advocating. Are you the person to decide what 'product' is more valuable, either in recompense or admiration?
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We probably aren't pulling in very different directions at all. As far as this: > All I ask is you really try to put yourself, and only you can do it, in the shoes of a someone who's very existence depends on what you are casually, or strongly, or passionately, advocating. Are you the person to decide what 'product' is more valuable, either in recompense or admiration? I think that all individuals have a responsibility to decide what is and isn't more valuable and align their actions accordingly. The fact that an action causes harm to someone else does not make it necessarily immoral though. I can afford to buy every book I want to read. Nevertheless, I still frequent my local public library. This causes quantifiable harm to authors, yet few would call it immoral. I could probably come up with a dozen reasons why it's a good thing to frequent the library (libraries are awesome, and making them a ghetto of people too poor to afford to buy books would be to their detriment), but the simple fact is I don't want to spend $8 on a book I'm probably going to only read once when I can get it for free. This is a selfish action with quantifiable harm that most people do not consider immoral. I can come up with many post-facto justifications for why libraries are good and piracy is bad, but IMO the real reason why society falls this way is one is an old and revered institution, while the other is something teenagers do to get access to media because they are time-rich and money-poor. And at the end of all of this, I'm still not going to advocate for general piracy, but I will say that it's mostly two sides each inflating or deflating the actual harm done in order to justify a position they hold that was never grounded in any sort of utilitarianism in the first place.
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I initially downvoted you but after finally getting the project site to load I changed my mind. The project explicitly mentions many examples of sharing through federation and it seems to me they’re explicitly advocating for illegal sharing of music. Now, I certainly have plenty of issues with copyright and I tend to lean more towards "piracy isn’t a huge deal since we all want convenient (not free) access to media." However, this project seems to be positioning themselves as a free music sharing service. I can’t imagine this ends well for them. Some may mention other means of sharing music such as Plex or Jellyfin. I think Plex etc are flirting with the edge a bit with their sharing features. However, their sharing features are meant to selectively share with say family members in your household. Funkwhale is positioning the hoster to share with anyone on the internet. Don’t be surprised to get a DMCA notice if you open up a music library to the whole internet. It’s too bad because there definitely is a space for someone to create a really nice self-hosted music library. Plex and Plexamp work ok but still leave a lot to be desired in terms of discovery.
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>The project explicitly mentions many examples of sharing through federation and it seems to me they’re explicitly advocating for illegal sharing of music. They're explicitly against that in their docs: >If you are uploading content purchased from other platforms or stores, you should upload it in a private library >As a rule of thumb, only use public and local libraries for content for which you own the copyright or for content you know you can share with a wider audience. They also noted that they have made changes to funkwhale out of copyright concerns: >Managing the library at instance was cumbersome and dangerous: sharing an instance library over federation would quickly pose copyright issues, as well as opening public instances. It also made it impossible to only share a subset of the music. |
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Speaking as a musician here, I align with the decentralized approach personally, and we've just uploaded our best album so far as CC-BY, using the gracious offer of the funkwhale guys to join their libre audio effort under https://open.audio/channels/wergiftfresch_music/
There's other ways for us to get paid if you insist on it. I'm sure we'll find a way. And if you don't want to pay us, well, just enjoy some positive music :)
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> people convince themselves digital theft is somehow not to be equated to physical theft. It really isn't, though. If you steal my car, I won't have a car. If you copy my car, I'll have a car. To claim that the two are equivalent is pretty indefensible, in my opinion.
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And where did the car come from? The deal is, work is rewarded, not stealing work, or did I miss a meeting?
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It congealed from an amorphous mass of nutrients in the bowels of the earth. What does it matter where it came from? Stealing deprives the owner of their good, copyright infringement does not, therefore they are not equal.
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Sure. Your remarks only prove my point. But I am a realist. And I wouldn't keep focusing on music. It's an easy target. Audio happens to be my thing but I'm concerned at the cavalier attitude and on a broader level. Let's for one minute, expand the remit. It's not funkwhale, it's carwhale, foodwhale, healthwhale. Keep going. Keep thinking. If all we're doing is not creating anew, but instead forging special keys that give you access to anything anyone that made the considerable effort to creative something new - then we treadwater, as a human race. And I see exactly this in so many aspects of human life already. Not creating, not moving forward, not innovating, and only taking (in this case) other people's music AND then, here, loudly having the arrogance to declare that all music (or cars, or health, or food) should be free to buy once and you get the right to give it away. Don't complain, like I have often read on these pages, how modern music (and cars, and food, and apps, and laptops) all look and sound the same when we have merrily sucked dry the very chances of anything new making its first steps.
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> it's carwhale, foodwhale, healthwhale. Keep going. Keep thinking. You're describing a post-scarcity utopia where we can spend our creative energy where we want and not be tied down to jobs that we hate in order to pay the bills. Yes, I would very much like that for everyone. Thank you for bringing this topic up. Let it come.
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Haha. I've read that. Remind me, in this Utopia, who collects the trash?
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You insist on reading my argument of "it's not the same as theft" to "therefore it's fine". I didn't say whether it's better or worse than theft. I just said it's not the same, in the same way that murder or jaywalking is not the same as theft.
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Not true, I'm not doing that, though you do seem to be reading parts of my remarks and not others. I shouldn't have replied specifically to you, I'm trying, and failing on deaf ears, to make a much broader point. I'll save it for the pub.
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There's a short sci-fi story (whose name escapes me, but is mentioned in Cory Doctorow's Information Doesn't Want to be Free) in which the human race is given matter duplicators that can perfectly copy an item, including the duplicators themselves. It's basically a more fully-explored version of the "what if I can copy a car" thought, in which I think the conclusion is that creativity would flourish because less effort is put into making many of the same item. It's quite a far-reaching hypothetical, but it has strong parallels with digital rights issues.
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You're aware that popular legal sites like BandCamp exist where musicians sell their albums in no-DRM mp3 format, right?
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Whilst it's DRM free, it's still licensed copyrighted content that cannot be shared unless the license permits. BandCamp's terms of use state that they take non-exclusive rights to sell and distribute works on your behalf, but they do not grant those same rates to buyers. DRM is not Licensing, but a mechanism to enforce a license. I think OP is implying that the sharing provided in funkwhale is likely violating the typical license terms of any purchased music, therefore is preventing a musician from making money from streaming services which have appropriately licensed the music for streaming. Buying a license doesn't mean that you own the work, just that you have the right to play it in specific circumstances (most of which nobody pays attention to anyway). I'm sure we've all played a song on a loud speaker for others to hear, but again that's against typical license terms.
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Note the word 'sell' in your remark.
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I noted it when I typed it.
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And? So you are aware people sell things they make, to live? and they hope not to sell to just one person who's paying $1 to put it online for 100,000 people to have it not sold. And that's ok with you because you don't, or don't need to, make a living creating music. Try thinking about this from the perspective of whatever it is you do to make a living.
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You're right, I initially missed that it was for sharing music with others, not just organizing your own.
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Well I helped create the Spanish Pirate Party so I strongly believe Funkwhale is perfectly moral. If my idols want some money, I'll be happy to go to a concert or buy their music from their webpage (but I don't think Jimi Hendrix will complain much these days).
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Idols? Famous guitarists that have bubbled under your nose? What about new guitarists?
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>Idols? Famous guitarists that have bubbled under your nose? What about new guitarists? What about them? If I purchase music, it's because I want to listen to that music. Whether that's Eric Clapton, Jimi Hendrix, Lari Basilio, Nick Johnston or anyone else, what business is it of yours (or anyone else, for that matter) how or where I listen to the music that I've purchased? This is the first I'm hearing about Funk Whale and I fully intend to install it, as I've been looking for a decent self-hosted, streaming music server to listen to music owned by me. It's likely that it won't meet my needs and I'll move on to something else. I suppose that just about any music streaming server could be used to take food out of the mouths of the starving children of musicians. Rather than assuming (as it appears you are doing) that everyone who uses a self-hosted streaming server is engaged in stealing from musicians, please let us (me, especially) know what platform you would recommend as a personal streaming server. I'd really appreciate any suggestions. Thanks!
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Glad to hear it. Absolutely not saying everyone will use it in a way that devalues creativity as a living, you rightly used the word 'seems'. The interconnectedness of digital content ultimately stifles competition. It means less chance of you ever hearing the next Jimi Hendrix. Given there are about 7 billion people and there's only been one Jimi convinces me this is true. Of course there have been, and are, many Jimis, but you'll likely never get to appreciate them. Maybe you're ok with just Jimi and all the stuff already out there. If so, maybe music isn't so important to you. You have the right attitude to the software. I don't want to suggest an alt here. I'm talking more broadly. I would ask you to think about this from the reverse perspective, and if it is whatever it is you do to make a living could be made once, and distributed for free to the effect you couldn't do it anymore - is the point.
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New guitarists benefit the least from recording sales because they get such terrible contracts from labels. I've known many up-and-coming bands that pirate their own songs to try and get people to come to their concerts.
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Well if I am not listening to them why would they complain about me pirating their music?
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Is it because you're not interested in a cohesive society?
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What is it that I said that you're trying to guess the motivations for?
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I agree with the concern. Tools like this (e.g. myTunes / ourTunes) tend to be used primarily to avoid paying for music that was produced to be sold. If you believe (as I do) that the supply of quality music creation / music discovery is elastic, that means it's a free rider problem for society to solve. I do think, however that your comment might have been better-received if delivered with less snark.
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Home taping is killing music!
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Yes, this was first stated in the late 70s. Back then duping 10,000 cassettes took some backstreet criminal a fair amount of investment. Now we are all that backstreet crim.
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relevant xkcd - steal this comic: |
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