Funkwhale might be the most overlooked Fediverse project

and I am trying to figure out what is missing to get more people interested and using it.

A link to the project would be a good start.

So if you have a good mix of friends who kept/ripped their CD/Vynil collection or bought songs from their favorite indie musicians, you can end up with a pretty extensive library. This makes it a decent (and legal) alternative to sneaker-net piracy.

Isn't that still not considered legal?

Legality aside, this is the huge barrier of entry for most people, I'd think.

The problem with funkwhale is legality. Unless somebody buys the streaming rights for copyrighted music, only CC music or copyleft music can be streamed, or stuff like podcasts uploaded and made by the content creators. However, many people with podcasts are trying to make money, which makes this a non-starter without some method of compensation.

What it first needs is a way to compensate content creators, then it needs publicity. If you got a bunch of random people to upload their shit because they can make money with it, then we're talking. Until then, people like me won't use it as users for lack of content nor as hosters for fear of legal repercussions.

Edit: Also, even for private use it doesn't fulfill my needs. It doesn't have smart playlists and last I checked didn't have star ratings (only hearts). Back when I evaluated it, it didn't have a quick track view either.

IMO, if this were hosted on I2P and I2P had decent speeds, it would take off like coke in a bottle.

#!/usr/bin/env nix-shell
#!nix-shell -i bash --packages xautomation xclip

sleep 0.2
(echo '::: spoiler Anti Commercial AI thingy
[CC BY-NC-SA 4.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/)

Inserted with a keystroke running this script on linux with X11
```bash'
cat "$0"
echo '```
:::') | xclip -selection clipboard
xte "keydown Control_L" "key V" "keyup Control_L"

Maybe it is overlooked, but is that unexpected when it seems to cater to such a specific niche? I'm struggling to see why I would use it. If I want to play my own music, I can just use my local setup that uses better apps and has my playlists already. If I want discovery, I can use last.fm, YouTube Music, and other venues. If I want to share music with other people, I start to see a point, but would rather direct people to use Soulseek or a different self-hosted solution that allows downloads. Speaking of, why is there no download link on the files? The website is sharing copyrighted content either way, what difference does it make whether it's saved or streamed to my PC? At least with a download option I could see it as a Soulseek alternative.

And personally, it seems like a lot of effort to upload and reorganise my collection when I can't trust the server and my effort to still be there a few years down the line. After all, storage costs money and who knows when the server host will get bored, run out of spare cash, or get taken down for hosting licensed music. This is before we get into the fact that even the shitty opus re-encodes I keep are over 60gb (the instance I found only supports 50). Of course you'll tell me to host my own instance, but that is narrowing the niche once again as I would have to move my music to a server and learn how to host Funkwhale and would be opening myself up to legal problems.

Excuse my skepticism but I can only really see the use for either:

• Music collectors that want to share music with each other but for some reason don't want to expand their library via downloading.
• Users with a tiny or non-existent library that don't mind locking themselves into another website they don't control and can lose their data from at any moment.

I don't didn't understand how it works 🥺

Edit 2: Honestly, it just takes someone to endorse it and it'll be huge. But for me personally, I'd rather own my music.

It is overlooked because filesharing gets you into trouble and Plex is for various reasons the much more evolved alternative.

It's pretty great!

Well, as someone who has been trying to launch a functioning Lemmy instance for nearly a year now, I can tell you, knowing not the slightest thing about funkwhale, that I would eat my hat if the documentation isn't an all but absent shit show.

My favorite part was learning that my domain was creating a completely new cert from lets encrypt with each deployment and no way of recovering them at all. So after 5 attempts, you have to wait 60 days (or whatever) for them to expire. That was awesome. I messaged the devs about that one and they literally said "we didn't think of that"... 😑

And so much shit goes tits up if you don't deploy it perfectly the very first time. Don't get me wrong, I love the fediverse, but JTFC I hate the fucking fediverse.

is this like a decentralised plex for music? like if i have a set of flac i can simply create an instance, upload those and use that instance with my friends like a spotify?

The first step would be understanding what portion of listeners fit the use case you’re trying to solve.

I’m an example that doesn’t. I have no interests in the social functionality but do want a large catalog of essentially everything. You’re not likely to attract someone like me, regardless of how good the project may be. So are most of role like you or most people like me?

Ok, guess I finally have to check out what it's exactly about, then.

It's not good enough for casuals nor selfhosters.

Needs a mobile app

I got kind of excited about the mention of the "social" aspect, but it turned out a bit nonexistent. Funkwhale seems to be just a way to set up a file sharing site for music.

Consider it harder.