radio free fedi

Discuss how to promote using FLOSS to make music.

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Rainmak3r
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radio free fedi

Post by Rainmak3r »

Hi all,

not sure if this post is in scope with this section (maybe it belongs more to "General Music Discussion"?), but just yesterday I was made aware of a project called radio free fedi, which in their own words is a "small web, consent driven, artist populated, non-commercial mechanism, attribution promoting, community radio for the fediverse". The website provides many more details on what they wanted to achieve with this radio project, which I encourage you to check out. Different artists (me included) contributed songs to the radio, which runs 24/7 rotating the music they have available. I've been listening to it in the background for the last couple of days, and I have to say I've listened to a bunch of really cool songs from artists I would never have been aware of otherwise: there's different genres that alternate in the rotation, which can be a bit confusing at first, but apparently one of the planned future enhancements is indeed creating some themed/genred subset.

I think it's mostly meant to give more visibility to musicians with a Mastodon presence, but I'm not sure if a Mastodon account is indeed required (advertising your Mastodon identity is optional). At the same time, the use of FOSS for writing music is probably not required at all either, since while I did make an extensive use of it (I wouldn't be here otherwise!), many others in that list probably didn't; many of them shared their music with CC licenses, though, which means there is indeed quite a good deal of openness involved.

In case you're just curious of what it is about, or maybe plan to contribute some music of your own, do give them a chance! I think it's a really cool idea that deserves some encouragement and recognition. 8)

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Re: radio free fedi

Post by tseaver »

Thanks for the reference! Seems like the fediverse might be a reasonable alternative to the current streaming oligarchs for music discovery, given that one can find the right crowd to share with.

On a similar note, I had just begun to fix to commence to think about setting up a Funkwhale instance, only to find that the Funkwhale site (https://funkwhale.audio/) was returning 502 Bad Gateway errors (the other hosts in that domain all return the same error). Anybody have any other info on Funkwhale?

Ubuntu, Mixbus32C; acoustic blues / country / jazz
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jdfight
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Re: radio free fedi

Post by jdfight »

I currently have my music on Radio Free Fedi and I have been listening to it a lot. I have found a lot of great artists there and highly recommend it.

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Re: radio free fedi

Post by bulevardi »

I also looked at Funkwhale... seems difficult, first you have to install it on your own server (which I even haven't), and there it stops.
You can't just sign up as an artist and upload your music like on SoundCloud?

I'll check out that radio free fedi later.

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Re: radio free fedi

Post by Largos »

bulevardi wrote: Tue Jan 28, 2025 8:15 am

I also looked at Funkwhale... seems difficult, first you have to install it on your own server (which I even haven't), and there it stops.
You can't just sign up as an artist and upload your music like on SoundCloud?

I'll check out that radio free fedi later.

You can sign up on someone else's funkwhale "pod" like https://open.audio

list of pods https://www.funkwhale.audio/join/

No point checking out that radio station, it's closed.

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Re: radio free fedi

Post by bulevardi »

Seems interesting.

LinuxMusicians should have their own pod on Funkwhale !!

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Re: radio free fedi

Post by Rainmak3r »

bulevardi wrote: Tue Jan 28, 2025 6:48 pm

Seems interesting.

LinuxMusicians should have their own pod on Funkwhale !!

Unfortunately Radio Free Fedi was closed at the end of 2024, but there's a new effort that's trying to take the baton:

https://indieart.support/

At the moment it's just a directory of who contributed media to RFF, as a discovery mechanism, but I think the plan is getting back to a point where songs can be streamed again like RFF did.

About Funkwhale, to be honest I haven't heard very good things about it. I never tried myself, but some who did complained about high usage of resources and a somewhat clunky interface. That said, not having used it myself I have no clue if those complaints were warranted or not. For my own setup, I chose to deploy my own instance of Faircamp, which was quite easy, and is lightweight enough it can be hosted on the tiny 1€/month server I have for some of my stuff. Clearly it doesn't help with discoverability (which is what a radio would do), but it's still cool for more control on how you present your music.

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Re: radio free fedi

Post by bulevardi »

Rainmak3r wrote: Tue Feb 18, 2025 9:43 am

Unfortunately Radio Free Fedi was closed at the end of 2024, but there's a new effort that's trying to take the baton:

https://indieart.support/

At the moment it's just a directory of who contributed media to RFF, as a discovery mechanism, but I think the plan is getting back to a point where songs can be streamed again like RFF did.

I sent them a DM to get into their directory :)
Thanks :)

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