The more I'm thinking about the music streaming thing the more I'm wishing that Funkwhale actually worked in a more open way, because at least conceptually it already does most of the things I want it to do.

I just really can't vibe with how it's built as a platform, rather than a protocol, and how it's not easy to self-host, and how putting your music collection in it means having to host it directly on the Funkwhale instance instead of being able to provide any sort of NAS-based connection.

I've tried to find its federation protocol and to see if there's a way of setting up a minimal publish-only thing that can ingest content from arbitrary hosting sources.

Like there shouldn't be any reason for the storage to be tightly-coupled to the pod like that.

Also, fundamentally I just plain don't like ActivityPub.

Maybe I should try installing it on a docker container on my NAS and just play with it a bit anyway, like maybe it actually does everything I want it to do and I'm just doing extra stupid levels of effort here

wellp, so far I've found that its dockerfile doesn't make sense to synology, and its baremetal install on Ubuntu is super broken, and either way the actual installation requirements are pretty heavy, so maybe I am right to not be super interested

I just wish Mozilla Songbird hadn't died. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Songbird_(software)

okay so I was granted access to open.audio and when I start to upload my music it suggests that I can just provide an RSS feed for my discography, great! But the docs say absolutely nothing about the specific RSS formatting to use for an album, the only feed documentation I can find elsewhere is for a podcast, and Funkwhale's own docs only refer to uploading stuff through an interface that doesn't appear to be on open.audio.

Can someone with more Funkwhale experience help?

ah it turns out I was confused by things, the actual doc flow is to *create* an RSS feed from Funkwhale, rather than to federate one from an external source

I'd definitely prefer the latter (since I already have my own website on which I can put any feed I want!) but at least this is a start.

so I tried uploading an album, its importer completely fucked up the metadata, I can't find any way to actually edit the metadata (the docs point me to a thing that does not exist), so I tried emailing their contact email, which immediately sent me a rejection message from gitlab

so far I am not impressed

finally found the track editor, it is NOT easy to find, and holy shit there are so many clicks you have to do for each separate track? How is this supposed to be usable by anyone?

wow and you can't even open each track in separate tabs to make the editing process easier

everything's trying to be a motherfucking "app" flow

the UX flow on this is just really bad

Go to artist
Create album
Go to artist
Find album
Edit album
Add artwork
Go to artist
Upload tracks
Select album
Try again because album list doesn't load
Add tracks
Edit each track
Re-edit each track because the edits don't apply
Get a pile of "not found" errors
Wonder WTF happened
See errors on multiple tracks
Go to library
Go to album
Go to track
Select "track details"
Select "edit track"
Try to fix the data
Fail
Repeat

so yeah this just strengthens my resolve to build a set of *protocols* to make this stuff actually feasible to do so that you aren't stuck using one specific implementation of things

oh great now I'm getting "rate limited" for API requests that were being issued by Funkwhale itself

@fluffy slow it down

@onelson i'm just trying to upload my albums

this whole experience has been absolutely miserable

@kiffiethedreamer it's like they focused so hard on trying to make the UX seem all bright and shiny and "modern" that they forgot to make it actually *functional*

which is, sadly, super common in software these days

well anyway if you want to follow me on funkwhale for some reason it's @sockpuppet

it's also ridiculous how many ActivityPub-based "fediverse" profiles I now have for my band, when really everything should just be at https://sockpuppet.band/ and there shouldn't be any need for all this crap

ActivityPub as a protocol isn't all that great IMO, and none of the "first-class" implementations of it (mastodon, peertube, funkwhale, etc.) have done anything to change my mind

the promise of ActivityPub is that it's one protocol for everything online but the reality is that every single implementation ends up with its own narrow focus of things, nothing really interoperates, and you end up with the same proliferation of apps and logins that it was supposed to be trying to avoid in the first place

https://beesbuzz.biz/blog/2535-ActivityPub-hot-take
https://beesbuzz.biz/blog/12455-Indieweb-vs.-Fediverse

@fluffy I tried writing an ActivityPub library and got scared off by JSON-LD. It’s just XML namespaces, but as an independent add-on so it’s got almost no library support. And with how anti-strict the ActivityPub data structures are, it’s a bear to define a strongly typed equivalent in a programming language.

@neia yeah

I mean html+mf2 (the indieweb dogma) is far from perfect too but at least it's vibes-based in an open way and the fundamentals are all there with it just being A Webpage that happens to have embedded metadata for theoretical clients to support as appropriate for the client's use case

@neia @fluffy yeah the problem with it is that none of the major implementors really give a shit about json-ld ad expect their particular format of json document, in a way the spec is more a hindrance than a help because “implementors” do their own things

@charlotte @neia I've never been particularly impressed with JSON-LD as a concept either.

@fluffy @neia it seems massively overcomplicated with what could be trivially be achieved with namespaced keys

@charlotte @neia Yeah, exactly. Also every time I've seen it in the wild it's always just like, directly exposed weird internals that aren't super useful to the outside. Like I wrote a Bandcamp importer for my own website and actually getting the correct JSON-LD blob out and then doing anything useful with it was a frustrating mess.

@fluffy enhance your calm

@onelson Does telling someone who's worked up about something to calm down ever actually work?

@fluffy no, it's just a jape. A play on Twitter's 420 status.

@onelson Ah right, I forgot about that one but it seemed familiar

@fluffy they stole the turn of phrase from Demolition Man.

@onelson yeah the chain runs long

I did submit some feedback to the Funkwhale project about my frustrations and they said those issues should mostly be addressed in v2.0 which is releasing real soon. But they have no interest in supporting syndication from non-Funkwhale sources for reasons that still feel incredibly short-sighted to me.

Their reasoning is that most users want to use Funkwhale because they don’t have their own infrastructure for releasing music, but I would have thought the point to a federated music platform is to, you know, federate?

Also “most users” requires further qualification, because I suspect selection bias.

@fluffy What are your thoughts on atproto as opposed to activitypub? I know bluesky is basically a silo at this point, but they still run on a protocol and I've even seen git repos federated on it. Been thinking about it a lot

@rilic I have absolutely no confidence in it.

@rilic to expand a bit:

1. ActivityPub, for all its problems, is at least meant to be a more general protocol, while ATProto is *just* for Twitter-likes
2. ATProto isn't even very good for Twitter-likes, since it requires everything to subscribe to and filter a global feed of every post everywhere
3. All this shit could be done with RSS/Atom or HTML+MF2 and actually have real interop and way less jank and overhead

@charlotte @fluffy @neia The only time I’ve ever seen JSON-LD even remotely make sense is in the context of Solid, but Solid is extremely abstract for a lot of people, and takes a long time to really understand. It absolutely feels as though it was shoehorned into ActivityPub.

With Solid, you can at least say “What if you had a PDS that you could use like it was a Google Drive or a DropBox, but the whole thing is basically a database of your stuff using RDF and Linked Data? And all the apps you used basically just were clients that connected to that?”

Like, in the context of all the ways that stuff works, fine. But with ActivityPub, it’s like this whole other layer that most people don’t care about.

@fluffy @rilic I don’t know if I necessarily agree on ATproto being “just” for Twitter-likes. While Bluesky itself is Twitter-like, and I think it’s fair to argue that network topologies take on the form of whatever the main use-case’s form is, there’s actually a pretty decent amount of ecosystem diversity.

Some of the things being built on ATproto include code forges, long-form publishing, live streaming, videos, and all sorts of other stuff. Some of these apps even build out their own social graphs and lexicons completely separate from anything that Bluesky uses.

I will say that ATproto is doing what the Fediverse should have done with ActivityPub C2S a long time ago. We absolutely shot ourselves in the foot by not embracing the client model, which led to everything being its own federated platform.

@deadsuperhero @fluffy Yeah I just found the git forge site I spotted, https://tangled.sh/. It looks like a similar idea to https://forgefed.org/ but with more tangible results, though on what circumstances I'm not sure. Idk if it's using it in a hacky, unintended way, or if it's fully supported.

If it's the case that atproto can be used like this in a more supported way, I think i'd choose to have hope for both AP and atproto. We need at least one federation protocol to succeed, right?

@rilic @deadsuperhero I’d still rather it be IndieWeb.

@rilic @deadsuperhero also it isn’t clear to me how tangled.sh is making use of atproto as anything other than basically a stream of tweets about git commits, still making use of a “sipping from a firehose” model for subscribing to updates.

IndieWeb uses feeds (typically rss/atom, aspirationally mf2) with WebSub as an optional update notification mechanism for cutting down on latency, and webmention for interactions, all simple and lightweight to implement.

@rilic @deadsuperhero I did experimentally put a few of my projects on tangled.sh though just to see how things work. Annoyingly I had to remove LFS from a couple of them (which didn't really *need* LFS anyway) to do so.

Also it is very funny to me that Funkwhale 2.0 can't even talk to Funkwhale 1.0. So much for ActivityPub being the "universal interoperability standard."