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FunkWhale: Decentralized Music Server

177 points| alexfromapex | 5 years ago |funkwhale.audio

92 comments

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[+] casi|5 years ago|reply
Ive been running a private funkwhale for me and my friends since november ‘19 and its been great. Works lovely with play::sub for ios. Have about 300gb of music hosted and 4 daily users :)

Recommended for those wanting to ditch spotify. Redirect the subscription fee to buying an album or two each month. Get a few friends to do the same. The artists get much more royalties and you have a more personal collection.

[+] denismi|5 years ago|reply
Last.fm tells me that in the last 2 years I've listened to songs from 2,015 different albums (almost exclusively via Spotify). That goes up to 4,238 in the last 5, and increases by a few hundred per year thereafter.

The top 50 albums over those 2 years are a quarter of my listens, the top 100 are just over a third.

Even if two-thirds of that album count is bad metadata (e.g. the same song counted against multiple different albums/compilations/etc.) it would still be prohibitively expensive to consume anywhere near the same breadth of content if I had to acquire perpetual rights (from Bandcamp/iTunes/etc.) for everything rather than effectively renting them out for a single play (from Spotify).

The other thing I like about the streaming model is that artist remuneration correlates to how impactful their work subsequently is to my life (i.e. how many times I listen to it both during discovery and then over the subsequent years/decades) rather than how effective their marketing is at convincing me to buy the album up front.

[+] pavel_lishin|5 years ago|reply
Is there an android app that works well with this? Youtube Music has killed most of the usefulness that Google Play Music had (e.g., no way to edit id3 metadata, no way to browse by genre, and a thousand other tiny papercuts) and I'm really looking to stop using it.
[+] enilsen16|5 years ago|reply
Are there any laws to worry about with this? What's stopping a bunch of people coming together and doing this?

This could be really cool especially for a lot of older music that isn't on streaming platforms.

[+] bobajeff|5 years ago|reply
I wonder what the feasibility is of doing something like this for movies and tv shows?
[+] saaaaaam|5 years ago|reply
I’m interested that you say the artist gets more royalties. How does that work?
[+] sho_nuff|5 years ago|reply
What are you using to host the server? VPS? Machine from your home network?
[+] Kaze404|5 years ago|reply
Funkwhale is incredible. I comment every time it's posted here because it's truly one of my favorite technologies out there. I ran a personal pod for around a year, and lately I've been thinking of running one for my home.

The project is also looking for maintainers, as the lead developer might not be able to contribute for much longer. If you have the inclination to do so, definitely reach out to them :)

[+] jjice|5 years ago|reply
I noticed they call their groups "pods" and I thought that was poor naming because that's what Kubernetes calls their groups. Then it hit me and I looked up what a gathering of whales is called, and sure enough, it's a "pod". It gave me a little chuckle.
[+] verdverm|5 years ago|reply
Kubernetes is Greek for the "helmsman" of a ship. The seafaring theme runs deep in the ecosystem
[+] Lammy|5 years ago|reply
Funkwhale seems to focus on the social aspect of sharing music among a group, and that's cool if you're into that, but for hosting my personal music library just for myself I like Airsonic: https://airsonic.github.io/
[+] soulofmischief|5 years ago|reply
I use Airsonic, can anyone comment as to why I might want to switch to Funkwhale?
[+] oever|5 years ago|reply
It would be great if it would link the music to a graph of information about the songs, bands, individual performers, composers, recordings etc.

There's a project that makes this data available as linked data: https://wiki.musicbrainz.org/LinkedBrainz

[+] etcet|5 years ago|reply
I really miss the act of browsing someones music collection like you could do with Napster and Soulseek around the turn of the century. Definitely going to check this out!
[+] reaktivo|5 years ago|reply
Soulseek is still going strong, I recently discovered.
[+] orblivion|5 years ago|reply
The whole idea of this seems cool but I don't really get the value of it as a Spotify replacement. Though I haven't tried. Spotify to me is a source of music I don't already have. I don't understand the value of putting my existing music on a website. I mean I guess there's some, but not a ton.

Given the social/federation aspects, it seems like it's a much better replacement for Soundcloud. You could use it to distribute freely licensed stuff (assuming you're respecting copyrights) or more importantly your own music as a musician (which I am not). I could see a lot of value in interoperating with Mastodon. You "boost" a new song by a musician you follow. Some of your Mastodon followers see it and listen and comment directly on the song. Others look at the person's Funkwhale profile for a better catalogue view to explore further. Etc. Could be a great future.

[+] icy|5 years ago|reply
Been using gonic[1] on my Raspberry Pi at home. Works brilliantly.

As an aside, I'm glad I didn't bother with Funkwhale: https://funkwhale.audio/en_US/code-of-conduct/.

[1]: https://github.com/sentriz/gonic

[+] Toutouxc|5 years ago|reply
I like the project, but the Code of Conduct is literally the only reason I will not be trying Funkwhale out.

I am very respectful towards homosexuals, transsexuals, women in highly technical roles, people struggling with disabilities or mental illnesses, am very open to interesting political discussion even with my ideological opponents, and always ready to change my mind if proven wrong.

But I have a very bad feeling any social-justice driven CoC can and will be abused, and in the long term no one is safe from being labeled a racist, misogynist, homophobe, transphobe or any currently fashionable -ist or -phobe one day. When there's a sufficiently malevolent will, there's a way.

Just wanted to say that.

[+] trentnix|5 years ago|reply
Does anyone else just want to build cool s***? Or does everything under the sun need to be about furthering a social agenda?
[+] conradfr|5 years ago|reply
Wow you're not even allowed to make jokes.
[+] asmr|5 years ago|reply
Is this federated or p2p? It would be amazing to have something like SoulSeek but in a music player (Spotify) format. I have rather eclectic taste when it comes to music and Spotify is missing a lot of good stuff.
[+] stryan|5 years ago|reply
It's federated over ActivityPub. You can follow other user's libraries on other instances.
[+] apexkid|5 years ago|reply
How does funkWhale deal with piracy of music and copyrights?
[+] rglullis|5 years ago|reply
It doesn't. Funkwhale is not meant to be run as a service for a large number of users. People running a pod should be cleared by fair use, much like someone with a iTunes library that is accessible through the home (or company) intranet.
[+] apexkid|5 years ago|reply
How are royalties paid to the music labels?
[+] kylegill|5 years ago|reply
This looks sort of like a Plex for music, and in a way (if you use some creative thinking) a self hosted Audius [1], neat!

I've been thinking about how I'd do this to ditch my library on what was Google Play Music and is now YouTube Music.

[1]: https://audius.co/

[+] number6|5 years ago|reply
Is this peer2peer? I am thinking about a tool for Podcast that federates and is p2p like e.g. peertube only with all the Podcast rss Features + listeners can choose a ratio how many copys of the Podcast they want to distribute
[+] jjice|5 years ago|reply
I personally use Jellyfin's music integration of my selfhosted music streaming. It works fine, but still has a few kinks to work out. FunkWhale seems like the way to go if you're just looking for music streaming.
[+] A6gYPfxNas|5 years ago|reply
WOW, I can't believe we went this long without this. I knew these old IDE hard drives full of MP3s from the 90s/early 2000s would come in handy someday!
[+] tomaszs|5 years ago|reply
The project is lovely and exactly what I'd need. If only it was possible to buy a raspberry Pi with everything configured and 32 GB of memory for music...
[+] vlmutolo|5 years ago|reply
How does this not run into major copyright issues?
[+] erikschoster|5 years ago|reply
Most instances I've seen are used to host music uploaded by the original authors, or collections of CC-licensed music, etc. I actually have yet to see anyone using funkwhale to share music publicly they didn't create themselves or have permission to share. It does have a private mode for that, so you could upload your music collection and share it with just a few friends or something.

(Edit: I tried funkwhale out as a way to privately share a small online radio station's music library with its DJs. It didn't suit our needs ultimately -- I felt the UI & search / filtering affordances were lacking for our use case -- but you could use it in a hybrid public/private way like that if you want. Libraries have some access control features.)

[+] X6S1x6Okd1st|5 years ago|reply
It's a federated model so it would be up to each instance to police it's self.
[+] cecja|5 years ago|reply
Because you are hosting your own legally owned music library on your server.
[+] betwixthewires|5 years ago|reply
FYI the funkwhale dev team is looking to orphan the project, or was last I heard.
[+] azinman2|5 years ago|reply
Do people have recent mp3s anymore?