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 described another case in the blog post: it would be really cool if indie labels or indie artists got together around their own instances, so that they could distribute/promote their own content with less restrictive licenses.
But why would i post my music on a platform i can’t make money on and that has little to no discovery features? The site can barely be used without logging in and i haven’t seen any compatibility with mastodon to take advantage of activitypub and reaching new listeners
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.
I don’t know, maybe it seems that you are experiencing a lot of the pains that comes with learning about self-hosting, which is fine and laudable but not at all an issue exclusive to Fediverse software.
Maybe my question is: are you trying to deploy your Lemmy for this long for the learning process, or do you just want to have a server of your own? If the latter, why not just go one of the hosting providers?
Look, I hear what you’re saying. And no offense intended, but people like you crow about things like fediverse not being supported… All the while, these applications are not supported by their own developers. And unfortunately, not unlike the majority of my experiences with Linux issues, every time I reach out for help I’m told the same old hat story, “this isn’t meant for beginners”.
And the “pains that come with learning about self-hosting” are so unnecessary and in my opinion quite apparently avoidable.
"Well, did you change the port number to this number that isn’t referenced anywhere in the documentation? It’s pretty obvious to anyone that’s been doing this for 20 years - who would be able to recognize that it’s a step everyone would need to do to deploy - so there’s literally no conceivable reason why that would be included…
###IN THE TUTORIAL
…Maybe you shouldn’t be doing this."
Look, this is software that has not even reached version 1.0. Of course it is incomplete. I totally understand your frustration, but if people are telling you “this is not for beginners”, maybe it would be wise to listen to it? You still haven’t answered my question: are you trying to run your own instance to learn or because you want “support the Fediverse”? If the former, it seems that you are trying to bite more than you can chew. If the latter, there are plenty of other ways to help beyond running your own instance.
Even though I don’t completely support what the other person said, the defense you are making here is dangerous. It’s not gatekeeping or anything like elitism, which is the argument of the other person. I don’t see the point of arguing with them regarding it.
So here you said ‘biting more than you can chew’. The fundamental problem I see here, which is something people say about Linux also, is that the entry barrier is pretty high. Most of the time it stems from lack of easy to access documentation in the case of Linux. But when it comes to some specific projects, the documentation is incomplete. Many of the self hostable applications suffer from this.
People should be able to learn their way to chew bigger things. That is how one can improve. Most people won’t enjoy a steep learning curve. Documentation helps to ease this steepness. Along with that I completely agree with the fact that many people who figure out things, won’t share or contribute into the documentation.
My point is in such scenarios, I think we should encourage people to contribute into the project, instead of saying there are easier ways to do it. Then only an open source project can grow.
