Development Teaser: I'm working on a self-hostable #bandcamp alternative - implemented as a static site generator written in #rust
As a small tech tradeoff and an experiment I'm integrating a soft paycurtain: Albums can display a price tag, (including a user interaction for setting a price for "name your price" albums), payment directions are given (Liberapay, SEPA, etc. as configured), but the payment itself is not technically enforced, i.e. the listener is asked to affirm by themselves - by clicking a button - that they have paid for what they want, and only then given the download link. I'm open to experiment further with this when I've released faircamp (current codename) to the public. I could also imagine an option for integrating a hard paywall based on entering a token that could e.g. be made exclusively available to your backers on an external platform (ghost, patreon, steady, paypal, ...).
Been fleshing out the first prototype all day today, and having a blast! ✌️
Update on the announced self-hostable #bandcamp alternative: Got tons of work done on the foundation over the last days (architecture, reading, transcoding, caching, syncing, configuration, cli arguments, ...). Today was the first time I did some design exporation (first glimpses attached - these are already in-browser screenshots of the functional interface, not mockups :)). I'm developing out in the open at https://codeberg.org/simonrepp/faircamp °˖✧◝(⁰▿⁰)◜✧˖°
Threw some other albums at my waveform computation logic, and I must say I'm beginning to like this idea a lot more °˖✧◝(⁰▿⁰)◜✧˖° The juxtaposed waveforms really add quite a unique graphical signature to the albums (even, or especially, with everything else removed), and somehow just seeing some of the curious waveforms totally triggers my curiosity to hear what's going on in those tracks. :D
Random faircamp progress excerpt: Added decoding (and thus waveform generation) for FLAC and WAV, experimented a bit with "waveform thumbnails" for the tracks of releases (might remain an experiment only), today added font customization (supplying custom files, default and custom system font stack options, etc.). I might make the system font stack the default, because environment, page load speed, non-latin scripts, etc., but let's see, in general I'm rather fond of bespoke typo choices and would rather eliminate other optional bytes on the page :)
Also there's now a --theming-widget cli option which injects a small overlay widget into all pages and with which one can interactively explore different color configurations for the visual theme - the configuration options are automatically generated as text and can be copied into the config file. (sorry for the weird video compression, wasn't meant to be an encoding glitch art video :D)
@freebliss do you know funkwhale?
@freebliss @poemproducer could also be good for feedback on your music platform project.
@freebliss I like this, a lot! 😍
@freebliss These look so nice – almost hand-written. It makes me think of Cy Twombly paintings. I'd much rather look at these than the usual sterile VU-graphs.
@freebliss How are you (technically) drawing these waveforms? I've got some software that I'm working on where I'd like to do something similar.
@freebliss this looks really exciting, and if you get to a point where you want beta testers i’d be game. i’m launching a new label this summer, so timing could be good.
@emenel Hey thanks, very happy to hear it! Beta testing would be fantastic - much appreciated and I just made a note to ping you when things get stable-ish. :) Also - if you then like what you see and opt to use faircamp further - I'd love to start collecting faircamp sites out in the wild (for others to get inspired and have some reference of what's possible) and would gladly add yours to the link collection then, if you're ok with that! Lastly, if you like to share that already, I'd be curious about the label's genre/very brief context! :)
@freebliss It seems like now might be the time to make this happen! :) With the changes at bandcamp all but inevitable, I'd love to start transitioning to an open platform that offers similar functionality.
@emenel noted once more! :) sorry for the long wait and thanks again for the support offer, still much appreciated! I have to sort some personal and work stuff out for a few weeks to come at least but hope to establish a regular pace for my open source work in general (eno, faircamp, setting up an ssb room - I did a bunch of research already! ;)) soon again, and then all hands will be welcome for support! \o/
@freebliss Incredible work! 👏
I'm really looking forward to see how this will turn out
@freebliss Still love this!
Actually getting ready to do something similar in a piece of software I'm working on.
@freebliss Also, I don't think I mentioned it... but I'm a bandcamp user and customer:
https://fortifieduniverse.bandcamp.com/
Totally interested in what you're doing with faircamp for those reasons, too...
@freebliss ooooh this looks cool!
@kookie thanks for the kind feedback! :)
@freebliss interesting project. What is missing is the social salt in the soup. One of the factors for success of Bandcamp and NFT is the ability to show of your music collection, curate and recommend etc.
I like the update/upload process. Kinda like old apple website tool (forgot the name). Looking forward to see where you take it.
@tekknovator hehe yes it's definitely unsocial by design :) I like to think about this in terms of a separation of concerns, i.e. social aspects can be covered by another medium (such as mastodon), so faircamp can be good at what it is, and excel at that. but anyhow i absolutely appreciate that there is a diversity of approaches out there (funkwhale e.g. for an activity-pub powered, very social and federated experience), more approaches and ample choice are the way to go \o/ thanks for sharing your thoughts, appreciate it!
@freebliss makes sense. I also thought that your project would be a nice interface to an existing music collection at home. In any case thanks for exploring and sharing 😎
I'll be able to post full-length tracks there, and keep short demos for the fediverse, or even link from the fediverse to full length tracks.
@samae hey i'm very happy you found it (and find it useful)! also thanks for sharing \(^ヮ^)/ and great to hear it's somewhere in the nixpkgs repo - i didn't know :)
Been looking a bit into the topic of waveform representation in faircamp. I like the idea of integrating something that adds a varying graphical quality to all releases and tracks without forcing the artist to provide artwork, i.e. having the system generate something graphical from the audio itself, which also has functional value ... Delicate matter anyhow, not yet sure if there will be waveforms in the end. :)