this post was submitted on 13 Nov 2023

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Faircamp is a Free Bandcamp Alternative (wedistribute.org)

submitted 2 years ago by deadsuperhero@lemmy.ml to c/fediverse@lemmy.ml

27 comments fedilink hide all child comments

There's a really cool open source alternative to Bandcamp that just came out. With some questions raised about Bandcamp's future, some musicians in the Fediverse are leaning into the new platform as a different approach to selling their music.

Faircamp is just a static site, and doesn't federate itself, but its adoption within the Fediverse suggests that people are at least thinking about alternative solutions.

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[–] theskyisfalling@lemmy.dbzer0.com 60 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Doesn't really matter if it is good or bad, at the end of the day I am forced to go where the people I like choose to sell their music. Right now I use band camp because it gives the most money to artists and it is heavily used by my chosen genre but if band camp goes tits up I have to go where they go.

[–] wiki_me@lemmy.ml 3 points 2 years ago

Maybe if someone will offer paid management of this software, people could contact the artist and suggest it as an alternative.

[–] Metal_Zealot@lemmy.ml 27 points 2 years ago (1 children)

The setting up of servers and understanding the fediverse will prevent most artists from participating in this, I feel...
I'd love for this to take off though, I'm fucking pissed that Epic ruined Bandcamp.

[–] Aqarius@lemmy.world 5 points 2 years ago (1 children)

What happened?

[–] Metal_Zealot@lemmy.ml 15 points 2 years ago

Epic bought them (I think they wanted to start competing with Spotify?), laid off a bunch of staff, SOLD Bandcamp to Songtradr, who then laid off %50 of their staff

[–] sabreW4K3@lemmy.tf 15 points 2 years ago (2 children)

What questions about Bandcamp's future?

[–] Hubi@feddit.de 67 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Epic sold Bandcamp a few weeks ago and the new owners instantly laid off a large part of the staff. It's fair to say that Bandcamps future is uncertain.

[–] sabreW4K3@lemmy.tf 13 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Oh, I didn't even know Epic owned Bandcamp. Thank you.

[–] Skelectus@suppo.fi 23 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

Epic also only bought it last year.

[+] PeleSpirit@lemmy.world 7 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (2 children)

[deleted]

[–] clmbmb@lemmy.dbzer0.com 10 points 2 years ago (1 children)

This is not a site. It's software you can use to host and publish your music... And I think it would work for podcasts too.

[+] PeleSpirit@lemmy.world 7 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (4 children)

[deleted]

[–] Eikichi@lemmy.ml 10 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (1 children)

its more an self hosted service,
Like if you host an lemmy server, you can also host faircamp to share music with, accross your lemmy's instance.

imagine my fake domain www.eikichithefrench.com,
i can use my main domain as an portal with an static webpage wrote in html, where you click on "lemmy.eikichithefrench.com" or "faircamp.eikichithefrench.com"

Sorry, my english, as u know now, im french,

[–] fuckwit_mcbumcrumble@lemmy.world 5 points 2 years ago (1 children)

I'd probably suggest having a dedicated machine. You don't need anything fancy, I'd imagine any old laptop should do.

It's essentially software to convert your machine into a basic web server, so if the laptop disconnects now nobody can download your stuff. And I assume you don't keep your laptop on 24/7

[+] PeleSpirit@lemmy.world 3 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (1 children)

[deleted]

[–] fuckwit_mcbumcrumble@lemmy.world 8 points 2 years ago (2 children)

That's kind of the crux of a lot of these things. The instructions make it look really simple to install, but if you've never done this before then I could understand it being confusing. There was this teeny tiny line in the middle of some pictures that says someone will help you set them up I think.

More notably, Radio Free Fedi has been incredibly proactive, offering a free service to help Fedi musicians host their own Faircamp sites on RadioFreeFedi’s infrastructure.

It looks like you just ask them for help and send them some of your songs and they'll handle the setup.

https://faircamp.radiofreefedi.net/

[–] deadsuperhero@lemmy.ml 2 points 2 years ago

Thanks for the feedback, I added a big quote from Radio Free Fedi to call more attention to that effort.

[–] deadsuperhero@lemmy.ml 3 points 2 years ago (1 children)

You'd probably want to host it on an actual server, if you want people to be able to access it when your laptop isn't on. The documentation seems pretty good, though, it should walk you through the steps: https://simonrepp.com/faircamp/manual/installation.html

[–] BolexForSoup@kbin.social 2 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

If, and this is a big if, it can support an RSS feed that also allows you to provide the requisite info apple et al demand (3000x3000 pixel image, categories, etc.) then it could in theory support it. The bigger concern is traffic - will they be cool with you syndicating out and having folks pulling that frequently and can it support a lot of folks with larger shows doing it. Some podcatchers won't care and will let you just use an RSS pointing at the page hosting the files, but it's not a given especially with the larger ones.

My advice? Unless you want to really hack it together yourself and accept that it could force you to migrate without any notice, sure give it a shot. If you are risk averse, don't want to disrupt your listeners, aren't really comfortable doing a lot of tech troubleshooting, etc. I'd say don't try it. Podcast hosting is trivially inexpensive and all the big services have an embeddable player now if you really want folks to listen on your site.

Edit: worth noting that a lot of this is going to depend on whether an instance admin specifically wants to deal with all your traffic, assuming you get regular users/the numbers are decently high. If you stand up your own instance then it's all about what your infrastructure can support.

[–] Knusper@feddit.de 8 points 2 years ago (1 children)

You might be interested in Funkwhale instead.
It's a more mature piece of software, it does federate and they've even put quite a bit of effort into podcasts.

They have a flagship instance at open.audio, which only allows Creative Commons content (to avoid copyright issues when federating).
So, as I understand, if your podcast is CC-licensed, they'd be happy to host yours.

[–] unix_joe@lemmy.sdf.org 4 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

Honestly, fuck Bandcamp. I used that platform for years, purchased a huge library, supported artists even when I was about 90% sure that some of them were just resellers providing rips of the original artists music.

And then for no reason at all a few weeks ago, I was asked to verify my account via email. Despite using the correct autosaved password. That email never arrived. Never arrives no matter what I try. So I cannot get back in. Support is like check your spam folder like motherfucker you don't think that's the first place I went when I didn't see the conformation email?

Fuck the new ownership. Fuck Bandcamp. Good luck with your upcoming job search.