Discoverability on the Fediverse and Thought Dump
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I get it, at both ends. I don't watching to be watching video on either platform, but I can access YouTub via liberated web apps (eg Invidio.us), and Android apps (eg NewPipe), and the same things I've said about my use of BandCamp apply here. There's a huge library of stuff to access (too much, really), and search usually finds what I want, or something close enough.
I want PeerTube to be the federated YouTube, but I've seen it pitched as more like a federated Vimeo, and the comparison is apt. The UX of the default web app is pitched more at channel hosts than viewers.
As viewers, we need client apps built around finding and playing videos we want to see, by searching across the full videoverse. All services running PT, OwnCast, Loops, etc, but also video uploaded to any other federated service. And filtering video intelligently, by grouping together short video, TV-style series, feature length content, and live-to-air marathons, in interfaces suitable to those different durations.
I still very occasionally lurk on Reddit and a lot of recent comments on the PeerTube community relate to it being difficult or intimidating to join as a viewer. I also asked in the animation community whether anybody was using PeerTube and it didn't get a single response.
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Are we talking about bringing back music TV as a 24/7 streaming channel using OwnCast?! A video equivalent of Radio Free Fedi? Yes please! I would so watch this, and I would encourage every musician and video artist I know to submit videos to add to the rotation.
yeah that's what I'm hoping for... working with mizkirsten to see if the indie beat can host it but also mel is looking at options for hosting and paying
in the test script I made for LiquidSoap i've included an "eye candy" in regular rotation which is meant to be super short form inserts between videos... but you can see from the script it is easy to schedule program time slots and would be easy to insert a regular animation show
roku/indiebeattv at main · limebar/roku
A repo to store Roku app runtime assets and a web site to link to the apps in the store. - roku/indiebeattv at main · limebar/roku
GitHub (github.com)
I don't know how this all comes together I'm hoping mizkirsten and/or mel can figure out the hosting side (i'm very amateur at linux and hosting) but I think I've confirmed that LiquidSoap -> Owncast is the technology
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yeah that's what I'm hoping for... working with mizkirsten to see if the indie beat can host it but also mel is looking at options for hosting and paying
in the test script I made for LiquidSoap i've included an "eye candy" in regular rotation which is meant to be super short form inserts between videos... but you can see from the script it is easy to schedule program time slots and would be easy to insert a regular animation show
roku/indiebeattv at main · limebar/roku
A repo to store Roku app runtime assets and a web site to link to the apps in the store. - roku/indiebeattv at main · limebar/roku
GitHub (github.com)
I don't know how this all comes together I'm hoping mizkirsten and/or mel can figure out the hosting side (i'm very amateur at linux and hosting) but I think I've confirmed that LiquidSoap -> Owncast is the technology
This all looks amazing! I'm not technical in the slightest but as I said before, if I can make anything to help test it out in terms of idents or test card screens, let me know!
Copying in @simon about the funding page thing too. A few of the Mirlo folks have been chatting about whether to make fundraiser functionality part of Mirlo or spin it off as it's own thing (or both) and I wanted to ask you and Kirsten @TheIndieBeat whether it'd be useful for anything you guys are doing? I saw a stream at Radio Free Fedi fest where there was a funding progress bar at the bottom and thought it was a great idea (and other people seemed to think so too - it hit the target set!).
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This all looks amazing! I'm not technical in the slightest but as I said before, if I can make anything to help test it out in terms of idents or test card screens, let me know!
Copying in @simon about the funding page thing too. A few of the Mirlo folks have been chatting about whether to make fundraiser functionality part of Mirlo or spin it off as it's own thing (or both) and I wanted to ask you and Kirsten @TheIndieBeat whether it'd be useful for anything you guys are doing? I saw a stream at Radio Free Fedi fest where there was a funding progress bar at the bottom and thought it was a great idea (and other people seemed to think so too - it hit the target set!).
Also, if you've got any thoughts about finding animators on fedi and need any help with that, then shout!
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yeah that's what I'm hoping for... working with mizkirsten to see if the indie beat can host it but also mel is looking at options for hosting and paying
in the test script I made for LiquidSoap i've included an "eye candy" in regular rotation which is meant to be super short form inserts between videos... but you can see from the script it is easy to schedule program time slots and would be easy to insert a regular animation show
roku/indiebeattv at main · limebar/roku
A repo to store Roku app runtime assets and a web site to link to the apps in the store. - roku/indiebeattv at main · limebar/roku
GitHub (github.com)
I don't know how this all comes together I'm hoping mizkirsten and/or mel can figure out the hosting side (i'm very amateur at linux and hosting) but I think I've confirmed that LiquidSoap -> Owncast is the technology
Yeah I’d be completely happy to sysadmin this and implement your liquidsoap solution! Putting it in the grant application, submitting by end of this month and hopefully get a decision two months after that…
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Yeah I’d be completely happy to sysadmin this and implement your liquidsoap solution! Putting it in the grant application, submitting by end of this month and hopefully get a decision two months after that…
in the meantime, mizkirsten is hopefully able to get a staging server going this weekend so we can see what's what
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Not sure how best to approach this really but I was thinking about discoverability on the Fediverse and taking notice of a lot of the streaming articles coming out of late (plus Liz Pelly's book). At the same time, I'm also seeing interesting visual platforms popping up like https://www.soot.com and https://rooms.xyz (both backed by private investors though
) and wondering about what it would take to pull people away from streaming, if knowing "it's bad" isn't enough. It sort of reminded me of things I liked about the early internet and sites with clickable Flash-based comics and online places such as BowieNet. So, without this turning into a Grandpa Simpson-style ramble, I feel like there needs to be a site that takes the best of the links below and makes a strong, fun visual space where musicians can be found randomly, either by something like location, or by creating clusters of artists or maps of listener recommendations. Mirlo have just started testing out linking musicians to labels (without it being a paid feature like Bandcamp) and I think that's a really exciting start plus the Fediwall from Indie Beat and @limebar is also really cool (in the last day there is also a live app hoping to launch called Subjam which is aiming to link to music venues and their communities) and I was curious if there's a way of building on that and even linking a few different ideas together? Here's a few examples of things that are/were slightly more offbeat ways of discovering things (aside from the aforementioned Soot and Rooms):- Ghostly's now defunct app, where you could select from their catalogue based on "Mood" (but it was actually a colour wheel, because I downloaded it at the time).
- This genre map where you can click around then it gives examples in a playlist.
- Every Noise at Once (although I appreciate we don't necessarily want to fall under genres pushed as part of an end of year ad campaign cough cough Spotify Wrapped).
- Radio Garden - imagine this but with musicians and showing lines that indicate links between them. It's slightly infuriating that you can collaborate with your friends across your projects but on streaming, your musical projects aren't shown as being related in any way. It'd be a neat way of visualising that context and encouraging people to discover how different people are interconnected ("interdependent").
- A Number from the Ghost is one person's site but what if there was something showing fedi musicians videos in this kind of way? Or as floating images in a "constellation" (to use @Alex's terminology) that are scattered around and clickable.
Obviously some are more complex or resource-intensive than others, but it seems like there might be some weirder ideas that could help people get found in the same way you might stumble into a record shop and find something bizarre? It's hard to articulate, so I'm going to end the post here and let other people chime in.
Edited to add in Emma Warren's book, which might also have started some of this.
Bringing all this exciting talk of video streaming back to the topic of discoverability, I had a quick skim of @limebar 's thread about LiquidSoap and saw a comment about how their motivation is artist discovery. Which I think was the original goal of MTV too, before enshittification dynamics kicked in.
Maybe something worth discussing here is the UX of seeing a video on VFF, wanting to learn more about either the musical artist or those involved in the video, and clicking through to find them. How could integrations with BandWagon or Mirlo help them find more songs? How could integrations with PeerTube or loops.video help them find crew details for the video?
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Bringing all this exciting talk of video streaming back to the topic of discoverability, I had a quick skim of @limebar 's thread about LiquidSoap and saw a comment about how their motivation is artist discovery. Which I think was the original goal of MTV too, before enshittification dynamics kicked in.
Maybe something worth discussing here is the UX of seeing a video on VFF, wanting to learn more about either the musical artist or those involved in the video, and clicking through to find them. How could integrations with BandWagon or Mirlo help them find more songs? How could integrations with PeerTube or loops.video help them find crew details for the video?
I loved the way the RFF site displayed the artists’ links in the “now playing” box. I wonder could we embed something similar on the Owncast site?
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I loved the way the RFF site displayed the artists’ links in the “now playing” box. I wonder could we embed something similar on the Owncast site?
Couple of thoughts... azuracast has a way to publish "now playing" json. The Indie Beat for example (and RFF before) published that and I was able to pick that up to feed into the Roku channel (to display artist link as QR code) and for the indie beat now playing bot: https://mastodon.social/@tibrnowplayingbot and make a fedi wall of it (https://fediwall.social/?servers=mastodon.social&tags=tibrnowplaying&accounts=&hide=replies,boosts&ban=nsfw&title=Now+Playing+on+The+Indie+Beat+Radio&theme=auto&limit=100&interval=30) ...
Now in the LiquidSoap script I am pulling metadata tags from the MP4 files and putting that info onscreen including the artist WWW link as a QR code. Since this metadata is there in the stream... I am wondering if owncast has a similar function to output json.
If so, that could be parsed up and displayed in the chat or on a page on owncast site or... in a bot... or something. Not sure what owncast supports. Another thought is .. the LiquidSoap script could certainly output something but it would need to be coded... so if owncast already has it so much the better.
I wanted to get a QR onscreen in the stream because that way wherever the stream is consumed (like in a roku app, owncast directory site, etc.) it would be visible. Beyond that tho, there could be options.
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Couple of thoughts... azuracast has a way to publish "now playing" json. The Indie Beat for example (and RFF before) published that and I was able to pick that up to feed into the Roku channel (to display artist link as QR code) and for the indie beat now playing bot: https://mastodon.social/@tibrnowplayingbot and make a fedi wall of it (https://fediwall.social/?servers=mastodon.social&tags=tibrnowplaying&accounts=&hide=replies,boosts&ban=nsfw&title=Now+Playing+on+The+Indie+Beat+Radio&theme=auto&limit=100&interval=30) ...
Now in the LiquidSoap script I am pulling metadata tags from the MP4 files and putting that info onscreen including the artist WWW link as a QR code. Since this metadata is there in the stream... I am wondering if owncast has a similar function to output json.
If so, that could be parsed up and displayed in the chat or on a page on owncast site or... in a bot... or something. Not sure what owncast supports. Another thought is .. the LiquidSoap script could certainly output something but it would need to be coded... so if owncast already has it so much the better.
I wanted to get a QR onscreen in the stream because that way wherever the stream is consumed (like in a roku app, owncast directory site, etc.) it would be visible. Beyond that tho, there could be options.
That’s so cool! QR codes are a great idea, perfect for telly…
Yeah I was working on Le Fractal’s bot, hopefully this year I’ll have time to finish it and pull request etc. There is totally scope to have some sort of “now playing” integration there!
Also, when @Jordan mentioned a Subjam channel in theLiquid Soap thread, got me thinking about possible UIs for a bunch of related 24/7 streaming channels…
Found this in my bookmarks: https://scrobblerad.io/
Also, Network Awesome is gone now, but this article has some screenshots.
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Also, if you've got any thoughts about finding animators on fedi and need any help with that, then shout!
poking around https://sepiasearch.org/ i found a few accounts posting their own animations https://sepiasearch.org/search?search=animator+animation&page=1
btw if you use firefox desktop you can do this to add a search keyword for sepiasearch which searches across 1200+ peertube instances https://mastodon.social/@limebar/114750018094784677
also you can request them to add any missing peertube instances here: https://instances.joinpeertube.org/instances/add
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poking around https://sepiasearch.org/ i found a few accounts posting their own animations https://sepiasearch.org/search?search=animator+animation&page=1
btw if you use firefox desktop you can do this to add a search keyword for sepiasearch which searches across 1200+ peertube instances https://mastodon.social/@limebar/114750018094784677
also you can request them to add any missing peertube instances here: https://instances.joinpeertube.org/instances/add
That's great, thanks! I really like the crochet animations one.
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That’s so cool! QR codes are a great idea, perfect for telly…
Yeah I was working on Le Fractal’s bot, hopefully this year I’ll have time to finish it and pull request etc. There is totally scope to have some sort of “now playing” integration there!
Also, when @Jordan mentioned a Subjam channel in theLiquid Soap thread, got me thinking about possible UIs for a bunch of related 24/7 streaming channels…
Found this in my bookmarks: https://scrobblerad.io/
Also, Network Awesome is gone now, but this article has some screenshots.
Thanks for mentioning ScrobbleRadio @Mel. Just saw some traffic from here in my logs and thought I'd check it out. If there's any stations you think would be good to add, let me know and I'll see what I can do.
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Couple of thoughts... azuracast has a way to publish "now playing" json. The Indie Beat for example (and RFF before) published that and I was able to pick that up to feed into the Roku channel (to display artist link as QR code) and for the indie beat now playing bot: https://mastodon.social/@tibrnowplayingbot and make a fedi wall of it (https://fediwall.social/?servers=mastodon.social&tags=tibrnowplaying&accounts=&hide=replies,boosts&ban=nsfw&title=Now+Playing+on+The+Indie+Beat+Radio&theme=auto&limit=100&interval=30) ...
Now in the LiquidSoap script I am pulling metadata tags from the MP4 files and putting that info onscreen including the artist WWW link as a QR code. Since this metadata is there in the stream... I am wondering if owncast has a similar function to output json.
If so, that could be parsed up and displayed in the chat or on a page on owncast site or... in a bot... or something. Not sure what owncast supports. Another thought is .. the LiquidSoap script could certainly output something but it would need to be coded... so if owncast already has it so much the better.
I wanted to get a QR onscreen in the stream because that way wherever the stream is consumed (like in a roku app, owncast directory site, etc.) it would be visible. Beyond that tho, there could be options.
Answering that question is above my paygrade. But I do know that OwnCast has support for ActivityPub, which is based on sending buckets of JSON around. There's a 'Listen' Activity in the ActivityStreams vocabulary that I'm guessing could be used to represent song info.
So if OC doesn't do exactly what you need for this, the devs may be willing to work with you to add the functionality. Which would then be available to anyone using the software for this kind of thing.
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Thanks for mentioning ScrobbleRadio @Mel. Just saw some traffic from here in my logs and thought I'd check it out. If there's any stations you think would be good to add, let me know and I'll see what I can do.
Great to see you here @jbwharris ! Brilliant site.
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Thanks for mentioning ScrobbleRadio @Mel. Just saw some traffic from here in my logs and thought I'd check it out. If there's any stations you think would be good to add, let me know and I'll see what I can do.
does it have https://theindiebeat.fm stations yet?
https://labr.online/ is another fedi adjacent site
https://anonradio.net/ is another (SDF crowd) but I'm not sure they have the info needed ... could be wrong
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does it have https://theindiebeat.fm stations yet?
https://labr.online/ is another fedi adjacent site
https://anonradio.net/ is another (SDF crowd) but I'm not sure they have the info needed ... could be wrong
@limebar I'd be totally cool with adding those stations, though I worry it's not in line with the ethos of those stations, in that I'm typically not focused on sharing backlinks to individual artists, but focused on highlighting the station itself. It's not that I don't support the artists, it's more that my app is focused on being able to scrobble and also highlight the radio station. Ideally I want to add links to streaming and bandcamp per song, but getting that pulled in from a source has been something I haven't been able to reconcile.
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@limebar I'd be totally cool with adding those stations, though I worry it's not in line with the ethos of those stations, in that I'm typically not focused on sharing backlinks to individual artists, but focused on highlighting the station itself. It's not that I don't support the artists, it's more that my app is focused on being able to scrobble and also highlight the radio station. Ideally I want to add links to streaming and bandcamp per song, but getting that pulled in from a source has been something I haven't been able to reconcile.
good point
fwiw the artist link for the indie beat radio channels is in the now_playing | custom_fields | ext_links json field... but yeah since this is custom I could see how that is not reliable across all stations, so you'd only be able to pull those links if your code has a station-specific location selector (like xpath for json... )
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in the meantime, mizkirsten is hopefully able to get a staging server going this weekend so we can see what's what
Hi, friends!
Thanks to @Mel for bringing this discussion to my attention
I've been a little (ok, a lot) distracted the last couple of months. I'm selling my house (after 16 years) and trying to hopefully move my family to Spain (from the U.S.). It's a LOT, ha. I also run a business for income (reachyourapex.com).
I didn't get a staging server running yet. But this discussion has me psyched up! So I'll carve out some time this week to do so.
If $20/month is an accurate estimate of costs, then I've got no worries. Can totally handle that.
Y'all are so inspiring
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Hi, friends!
Thanks to @Mel for bringing this discussion to my attention
I've been a little (ok, a lot) distracted the last couple of months. I'm selling my house (after 16 years) and trying to hopefully move my family to Spain (from the U.S.). It's a LOT, ha. I also run a business for income (reachyourapex.com).
I didn't get a staging server running yet. But this discussion has me psyched up! So I'll carve out some time this week to do so.
If $20/month is an accurate estimate of costs, then I've got no worries. Can totally handle that.
Y'all are so inspiring
Life stuff will always slow us down... but luckily we are not in any rush! We are all just happily nerding out here hahah
Best of luck with everything Kirsten
