- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
- [email protected]
- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
- [email protected]
The Funkwhale music platform is alive and in active development, and they’re working on a feature to filter far-right artists off the network. Some Fediverse self-hosters are divided on letting a third party decide what should be allowed in their library.
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The intent sounds fine, but as @[email protected] points out, it offloads the actual responsibility of filtering on MusicBrainz and WikiData.
It’s not hard to imagine MusicBrainz being flooded by users trying to circumvent bans by editing tags. Or incorrectly tagging bands they don’t like or agree with to get them banned.
Funkwhale probably isn’t big enough in itself to make a huge splash, but this proposed ban does add another target to the extreme right’s hit list. It seems a little iffy to me to make an open project like MusicBrainz that target?
[from the original announcement]
If you are a liberal or if you want to have fun, have a look at “Aamer Rahman: Is it really ok to punch nazis?” :)
haha, nice. And this makes the Funkwhale announcement author’s position clear: combating fascism is more important than defending lofty ideals, like their liberties. They treat Funkwhale as a community, not merely a tool.
Some of the points Sean brings up may be reasonable critiques, I don’t know enough about music tagging to know how easy or hard MusicBrainz is to use, and there is also the question about what if a formerly RW artist reforms (many, many have deradicalized or left the movement, fun fact: this is an important source of antifascist intel). I know about a dozen artists who, as teenagers, were in edgy right-wing circles and echoed that in their works, and are now very far away from that and regretful, but if they hadn’t taken up new aliases, they’d probably be lumped in with their unwelcome past works. So I do see merit in the complaint about that project lead failing to implement a way to handle special cases.
With all that said, I’m definitely in support of this move. I just hope they implement and improve it well - that will make or break it.
This reminds me of Mastodon (like Sean mentioned in the article) and Lemmy. I’m not experienced with Mastodon, but I am aware of how they reacted to Gab (formerly a Mastodon instance, before getting bullied by almost everyone), and how most of Lemmy divorced Wolfballs (run by a US-Libertarian, think 🧊🍑 + antivax, but soon populated by white supremacists and neo-nazis; eventually shut down, among other reasons, when the admin realized the Nazis on their instance weren’t just pretending for a laugh and that many were commercial bots. Probably didn’t help that their admin had a non-white partner and jewish friends) and exploding-heads.
These are examples when a FOSS tool takes a community stance, rather than an idealistic liberalist freedom-above-all stance.
Maybe Im off base here but I’d say like 10% of music leans right of center?
This idea sounds dumb. Just don’t listen to kid rock or ted Nugent, or most country, and you’re basically all set.
Then there’s like 3 bands per genre that are dog whistlers or overtly shitty humans.
Done?
I fail to see how it’s even possible for an open source project to dictate what content is acceptable. Also, the entire idea is contrary to rms’ FOSS goals (for any purpose), other than being completely ineffective. I can understand the need for agency and contribution to whatever resistance can be mustered, but this is larping.
Also, the entire idea is contrary to rms’ FOSS goals
Perhaps, and I don’t see how that’s a problem. Saint IGNUcius isn’t the divine dictator of FOSS. The original Funkwhale announcement’s author makes it clear at the end that they don’t hold freedom-as-an-end-goal (liberalism) as their ideology.
LARP
Not LA nor RP, my friend.
As you hinted, a determined admin can disable the blocklist, it probably isn’t too technical to patch, but this makes a clear statement, which if you’ve seen any right-leaning tech forums, has a real impact on them (see their discussions on Firefox and Rust, or better yet, don’t).
It’s not even liberalism, it’s pragmatism. It’s simultaneously giving software as a commons and trying to restrict it, an extension of culture wars that’s so ineffective it gives the other side an easy win once they set up chudwhale as a script that forks the latest codebase but with no blocklist and a pepe mascot. Just time unspooling. I might be depressed.
I wouldn’t get too depressed about it, it would just be another niche bit of alt-tech if it were anything other than completely neutral. I can’t think of a case when an anti-left fork of a software was memorable as a self-hostable tool. The closest I can think of is Gab, which hardly qualifies, nor does it hold a torch to Mastodon.
They have benefitted from and encouraged ‘but if you do that you’re no diffrent from-’ spinelessness.
Their entire gameplan has been to whine and sob and play victim while demanding ‘we’ march to where they are, while they take two more steps back and whine and sob more at how we’re extremists.
So. Fuck 'em.
Their ‘compromise’ is ‘we give them everything, and get nothing in return.’
Show them that they are not welcome or wanted.
what the fuck are you even talking out?
What.
Are you taking about funkwhale or the right wingers?
Rightwingers.
Somewhat off topic but I was totally convinced that Funkwhale had died so I ditched my pod and moved to Navidrome, I wasn’t using federation so I wasn’t really the intended audience. I’m glad they are still going though. But personally I’ve had a better experience with Navidrome with Feishin as a player.
Ever heard the saying, „Your freedom ends where someone else’s begins“?
Exactly. Don’t give them a platform
Sounds like a fantastic plan.
The handwringing about if we’re being nice enough to the alt right is directly contributing to why we have so much mess we’re now having to deal with. The approach seems sane to find music that’s very specifically nazi rock, so they’re being extremely limited in response, imo.
Screw em, kick them out of anywhere you find them, and then nail the door they used to get in shut.
Root them out of all their little hidey hidey holes
Why is the right wing here,the fediverse is a socialist communist ass concept, so against capatilism born out as an indrect response to how republicans have led america
While that is funny and certainly deserved. Normally I would say that its not their place to decide that but fuck right wingers they deserve to be purged out of every single space they have.
I’m a bit torn on the idea, myself. On one hand, fuck fascists, don’t let ‘em have an inch. But on the other hand, this does kinda take away a users’ freedoms with the software.
Honestly, I think it’s fine if it’s a plugin or something that you can install at your own discretion or something. Or if it’s baked-in, it should be an opt-in setting. I’m of the opinion that the actual software, itself, should be apolitical. It’s something I can respect the Lemmy devs for, after all; even though I disagree with their politics, the actual Lemmy code is politically agnostic, and I think that’s for the best.
I’m sure people are still free to take the code and make the necessary adjustments if they really need to host a Nazi-friendly instance.
Which is an outcome I actually worry about, if they implemented this feature in Funkwhale. A fascist fork of the app existing and having a userbase gives it legitimacy. It immediately sells itself to those people: “Come to our free speech music platform” will bring in a lot of new users, very easily.
I mean, that’s the freedom you’ve been so concerned about only two posts ago. it’s a similar situation with Gab and Truth.social. they both use Mastodon’s code, but everyone else distances themselves from them.
Generally speaking, I agree. It’s just interesting to see a platform force a mechanism into itself that admins can’t turn off. The only thing that really bugs me about that is that admins are kind of supposed to have the final say on what their server does, and some of the infrastructure for this idea seems a bit shaky at best.
Its open source, the admins can turn it off by reverting the patch. The person who coded it has the final say on what their software does in an open source world if you dont like it you are welcome to fork it. The fork should still be able to connect to the network and interact as it did before.
What exactly is funkwhale? It looks like a federated music platform of some sort?
It’s basically an open source, federated clone of GrooveShark, which was kind of like Plex but just for music.
Huh. Well that seems pretty cool
Just ban country music and you’ve covered like 80% of it.
As a fan of the odd bit of black metal, I would appreciate the 20% being dealt with
At least most nsbm sucks and/or have names like “ss wehrwulf division 1488” so it’s usually really easy to avoid.
Still, be great to have another tool to filter bands.
Edit: looks like it’s going to be based on musicbrainz metadata, checked Burzum because Vikernes is a Nazi and Peste Noir, neither of which have an nsbm tag, nor do Grand Belial’s Key or an actual band called Wehrwolf, probably because of how niche black metal is.
I’ve personally used this list as a place to start, not perfect but it’s something. Metallum lyrical content helps as well.
“Wehrwolf” would make for an incredible semi-comedy horror movie. It howls at the moon because it’s the one white thing in a black night sky. It definitely dies when someone breaks a WWII tank out of storage and shoots it with a silver tank shell
But there is a load of really dodge black metal that is much more cryptic, not being blatant but made by Nazis like Deathspell Omega, Mgla, Drudkh and Winterfyllth. I’ve been in the scene a long time and been fooled by some of these.
Oh for sure, there’s exceptions to the rule, I’ve been fooled too. Peste Noir, Drudkh, Deathspell Omega, Burzum all end up on essentials lists, definitely contributes.
If only funkwhale wasn’t such a royal pain in the ass.
And had a way to support artists
How would you do it directly in the software?
Yeah, the UX is historically not great. I’m also pretty sure that the federated social layer is still kind of non-existent at this point. It used to be that you could upload your own music and share it, but you’d never see replies from anybody.
It’s like someone took a Grooveshark clone, shoehorned federation into it, and then kind of made some features act like SoundCloud, if you squint. But, they didn’t really finish the transition.
Setup is also huge pain and it has compatibility issues with clients that use the subsonic API. Every step of the way something I needed from it had issues. I gave up running one funkwhale instance for multiple users and instead spun up 4 Navidrome instances. Not only was it easier and more stable it also uses less resources than one funkwhale setup.
As much as I love the idea of funkwhale it’s just so far away from usable.
@[email protected] OMG roastmaster Sean, where can I subscribe to hear more of this.
