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Funkwhale and the Importance of Decentralized Podcasting

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Funkwhale and the Importance of Decentralized Podcasting
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Podcasts are inherently decentralized. As a medium, they rely on open standards and simple, straightforward tools to allow them to reach as wide an audience as possible. In recent years, however, the desire to monetize the format has started to change the shape of the podcasting landscape. With the acquisition of popular podcasts, platform holders such as Spotify have started a precipitous downward trend into centralization which flies in the face of what podcasts stand for. Luckily, there are many emerging platforms within the world of free software which aim to make the publication and dissemination of podcast content easier, more accessible, and more decentralized to combat this trend towards neo-corporate radio. As the developers of one of these platforms, the Funkwhale project has faced and still faces unique challenges designing the necessary tooling and anti-abuse features to enable users to host their own podacasting platform. This talk explores some of these issues, some of the solutions we have found, and why we believe it is important that users have free and open alternatives to centralized podcast hosts.
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Transkript: Englisch(automatisch erzeugt)
Welcome to this talk on Funk Whale and the importance of decentralized podcasting. It's
just something that I'm doing as just a little outreach thing. So who am I? My name is Kieran Ainsworth. I am a member of the Funk Whale Association, who are the arbiters of
the Funk Whale platform. We have been developing it for a few years now. I joined Funk Whale a couple of years ago as primarily a documentation writer. So I installed Funk Whale after looking for some self-hosting tools, and I approached the project and said, your documentation isn't
particularly great. Would you mind if I helped rewrite it? From there on, I've got more and more involved in different bits of the project. I've been doing a lot of work with front-end
development, documentation, community management, and my role on the board is that I'm a member of the steering committee, which means that I am responsible for helping with development of roadmaps and research and development into different features that we might want to add at some other time. So what is Funk Whale, first and foremost? As you can see there,
very nice little interface design. Funk Whale is essentially a music and audio platform. To put it very, very basically. But more specifically, it is a free and open source
project. It's a self-hosted server software with a front-end web application for playing music. And the thing that kind of sets it apart is that it is federated. So it's built
on the same software as other federated applications, such as Mastodon, Plurimer, PixelFed, PeerTube, Realtobits, and all the others. We all use the same software to interact with one another. It's something called the activity pub protocol. And basically,
it just allows us to be a bit more interactive with other Funk Whale servers and also other software in the Fediverse. And when Funk Whale started up, it was primarily focused around music. The name comes from the fact that the original developer of the software, Agapereo,
wanted a free self-hosted version of Grooveshark, something that she could put music into and then create playlists and radios from. So that's kind of where the pedigree came from. We come from
music background. But nowadays, we're focused on many things. Music collections are still part of it, but we also have audio publication tooling and content sharing as part of our genetic makeup. So a little while ago, we were looking at our roadmap. So around about
September, October 2019, we started to look seriously at where did we want to take the project. At the time, we had just moved away from having Agate as essentially the benevolent dictator for life. And we're looking at moving towards a more democratic system of governance,
where we would ask the users to provide us with insights and sort of guidance on what they would like to see in the platform. And when we started approaching them with options,
one of the things we found was that podcasting was a very, very widely requested feature, which was something I don't necessarily think we were expecting, but it was definitely something that people were very interested in. At the time, the Fediverse in general lacked a proper sort of platform for things like
podcasting. We had music, we had... So I'm just going to adjust my volume, somebody's saying it's a little bit low. We had music, we had video, we had
things like microblogging, and we had image sharing, but we didn't have podcasting. So that was something that people seem to be quite interested in. So when people came to us and sort of suggested that, that fitted in quite nicely with another
thing that we were looking to do in general, which was content publication. So we sort of new structure, not just around podcasts, but also around music publication. So that we were
moving away from just hosting your CD collection and maybe some bits and pieces that you had done yourself to actually publishing content and putting it through to the Fediverse directly. So that was kind of the background as to why we got into podcasting in general.
And very quickly, we saw that there were going to be a lot of challenges with this particular bit of work. The biggest one really was we as a collective didn't really know all that much around podcasting. None of us were podcasters. We listened to podcasts sometimes, but not very
often. I myself only listened to a few. So we very quickly realized that we were going to need to approach people who did this sort of thing all the time. We were going to need to ask people
who knew about this stuff, had sort of experience working with lots of different bits and pieces in the current climate in order to build something that fit with their expectations and also addressed some of their frustrations, anything that frustrated them. The other problem was, as I mentioned before, we are a music publication platform, or we were
a music sort of hosting platform. So this podcasting and publication stuff was not in our DNA. It required quite a lot of sort of architecting on the back end to really get something that
would work for publication. We needed to kind of rethink a lot of things because we'd been making assumptions about audio in general based on music collections, which of course is a very different thing to podcasting. The other thing we didn't really know or
understand was what should it look like from beginning to end for a podcaster to publish something. We kind of understood it for musicians. It was a bit simpler, you'd have albums and you would have tracks that go in those albums, but we didn't really know all that much
about podcasting. So in order to get that information, we decided to form a podcasting task force, as it were, and this task force basically consisted of members of the Funkwell Association and a group of people from the podcasting subreddit, from the Fediverse,
people who made podcasts all the time. And we basically brought them all into a chat room and we said, okay, so if we're going to design this, what do we absolutely need to do? What do
we need to hit? What do you want to see? And what would kind of encourage you to come over to using our software to publish your podcast, if that's something you would like to do? And it was something, the other thing we needed to work out was,
you know, we didn't really have an insight as people who didn't publish into what the competition was doing. So, I say the competition, what other people who made this stuff were doing. So we very much needed to get that information from a first-hand experience and sort of pull that in to make sure that we were doing it correctly.
And what we found was, basically, podcasts are hard. They're quite complex things where especially the, particularly the complexity exists on the back end, it exists within the software,
but the user should be really getting a very simple front end to do things with. So, we found that basically, whereas with music, FunkWale really didn't handle a lot of the more complex stuff like tagging, we let music brains handle that. If we were going to be publishing, we needed to start actually taking on board that complexity and sort of facilitating
it in our publication layer. And podcasts, of course, offered a slightly different way of doing things because there was less metadata to be included and it was less sort of catalogued than something like music. The other thing that was very, very strongly put forward by the
people who we talked to was that there exists in the podcasting world standards. We have certain ways of doing things and that has to be retained no matter which tool we use. So, for example, we need to use RSS. We absolutely have to include an RSS feed.
Images need to be correctly sized. The RSS feed must be consumable by tools such as iTunes and Apple Podcasts, which means we have to include certain fields that only exist for
iTunes and Apple Podcasts. The other thing we kind of came to realize was that people were going to be using us as a podcast publication tool, but we also needed to act as the podcatcher. Because our current makeup at the time was to be a music hosting tool,
but also an application which played music, we needed to give that same experience for podcasts. It needed to be that people could publish content, but also take the content they already liked and put it into FunkWale. And then the last sort of big thing that came
from this was the sudden realization that if you're going to have two or more servers talking to each other a lot more, you're going to need to really strengthen the moderation tools that you have in place. Especially when we're talking about user-generated content,
the scope for abuse on that is quite significant. So we needed to give users tools to be able to report things. We needed to give people tools to be able to block certain stuff. We needed to give administrators the ability to use things like enable lists so that they could prevent federation with certain other platforms. And we needed to give them the ability to ban
users, take down channels, that sort of thing. So this was a whole lot of architectural design for podcasts, which it was really the podcasts that drove us to it. And what we came out with was basically a hybrid of a traditional sort of podcast overview
and a Fediverse channel. So in our world, we have podcasting channels and music channels. And from what you can see in that sort of screenshot, it gives some sort of basic
information. You get your artwork, you get your episodes. We can split things up into series, which was a big request that people had, was the ability to create different series within the same channel. We have the ability to subscribe, which I'll go on to in a second.
And obviously, if you're the channel owner, upload new content to make sure everything is working as expected. The important bit here that we have is the information about what's in that channel. In this channel, this is mine. Ignore it. It's terrible. But there's one episode and it's been
listened to 13 times. And this was important information that we sort of worked out was needed in order for people to get a grip on how are people interacting with my content. But taking that on board, we went ahead with the subscription capabilities. And as you can see in the screenshot, we have kind of three options in every case. The first is if you already have
a FunkWale account, you can subscribe using your FunkWale account to that channel. And it will be one of those things that appears in your feed. When a new episode is uploaded, you'll get notified that there's a new episode in the front end. The other thing you can do is subscribe via RSS. So going back to what we were saying earlier, we put a lot of
effort into making sure that our RSS feed was compatible as much as possible and that anybody could go onto a sort of an open FunkWale channel and subscribe without having to sign up to FunkWale. Because one of the things we very quickly realized was
we don't want people to feel like they have to sign up. We want people to be able to enjoy the content no matter what. And that really should be up to them where they listen to us, whether they listen to us on FunkWale or some other podcatcher. And the last one is subscription
via the Fediverse. So that enables users to follow a channel in much the same way that they would follow a Mastodon account or a Plurima account or something similar. So we're trying to hit all sort of boxes there of how you can keep up with somebody's content.
The other thing that I've been doing some work on recently is more front end stuff, but it's just making sure that we sort of point people towards adding new content where possible, either by themselves, creating new channels or subscribing to things via RSS
or via the Fediverse. So really pushing people towards that more creation element. We want people to create. So that's with the basics in place. This was
the development work we did over the past year or so. It's been a wild ride. There's been a lot of content that's gone in, a lot of changes made. There's still some changes to come. The most current release that we've done has been a lot of new content that's gone in, doesn't have some of the newer tools that are around podcasting, such as dedicated podcast
searching and sort of wider accessibility of subscription tools. But we're not finished. There are still things, there are still items on the roadmap that we would like to complete and still items that are not currently on the roadmap, which may need to be added in future
to really help us to get involved with podcasting more. Because what we found is this is a market that we very much have enjoyed working in. And it's one that actually has
proven quite popular with people. People see Funkwell as a podcasting platform now. Even if it was originally supposed to be music, this is how it's kind of evolved. So what do we have to consider next to take Funkwell to the next level of
being a proper alternative to what's currently out there? The first thing that strikes me as necessary is Funkwell currently allows you to import RSS feeds from external podcasts.
It currently allows you to follow podcasts on the Fediverse, on Funkwell, and it currently allows you to publish your own. But what we don't have at the moment is any way of finding external podcasts. You still have to leave Funkwell to go and find the RSS feed that you're
looking for. You still have to go and see where things are, go and find them on something like iTunes or Feed or Spotify, and grab the RSS feed and bring it back to Funkwell. Which of course, from a user experience point of view, is not great. It's basically meaning that
Funkwell is not yet the one-stop shop for podcasts that we might want it to be. So one of the things that I would quite like to see come in in future is podcast discovery for an external storefront. I have built myself a proof of concept of how we might do this
using the iTunes API, but there are different things out there, such as feed and others, that we might want to consider looking at. The other thing is an improved publication workflow. At the moment, the publication workflow works. Things go in, you get a podcast out of it,
it generates an RSS feed for you. But we have had people raise issues with it, specifically around how do I edit metadata during the upload process.
The problem, I think, is because of the way we designed the front end, it was more in line with how we'd worked with music previously, which is to say, upload many files which have been previously tagged and just let them be. Whereas, of course, if you're doing an upload of podcasts, you want to basically upload an episode, title it, tag it, put some artwork with it,
give it a license, do all of that stuff, and then move on to the next one. Or if you know you're going to be uploading multiple episodes of a series, you might want to have a tool say that you can put them all in a series and say, number them automatically. At the moment, we don't have that. If you upload multiple things, a pencil icon appears next to
each one and you can click through them and edit them all, but it's not very obvious how you do that. That's been raised as something that needs to be addressed. We've had some designs submitted for how we might go about doing that, which looks to be a lot better. The other one is something I'm going to come onto in the second part of this, and that is
the introduction of links to donation services. At the moment, hosting your podcast on FunkWale is great, but it's the same as hosting it anywhere else. What we want to be pushing people towards or encouraging is this idea of supporting people who create.
The best way to do that in our eyes is to promote the idea of donation services and promote the idea of helping to support the podcast that you like. We don't want to be a payment handler, obviously, but we do want to help make it
a lot more visible when there is a service that you can actually put money towards. The last one has been on the roadmap since channels were introduced. It's very complex. As somebody who does not work on the backend, I don't really have the technological knowledge to go into it,
but there is this idea of channel claiming, where if somebody uploads some music to a channel and it's not their music, the person whose music it is should be able to claim that channel and take control of it. As you can imagine, that's a very complex thing to do, particularly over federation because you have all of the different implications of the wider
Fediverse to take into account there. It's our biggest boon. It's also our biggest challenge day-to-day is working with that federation. But that moves me on to my next point, which is all about decentralized podcasting.
This may seem like a strange concept to people who do podcasting because podcasts are decentralized by design, really. I didn't know a lot about podcasts going into this. As I say,
it was a very much a learning experience, but the more reading I did into podcasts as part of the research that we did for this, the more fascinated I became by how they work and how they're set up. The thing that struck me was podcasts occupy this unique space of being
very, very disruptive, low-tech, certainly audio podcasts, but video podcasts as well. Disruptive, low-tech, standards compliant ways of communicating a lot of information.
So podcasts can be hosted anywhere. As long as they generate a valid feed, anybody can capture them into a podcatcher and play the files linked using a relevant piece of software. That means that the potential listener base is enormous, much more so than anything based on
a single platform, a centralized platform. This was one of the reasons that when we were designing the podcast publications tools, we were so emphatic about being a part of that existing
infrastructure, making sure that we didn't try to lock people into our way of thinking, but instead follow what podcasting was already doing because it already seemed pretty great. We had things like RSS feeds. We had good encodings being used like MP3,
which could be so widely used. It's ubiquitous at this point. That's a really important part of it. The reason that this came to my attention was during some of the conversations we were having with podcasters, and specifically when we were
looking at FunkWale as a podcatcher, so something that consumes RSS feeds and plays them back, somebody had said something about a specific podcast. I think it was called The Last Podcast on the Left. They said basically, it's a shame. I won't be able to play this
through FunkWale because they are going Spotify exclusive, and so they're not producing an RSS feed anymore. This worries me slightly. It's a concerning trend away from what podcasts
stand for, from my understanding of what podcasts stand for, because when you go exclusive to something like Spotify, you have the introduction of DRM and you're creating a garden around content. Certainly for content that used to be free and open,
so it used to follow the same rules as everything else, for it to suddenly go into a platform specific publication is a big break. There are a couple of reasons for this, but the primary one is, let's say that with podcasting, the only limitation for a user is that
they have a machine that has software that is capable of listening to that podcast. It's capable of reading the feed and playing back the audio. That's your limitation. If you put it onto something like Spotify, you actually divide this into four,
four different experiences. The first two are users who live in a country that have access to Spotify, and those people will have two experiences. One, they will either listen to an ad-supported version of the show, and the second one is that they pay for a subscription
to the actual podcast, sorry, to the actual platform. Then you have people who live in other countries, which don't have Spotify served up to them, and those people
have more experiences. One is that they have to pay for a VPN and basically access Spotify externally using the ads, and then again, access externally using a subscription.
Then there's that last fifth one, which is they don't have the money for any of this, so they can't listen. We fractured the user base by centralizing the content into a certain place. The problem with something like Spotify is at that point, when you've done that and
you've taken that decentralized nature away, what you have left is not a podcast. It's essentially corporate radio. Like I say, for something that started off as a podcast, there's something that started off freely available, having it move in that way is somewhat concerning, but at the same time, we have to look at why does that happen.
And generally, the answer is podcasting is expensive. Everything that takes up people's time is expensive, and podcasting from the little I have done of it is very expensive. You've got to take the time to script and record and edit
and work with all of that audio and video. You've got to find a place to publish it. You've got to do all of the promotion around it. If you are looking to make money off of it, you have to search around for sponsorships and ad deals and things like that.
So when a company like Spotify comes along and says, we'll take all of that complexity off of your hands, we'll give you a good portion of money to pay your staff and to make sure you make a living, it's very, very tempting. And you can kind of understand why it happens.
And one of the things that we kind of found was that the free software community in general is not always the best equipped to deal with that kind of thing. We can't make a counter offer to that. Our weapon here and what we can do about this is, as I've said before,
try as much as possible to make it easy for people to make the decision to continue listening outside of those platforms, make it easy for them to continue to support their favorite podcast directly, which means lowering the barrier to entry for payments,
lowering the barrier of entry for sharing, for supporting, for getting things out there. But it's an inherently sort of difficult thing to come up against and something that we haven't found the answer for yet. It's something we've done discussions about,
how we might help podcasters support themselves, how we might help people support podcasters and musicians as well. This stretches to all areas. But the answer is a difficult one. It's not one that sort of, you know, comes very easily.
Now I've purposefully sort of left this. I think I've got exactly half an hour. That's good. I purposely didn't want this to go on for too long. That's kind of the journey that we've had. The first thing is podcasting is fun. From a sort of user perspective,
podcasts are wonderful to listen to. Having a good place to put podcasts is great for, you know, people who make them. From a software perspective, they're a bit of a nightmare, especially when they aren't what your software was originally sort of set up to do. There's a
lot of work goes into it. I think it's underestimated in general. But, you know, it's worth putting the effort in to get something like that. Free software worlds, the open source software worlds, we still face some significant challenges
with assisting people with things like anything to do with finances is something where we struggle. It's because we don't have that monolithic approach. It's
to focus more on improving the experience of working within a sort of direct donation world and a direct sort of way of working. And yeah, this whole sort of trend of existing podcasts being picked up by companies and, you know, things that used to be so free and easily
accessible becoming walled off inside. I only know of Spotify doing it, but I can imagine the same thing happening with Apple Music and Deezer and a lot of others, is kind of a concerning move, which is diluting what was really quite a fantastic sort of idea. And it's a
shame that it happens to some of the ones that people find, you know, people connect with the most strongly. I think two of the most popular podcasts that have been picked up are things like Joe Rogan and the last podcast on the left, which is a shame because high profile things
being taken over has meaning and, you know, it will normalize it in my eyes at least. But with the use of free software tools, with the use of, you know, these open standards, real podcasting will never go away. It will always, you know, bubble up underneath. We will
always see people continuing, you know, to put things out. So, yeah, it's not all hopeless. This wasn't what that talk was about. It was more than just about this is something I think is very important and something that, you know, as a project we're really striving to support. So I think that takes me quite nicely 35 minutes, which is exactly what I was aiming for.
If anybody has any questions, I think that the number has been put into the chat. It's
plus four nine five three six one eight nine zero two eight six eight zero zero one. And if you're using event phone, it's just eight zero zero one. I'll just have a look and see if anyone asked any questions in here.
Let's have a look. Yeah. How do I find, how can I find a fun quote instance for a podcast I'm planning that suits me, my needs and my content the best? Yeah. So the link there is a good idea. The get started guide. We actually have a sort of a pod picker, we call it,
which is just something that sort of takes you through the summary of different pods, which is what we how we refer to servers. People can write a summary of what sort of content they want on there. The two biggest servers are open to audio. And
I think Tanuki tunes, which is my server is quite sort of big and open. There are lots of servers out there. So, you know, if you find one where you think it would fit in here, then great. You know, usually just find one that has open registrations and sign up.
Or if you're feeling brave, install it for yourself. It's a fairly easy install. There are some hosts that will host it for you. They're listed on the funkwell.audio website. So if you just wanted somebody to set it up for you so that you could host a podcast, then yes, you could sort of put it in there. Do you know the podcast index.org project?
I don't personally. I will look it up after this. That looks interesting. If there's a solution that is to be found that could work for podcasters, could it also be applicable to indie musicians? Or are the two fields way too different in order to accommodate both?
I'll just finish this one. I think I've got a telephone person coming in. So if there's, I mean, yes and no. If we're talking about supporting
financially, then yes, in theory, we already have some of those. I mean, there were already donation platforms which kind of work for a multitude of things. So really, I think we should be trying to sort of lean into things like Liberape, Kofi, maybe Patreon rather than sort of trying to solve that problem within the publication
software. Because those features already exist and because that's already quite well established, having better interoperability between those tools is probably the best way forward. You just want to take the complexity away from the person listening. It'd be nice if
they had something like, for example, you're listening to a song, you really like it. So maybe you preload a certain amount of credits to your account and every time you sort of play a song you really like, you can throw some credits their way. I don't know the complexity of the actual implementation is beyond me a little bit. As I say, I'm just a front-end
guy. But I don't think there's that big a difference between them from that sort of perspective. Open.audio is the main sort of flagship server and my server is called
tanukichunes.com. I'll put that link in. But there are lots of servers, as I say. If you go to the actual funqual.audio website, they're there. So why should I as a broadcaster decide against a centralized platform with lots of users for a decentralized one with
only a few users? How can we dramatically increase the visibility of my project and my product on Funkwell? It's a good question. The thing is with a centralized platform is you may be on a platform with a lot of users, but that doesn't mean that
you're actually going to be seen by a lot of users. There is a lot of stuff on Spotify which never gets played. That's just the fact of it. There's so much content on there that you're just a grain of sand. Obviously, if you've got an established
fan base and you've got a lot of people already listening to you, then that doesn't affect you. But in that case, it also wouldn't affect you if you were decentralized. Those same people still be listening, and in fact, you would be able to reach more people. Podcasts allow for
word of mouth in a way that something centralized doesn't. It can be passed around a lot more virally. As for Funkwell, Funkwell's greatest strength is the Fediverse with this. The fact that the audio can be shared between people's servers and streamed directly from server
to server, the fact that it can be followed on a multitude of different platforms is where the visibility would come from. It's that viral sharing. But the fact that it also works outside of Funkwell, it also works just using a traditional podcatcher, also plays into its favor. That's where Spotify falls apart.
Yes, Spotify has a lot of users, but you do cut off an entire core audience, which is the concern. There's no simple answer to this, is the way it goes. I feel like the point made earlier in the chat, which was that if you centralize it and you lock
it behind a walled garden, it's no longer really a podcast. That stands. It's not a podcast technically anymore. It's something different. That's not necessarily a bad thing, but it is true. It's no longer what it was originally supposed to be.
It is best, I think, to try and make use of tools that fit into the existing podcast infrastructure. That looks like all of the questions. I don't think anybody's calling in,
which is fine. With that being the case, if there's no more questions, thank you very much for listening to me ramble about podcasts for 40 minutes. Obviously, if you'd like to check the project out, it's just at funkwell.audio,
but also go out and support your favorite podcasters, whatever platform they're on. God knows they'd appreciate it, especially in these times. Thank you very much. Um, I think that's where I'm going to call it quits.
I think we have a phone call. Okay. Someone on the phone.
Oh, yeah. Hello. Hi. Hello. Oh, wait, excuse me for that one. I just want whether you're familiar with the website called fortgottify.com. You brought up earlier that there's tons of audio that has never been heard of, and that's basically a site. So it's like a song or a piece of material
on Spotify that has never been heard of before. Hmm. What was the name of the site again? Sorry. Uh, fortgottify.com. Oh no, I've not heard of that. That's quite interesting. So it just plays stuff that doesn't get played much on Spotify. Yeah, you just click on a button and it literally shows you
like a random song or a random piece of audio that has been like distributed on Spotify, but never heard before. I even heard some tracks from 2009. I'm not sure. That's great. I really, I really like that idea. Yeah, that is a genuine concern. I,
when I was, um, I used to use Google plus a lot because I'm that kind of person and I was part of, um, sort of publishing musicians, uh, club. And I had people on there who published on Spotify and they never got listened to, you know, it does take quite a lot for you to, to actually get picked up by Spotify's algorithms and to be sort of prioritized. So
it's not the best solution for podcasts. There's, I think there's a reason that only already popular podcasts are getting picked up for Spotify circulation, but you know, that, that sort of project sounds really interesting because it'd be fascinating to see what gets forgotten down the sort of cracks of the seat, so to speak. It's also very interesting to play the game of the algorithms and stuff. I think that's
one of the main reasons why I'm making music myself and certainly online personally. So that's why I'm excited. Yeah. Yeah, it is. It is. Anyways, thanks a lot. I'm not, I'm not a little with the side of the
strike. I found it very relevant and decided to share that. Thanks. Yeah. No, thank you very much. That's really interesting. Thank you. Bye. Okay. I thought we don't have any more calls. Going once, going twice.
Okay. Okay. Thank you again for, for coming to watch and I hope you have a great rest of your conference. It looks like it's going to be a lot of fun.