Notices by Ben Pate 🤘🏻 (benpate@mastodon.social)

You guys are fantastic. Thank you!

While you're here, check out the release notes, including a progress report on online album sales, 0% revenue sharing, and my personal Decentralization Manifesto

https://bandwagon.fm/2025-05-May-Update

Awesome #Bandwagon news: I've just pushed a number of cool updates to bandwagon.fm - including newly revamped profile pages that are smarter, more streamlined, and easier to manage.

The new profiles highlight your albums, concerts, and news posts separately, showing each in its own customized layout.

If you're already a Wagoneer, then sign in to see the results of the spring cleaning. And if you're a musician and you're not on Bandwagon yet, well…. you know what to do :)

@MastodonEngineering

Need like this is really great for the #Fediverse. It means there’s real money behind making this ecosystem better.

Now, someone out there go get yourself #fedihired and keep pushing this thing forward.

That was not my experience with Mastodon.

Perhaps there was some other issue I didn’t account for? But notes I delivered to Mastodon (without the sensitive flag) were getting obscured behind a CW.

Gosh, I wish this was all written down somewhere…

@julian @silverpill

Hey @wjmaggos

I just got an invite to Netlabel Week from Douglas Whitfield (cc-ing you). Very cool. Thank you!

I didn't realize you were involved in https://netlabelday.org - it looks like the perfect kind of project for 2025 :)

So… would you like to talk about publishing CC music from Bandwagon onto your streaming station?

Check this out..

@mirlo is killing it right now, and working hard to do the important (but un-shiny) work of making a site for #Musicians that anyone can host **inexpensively**

This is the endgame for the #Fediverse - thousands of indie sites, not mega instances - but it’ll take this kind of work to pull it off.

Good job, guys. I’m super jealous of you rn.

https://mirlo.space/post/222

@dansup okay, cool. I’ll put it in my calendar for 5:00pm on Tuesday.

I can meet on Jitsi, Discord, FaceTime, or Zoom (but I don’t have Zoom premium). What works best for you?

@dansup perfect! Afternoon is best for me, but I can be flexible. I can probably meet any time before 6:00.

Do you want to try 5pm on Tuesday?

@dansup Yes. I’d live to chat. Tuesday and Thursday are the most open for me this week.

I’m in Denver, US Mountain Time. What time zone are you in?

Settling in to finish the last 100 pages of reading due before tomorrow. Luckily I've got this to keep me company:

Crystallization [ft. Lydia Wu] - EP https://bandwagon.fm/678816e01b221f9c67784336

I gotta say, my favorite part of my job right now is discovering so much new music on #Bandwagon.

While troubleshooting a technical issue (it's totally fixed, everything is fine, nothing to see here…) I had to replay "time" by @sknob about a thousand times.

https://bandwagon.fm/675d63a3bd1c354e6b03be77

Days later, this awesome ear-worm is still stuck in my head:

"Time ain't money
Money buys you time
The rich outsource the drudgery
And idle on by.”

Hey #Musicians, if you're on #Bandwagon, the time has come.

I'm prepping the #SearchEngine and giving you a preview of how it'll work. Just jump over to bandwagon.fm and hit "Discover" to check it out.

I'm really pleased with this first step, but it will still be a just dumb, empty shell until we can get all your music is tagged, and optimize the tags/categories together.

You can read my full post at https://bandwagon.fm/2025-01-22-Search-Engine for all the details.

I can't wait to hear what you think.

Huge thanks to @dansup for creating https://respectfulplatforms.org. This is the kind of declaration everyone should get behind.

Honestly, it's still a bit of a "to do" list for #Emissary and #Bandwagon. Moderation tools, in particular, are still lacking right now. But I'm going to work hard to complete these, because I believe every person - all 8 billion of us - deserves to use an Internet that values people over profits, privacy over censorship, and humanity over technology.
https://mastodon.social/@dansup/113851929699796097

I don’t have a strong opinion here, and will lean on your recommendations. What’s the reason to choose one over another?

I only added OGG recently, swapping out AAC because the proprietary codec wasn’t supported on some versions of Linux.

And, I’m only using the default encoding the FFMpeg used, so I’ll have to double check the details to be certain.

@freebliss

@dansup

This is super interesting! I was just having an offline discussion about something very similar.

Yes. This feature set needs to be a standalone service with an #OpenAPI that anyone can use.

I would love to plug into this from #Emissary as well. How do I contribute, or connect to this project?

I put the big news first, but I'll say it again so it doesn't get buried:

When you publish #Music on Bandwagon.fm (or other #Bandwagon servers that launch later this year) you can just check a box to add it to the streaming rotation on https://TheIndieBeat.fm

Open APIs FTW

As I write this, I'm listening to a digital mix-tape of music -- some I recognize, and some I don't -- all from fellow Wagoneers.

Awesome 🤘

* Streaming Stations: launching an ethical, opt-in API with TheIndieBeat.fm streaming radio

* Salute to Radio Free Fedi: the original Fediverse stream is going dark

* Free/Premium: my commitment to make Bandwagon.fm free forever.

* Search/Discovery: progress on a unique music-only search engine for the Fediverse

* Licensing: assign CC/Copyright licenses to your work

* Open Source update: more Bandwagon coming servers in 2025.

Hey #Musicians, between Christmas and New Years, I've been pretty quiet about #Bandwagon.

But I have a bunch of huge news that I'm super excited to finally share with you.

Here's the full news release. I'll put highlights in a reply

https://bandwagon.fm/2025-01-01-January-Update

So, 2025 is going to be a huge leap forward for the #Fediverse in general, and #Bandwagon specifically. I've finally made enough progress on the search engine that it's finally worthy of sharing a screenshot.

There's TONS more to do, but I'm so excited about getting this into your hands in January that I couldn't wait to share this now.

@wjmaggos @evan

yeah, local libraries would probably be better. Esp. with centralization concerns - too much power for a national postal service might be bad.

I *do* think governments have missed an opportunity to authenticate identity online. What if the post office (or library) had a way for me to establish my identity, like a digital ID card that I could use online when I need to prove who I am?

Right now, that role is taken up by credit card companies and email providers.