Playlists specification

Sporiff

Hi everyone,

There's been quite a bit of discussion around the overlap between Collections and Playlists since the original collections specification was finalized. A lot of the contention seems to come down to the issue of sharing and controlling access to content, and the effect that this has on how a user experiences a playlist in Funkwhale.

For example, if playlists are meant only for public and private content where all users accessing the playlists can reasonably expect to be able to access all tracks, then we need to decide how we reflect this in the interface. Alternatively, if the expectation is that users should be able to share playlists regardless of the visibility of the content within, we need to think about how we want to reflect this to users to avoid confusion.

Some open questions here are:

If playlists are considered public only:
- If the pod that hosts the content of a playlist goes offline, what impact should this have?
- If the user attempts to add content that is not in a public collection, how should we clearly communicate this?
If playlists can contain mixed visibility content from different collections:
- How can we make this clear to users?
- How could we usefully surface links to users to get ahold of the missing content so they can complete the playlist?

petitminion

I would prefer to go with playlists containing mixed visibility content from different collections. To allow more flexibility on content curation.

I think we already have already some tools to make clear all the tracks are not accessible : they are grey out of the UI. We could add some new feature tho' :

Share the content of this playlist : only for a limited amount of people through a content sharing link. Which is different from the playlist link of course. And would consist to give access right to a list of Upload for a list of users or for a limited amount of users (the link can be used only x times). This feature could be used to sharing individual tracks , or albums, or artists.
Change the visibility of the content of this playlist. All the content will be moved from the original collection to another one.

I think only allow one content visibility on the playlist will create paradoxes in the case you describe : what if a content is not visible anymore ? If we delete it from the playlist it's a shame for the playlist creator, if we keep it on the playlist, they will have content that cannot be accessed anyway so in the end we come back to the need to have mixed content visibility.