Hi,
Disclaimer: This is not a formal feature request, nor do I want to come over as the "entitled FOSS user" who expects people to jump to their help to make the thing they need without wanting to get involved. I don't expect that at all. I just had some thoughts about Funkwhale while playing around with it, and thought I'd share them. If there are misconceptions on my side, please let me know. Either way it's a great project. Anyway ...
I'm looking at it from a music self-publishing perspective. I know that Funkwhale is also developed for the "share-your-music-collection" use case, for me personally that's not relevant, neither are podcasts.
One thing I'm noticing is that I find it really hard to reach the music. When, for example, looking at a PeerTube instance, the first thing I see is a selection of videos. When looking at a Funkwhale pod, I first and foremost see that it's a Funkwhale pod, with a lot of metadata (such as registrations being closed), but to reach an actual track, I can either:
- scroll down to see local channels, click on "Artists", which shows me channels that have an album (or I have to un-check "exclude multi-artist channels" even though my channel has only one artist but no album, which seems like an odd default)
- click browse to see the local library with "new" channels (what happens if channels aren't new anymore?)
- ... some other ways I haven't explored yet.
So I guess my point is, that from a music self-publishing perspective, it seems pretty inconvenient because the music seems quite hidden under a pile of meta-information, and it needs some clicks to get to them. A PeerTube-like navigation where you see tracks (or artists) right on the landing page would be nice.
Also the lack of distinction between artist and channel makes publishing awkward. If I, for example, want to create channels by topic, rather than artists (like, when I'm producing different styles of music), the album will always appear with the channel name as artist.
Lastly, I feel like the "music publishing" and "music collection sharing" use cases get in the way of each other at times, i.e. because I have to select what I want to do every time I upload something.
I'm not quite sure yet how to solve this (especially because the "music collection sharing" use case is something I don't understand very well), but my general take on this would be:
- define the concepts like "artist", "channel", and "album" better
- don't exclude "multi-artist" channels per default
- on the landing page, put more focus on the tracks or channels, rather than on the metadata
- i.e. if registrations are closed, just don't mention it
- a bit of modularity, i.e. allow to disable components related to podcasts and collection sharing.
Anyway, just my take, from someone who wants to avoid soundcloud. I'm excited to see where Funkwhale is heading, no matter what š
ā¤ļø, n