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

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

@silverpill @mariusor

That’s great. I’d love to work out the details with you. On bandwagon.fm, this feature will also include digital album sales.

I think it will be as simple as making an access list for the people who have subscribed to each kind of content, then using “Authorized Fetch” to prevent unauthorized people from accessing protected content.

How far along are your plans for subscription feeds?

@silverpill @mariusor

Yes, I think this is the right model going forward.

I’m aiming at something like this in early 2025, though probably via PayPal and Stripe, not with Monero

@mariusor I know there are a couple “monetization” vocabularies out there right now. I think the crew behind Mitra has published an FEP, and Mammoth/sub.club uses its own slightly different links to publish payment options.

When I get there, I’m probably going to implement one or both of those. But allowing guests to buy stuff online is close-but-not-quite the same as asking users to pay for their accounts.

@mariusor I can’t say for sure. But every interaction I’ve had with them has been positive, and they’re very knowledgeable about getting things done the right way.

Hey @silverpill - how would you describe Mitra’s payment system? What use cases does it support right now?

Hey all..

What's the best way to fund a service like #Bandwagon?

I strongly believe that the #Fediverse needs a sustainable funding model to be competitive with BlueSky, Xitter, and Facebook. More than just donations and mutual aid, people should be able to make careers on the Fediverse.

I'm reevaluating how I'll pay for bandwagon.fm in the long term. And I want to make something that's still "free forever"

Do you think there's a place for the #Freemium Fediverse?

@silverpill

I’m super interested in all of these efforts to improve conversations and relies.

This looks like it’s pulled from Streams, yes? Which means it’s not related to the Forums and Threaded Discussions Working Group, is that right?

There are some cool ideas in here. Hopefully we can consolidate all of them to arrive at a single standard to implement.

@silverpill @mariusor I haven’t gotten far enough to test FunkWhale’s object type handling, so I couldn’t say for sure.

All of this is just a perfect example of the issues in our other “ActivityPub Improvements” thread.

The JSON-LD dream of “everything can be anything” sounds great, but nobody can actually use it. At the end of the day, RDF data doesn’t cut it as a UI. We’ll all be better off when we go back to some kind of structured schema and move forward.

@silverpill @mariusor This is an excellent resource. Thank you! Fun Fedi keeps getting better and better.

I think I was trying to follow FunkWhale’s model, to be as compatible with it as possible. But the two object types probably will be more trouble than they’re worth.

I’d love to use these definitions from schema.org, but I don’t think they’re supported anywhere on the Fediverse, are they? If the goal is compatibility, this might be a footgun.

Piece by piece, we're connecting #Bandwagon to every corner of the open web.

Today, we're improving how links to your songs and albums display when someone shares them on Mastodon, Facebook, and others. It's a small thing, but immensely valuable to the social web.

As an example, here's an album I've been listening to on Bandwagon.fm: https://bandwagon.fm/671667a8d7963fa9c589401e

@silverpill Thank you! I’ll double check the ActivityStream data.

@hrefna I agree with you 100%

Do you see a path forward? FEPs?

Many here are so committed to “how things were” that it’s hard to talk about “how things could be”

I’ll happily sign on to something AP-adjacent (strict mode?) that lets us talk to Mastodon and Threads for now, and provides a richer overall UX among the implementers of the new protocol.

Any new group would have to be small, and filled with actual implementers, not industry reps and armchair architects.

@silverpill @trwnh

Sorry, I meant to answer this directly, but I'm still catching up.

In the original FEP, I tried to address the FEP namespace from w3id.org. There's a lot of good reasons to use it. But I'd hate to have to type `/fep/3b86` over and over. It's not very semantic, so I went looking for something else.

What do you think of using `w3.org/ns/activitystreams/#Follow`? Are those IRIs off limits for some reason? If not, it seems like a pretty good fit.

@silverpill Yeah, I knew I was probably going to get bit by web standards. And I *DO* want to follow the best standards.

What do you think would be the best approach here? I think it's important to keep it short, and as semantic/descriptive as possible.

Woo Hoo! Check out Baby's first FEP...

If you're a #Fedidev developer, please check out FEP-3b86 at https://codeberg.org/fediverse/fep/src/branch/main/fep/3b86/fep-3b86.md

I'm working on "Remote Likes" and "Remote Shares" that help you jump back to your own home server to post when you find something cool on another website.

Imagine those "Share on Facebook" buttons, without all the ick.

I know it needs some work (that's what FEPs are for, yea?) so please read, comment, and help me get this over the finish line.

Thanks for the feedback and boosts, everyone. You're all awesome. Are there FEPs out there that I should really consider to be "mandatory"?

It's hard to tell from the list which ones are just brainstorming ideas and which ones I should really get into.

I'm happy to start listing out the "best" FEPs, if that would be helpful.

In one session of #FediForum, I said that I really needed "a map" of the tools and communities for building apps on the Fediverse.

To follow up on that, I've posted a first draft of what this looks like to me.

If you know more about the Fediverse than me (that's most of you) please take a look and let me know how I could make this list better:

https://emissary.dev/fediverse-resources

Hopefully it's a starting place that'll help other #FediDevs to get their projects moving.

@aral Well keep it up. It looks super fun!

@aral Kitten looks pretty cool. Aimed mostly at JavaScript/HTML developers?

@silverpill @julian This verifier has been a godsend for me. Thank you for creating it and making it available to everyone.