really wish #reel2bits was still being developed - the approach that #funkwhale is taking with federated music is good for things like sharing music libraries, but not so great for artists looking to self-publish

Yeah, that's been a long-running criticism of the project. It's what happens when a media locker-type project pivots and does federation.

Funkwhale does have Artist Channel support, but without any kind of likes, comments, or notifications. Which really kind of sucks the fun out of it.

yeah, it seems like federation is a bit pointless on that platform. Channels are a decent workaround, but they’re clearly meant for podcasts, so when I post a new album it’s listed as a series of “episodes”.

If #funkwhale pivoted towards something a bit more like #bandcamp it would be a lot better. Tracks are treated as posts with a rock-solid cross-platform embedded player. Then implement some kind of internal tagging or list creation to group tracks into albums and playlists.

In fact, you could probably do this by forking mastodon and retooling how it handles audio posts and tagging.

There are discussions happening around precisely this (and more generally how we can federate more content and make FW a hub for artists). However, these things take a huge amount of work and speccing since we’re working against the project history a bit!