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social.coop is one of the many independent Mastodon servers you can use to participate in the fediverse.
A Fediverse instance for people interested in cooperative and collective projects. If you are interested in joining our community, please apply at https://join.social.coop/registration-form.html.

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Ed Summers

It might sound weird to say this about the impact of a website, but Bandcamp really has transformed my musical interests and, as a result, my life. I have been able to cultivate & help support a small, shifting, virtual community of artists and listeners that I learned from over the past 13 years. So, it is very sad to hear about the recent sell-off, layoffs and plunder.

cc/ @bandcampunited

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Ed Summers

This post from @pettter has me wondering if there are any efforts yet to start to think about what a similar run service might look like?

mastodon.acc.umu.se/@pettter/1

It seems like Bandcamp is past the startup stage where it could ?
colorado.edu/lab/medlab/2020/0

As much as I personally align with decentralization, there does seem to be some value in a centralized platform for managing payments, storage and discovery for artists whose livelihood depends on trust.

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Mastodon @ UMUpettter (@pettter@mastodon.acc.umu.se)It's funny: Both Bandcamp and Patreon had the easiest and most straightforwardly long-term profitable business models imaginable: Sit between indie creatives and their fans, provide some basic services for mediation (comment sections, media posts, semi-global payment) and take enough of a cut of any payments to cover the costs and then some. But because that business model wouldn't scale forever, they are instead being gutted, because ever _increasing_ growth is the only model capital accepts
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Ed Summers

If anyone has any leads for how to tap into, or start, a conversation about what a run music platform like bandcamp could look like please let me know.

It seems like there must be a very large number of people who would be supportive of a cooperatively run AND FUN site like Bandcamp, that was self sustaining, supported artists, supported its workers, and had a clear governance model.

If it was open-source and could federate that would be great of course too. But first things first.

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🍃 Nick 🍁

@edsu check out retro.social/@ajroach42/111252 too if you haven't seen that already

Retro Social Andrew (spooky) (@ajroach42@retro.social)@djsundog@toot-lab.reclaim.technology and I are launching a project to build federated, open source, #bandcamp alternative. We're building this because we need it. We're doing it ourselves because it will become a part of the larger media production and distribution ecosystem we have planned. We welcome other open source projects, and we might even contribute to a few of them, but for the next several months, this is our full time gig. Long term vision: https://mountaintown.technology/ Repo: https://code.communitymedia.network/MountainTownTechnology/aural_isle/ How and why: https://ajroach42.com/the-uncertain-future-of-bandcamp/
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Ed Summers

@nick thanks Nick! I know tech is going to tech, but I will be interested to see if some of these efforts frontload the governance side of things and then get into how to assemble the various pieces. As much of a fan I am of decentralization, I think it needs to take a back seat to how the thing will be run once money starts moving around?

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🍃 Nick 🍁

@edsu this is actually one persons analysis of why resonate failed to achieve their goals:

"I’ve always kind of had the opinion that Resonate does some amazing conceptual co-operative governance but that governance was way ahead of what the product (software) actually offered."

community.resonate.coop/t/addr

Resonate Community Forum · Addressing our current crisis: community input neededThe Resonate board recently discussed a perfect storm of problems that has made many of us question whether the organization can and/or should continue. These include: multiple pending resignations lack of director insurance no clear funding plan in sight numerous technical challenges brought on by… …a profound lack of developer resources In regards to resignations, there’s no overall pattern, although at least one resignation was partly related to the insurance issue. (This refers to protect...
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Ed Summers

@nick interesting, yeah -- that's a good reminder that it's likely a sociotechnical problem that requires thinking about both governance and tooling at the same time. Thanks for the pointer to look closer at what is going on w/ Resonate.

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🍃 Nick 🍁

@edsu I think resonate is a really great case study of the challenges in getting co-operative alternatives up and running.

I don't know if there is a proper write up of it somewhere to learn from, there should be... probably many different perspectives though... so much to learn from failure.

A while back I spent a while reading around on the forum to get a sense of what happened, sad times!

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Ed Summers

@nick I would read that blog post from you :-)

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🍃 Nick 🍁

@edsu I'm so peripheral to the project (i.e. of no connection at all), and it would be quite some effort to do a fair job of it given the complexity of what seemed to happen. Maybe someone else could :)

Ed Summers

@nick yeah understood ... this has been helpful what you've written so far, so thank you for doing that reading and sharing it here.

Oct 18, 2023, 10:53 AM·Public·Megalodon
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