 Welcome to this talk on funk whale and the importance of decentralized podcasting. It's just something that I'm doing as it's just a little outreach thing. So who am I? My name is Kieran Ainsworth. I am a member of the Funk Whale Association who are the officers of the Funk Whale platform. We have been developing it for a few years now. I joined Funk Whale a couple of years ago as primarily a documentation writer. So I installed Funk Whale after looking for some self-hosting tools and I approached the project and said your documentation isn't particularly great. Would you mind if I helped rewrite it? And from there on I've kind of got more and more involved in different bits of the project. So I've been doing a lot of work with front-end development, documentation, community management and my role on the sort of board is that I'm a member of the steering committee, which means that I am responsible for helping with development of roadmaps and sort of research and development into different features that we might want to add at some other time. So what is Funk Whale? First and foremost, as you can see there, very nice little sort of interface design. Funk Whale is essentially a music and audio platform to put it very, very basically. But more specifically it is a free and open source project. It's a self-hosted server software with a front-end web application for playing music and the thing that kind of sets it apart is that it is federated. So it's built on the same software as other federated applications such as Mastodon, Plarama, PixelFed, PeerTube, Real2Bits and all the others. We all use the same software to interact with one another something called the ActivityPod Protocol and basically it just allows us to be a bit more interactive with other Funk Whale servers and also other software in the Fediverse. And when Funk Whale started up, it was primarily focused around music. The name comes from the fact that the original developer of the software Agat Berlio wanted a free self-hosted version of Groove Shark, something that she could put music into and then create playlists and radios from. So that's kind of where the pedigree came from. We come from that music background. But nowadays we're focused on many things. Music collections are still part of it but we also have audio publication tooling and content sharing as part of our sort of genetic makeup. So a little while ago we were looking at our roadmap. So around about September, October 2019 we started to look seriously at where did we want to take the project. At the time we had just moved away from having Agat as essentially the benevolent dictator for life and we're looking at moving towards a more democratic system of governance where we would ask the users to provide us with insights and sort of guidance on what they would like to see in the platform. And when we started approaching them with options, one of the things we found was that podcasting was a very, very widely requested feature which was something I don't necessarily think we were expecting but it was definitely something that people were very interested in. At the time, the Fediverse in general lacked a proper sort of platform for things like podcasting. We had music, we had, so I'm just going to adjust my volume, somebody's saying it's a little bit low. We had music, we had video, we had things like microblogging and we had image sharing but we didn't have podcasting. So that was something that people seemed to be quite interested in. So when people came to us and sort of suggested that, that fitted in quite nicely with another thing that we were looking to do in general which was content publication. So we sort of looked at it as an opportunity to develop an entire new structure, not just around podcasts but also around music publication. So that we were moving away from just hosting your CD collection and maybe some bits and pieces that you had done yourself to actually publishing the content and putting it through to the Fediverse directly. So that was kind of the background as to why we got into podcasting in general. And very quickly we saw that there were going to be a lot of challenges with this particular bit of work. The biggest one really was we as a collective didn't really know all that much around podcasting. None of us were podcasters. We listened to podcasts sometimes but not very often. I myself only listened to a few. So we very quickly realized that we were going to need to approach people who did this sort of thing all the time. We were going to need to ask people who knew about this stuff, had sort of experience working with lots of different bits and pieces in the current climate in order to build something that fit with their expectations and also addressed some of their frustrations, anything that frustrated them. The other problem was, as I mentioned before, we are a music publication platform or we were a music hosting platform. So this podcasting and publication stuff was not in our DNA. It required quite a lot of architecting on the back end to really get something that would work for publication. We needed to kind of rethink a lot of things because we had been making assumptions about audio in general based on music collections, which of course is a very different thing to podcasting. The other thing we didn't really know or understand was what should it look like from beginning to end for a podcaster to publish something. We kind of understood it for musicians. It was a bit simpler. You know, you'd have albums and you would have tracks that go in those albums, but we didn't really know all that much about podcasting. So in order to get that information, we decided to form a podcasting task force, as it were. And this task force basically consisted of members of the Funkwell Association and a group of people from the podcasting subreddits, from the Fediverse, people who made podcasts all the time. And we basically brought them all into a chat room and we said, okay, so if we're going to design this, what do we absolutely need to do? What do we need to hit? What do you want to see? And what would kind of encourage you to come over to using our software to publish your podcasts, if that's something you would like to do? And it was something, the other thing we needed to work out was, you know, we didn't really have an insight as people who didn't publish into what the competition was doing. So I say the competition, what other people who made this stuff were doing. So we very much needed to get that information from a firsthand experience and sort of pull that in to make sure that we were doing it correctly. And what we found was basically podcasts are hard. They're quite complex things where especially the, particularly the complexity exists on the back end. It exists within the software, but the user should be really getting a very simple front end to do things with. So we found that basically, whereas with music, Funkoil really didn't handle a lot of the more complex stuff like tagging. We let music brains handle that. If we were going to be publishing, we needed to start actually taking on board that complexity and sort of facilitating it in our publication layer. And podcasts of course offered a slightly different way of doing things because there was less metadata to be included. And it was less sort of cataloged than something like music. The other thing that was very, very strongly put forward by the people who we talked to was that there exist in the podcasting world standards. We have certain ways of doing things and that has to be retained no matter which tool we use. So for example, we need to use RSS. We absolutely have to include an RSS feed. Images need to be correctly sized. The RSS feed must be consumable by tools such as iTunes and Apple podcasts, which means we have to include certain fields that only exist for iTunes and Apple podcasts. The other thing we kind of came to realize was that people were going to be using us as a podcast publication tool, but we also needed to act as the podcatcher. Because our sort of current makeup at the time was to be a music hosting tool, but also an application which played music. We needed to give that same experience for podcasts. It needed to be that people could publish content, but also take the content they already liked and put it into Funkwell. And then the last sort of big thing that came from this was the sudden realization that if you're going to have two or more servers talking to each other a lot more, you're going to need to really strengthen the moderation tools that you have in place. Especially when we're talking about user-generated content, the scope for abuse on that is quite significant. So we needed to give users tools to be able to report things. We needed to give people tools to be able to block certain stuff. We needed to give administrators the ability to use things like enable lists so that they could prevent federation with certain other platforms. And we needed to give them the ability to ban users, take down channels, that sort of thing. So this was a whole lot of architectural design for podcasts, which was really the podcast that drove us to it. And what we came out with was basically a hybrid of a traditional podcast overview and a Fediverse channel. So in our world, we have podcasting channels and music channels. And from what you can see in that screenshot, it gives some basic information. You get your artwork, you get your episodes. We can split things up into series, which was a big request that people had was the ability to create different series within the same channel. We have the ability to subscribe, which I'll go on to in a second. And obviously if you're the channel owner, upload new content to make sure everything is working as expected. The important bit here that we have is the information about what's in that channel. So in this channel, this is mine, ignore it, it's terrible. But there's one episode and it's been listened to 13 times. And this was important information that we sort of worked out was needed in order for people to get a grip on like how are people interacting with my content. But taking that on board, we went ahead with the subscription capabilities. And as you can see in the screenshot, we have kind of three options in every case. The first is if you already have a Funkwell account, you can subscribe using your Funkwell account to that channel. And it will be one of those things that appears in your feed when a new episode is uploaded, you'll get notified that there's a new episode in the front end. The other thing you can do is subscribe via RSS. So going back to what we were saying earlier, we put a lot of effort into making sure that our RSS feed was compatible as much as possible and that anybody could go onto a sort of an open Funkwell channel and subscribe without having to sign up to Funkwell. Because one of the things we very quickly realized was we don't want people to feel like they have to sign up. We want people to be able to enjoy the content no matter what. And that really should be up to them where they listen to us, whether they listen to us on Funkwell or some other podcatcher. And the last one is subscription via the Fediverse. So that enables users to follow a channel in much the same way that they would follow a mastered on account or a plaramo account or something similar. So we're trying to hit all sort of boxes there of how you can keep up with somebody's content. The other thing that I've been doing some work on recently is more front end stuff. But it's just making sure that we sort of point people towards adding new content where possible either by themselves, creating new channels or subscribing to things via RSS or via the Fediverse. So really pushing people towards that more sort of creation element. We want people to create. So that's with the basics in place. This was the development work we did over the past sort of year or so. It's been a wild ride. There's been a lot of content that's gone in. A lot of changes made. There's still some changes to come. The most current release doesn't have some of the newer tools that are around podcasting such as dedicated podcast searching and sort of wider accessibility of subscription tools. But we're not finished. There are still things, there are still items on the roadmap that we would like to complete and still items that are not currently on the roadmap which may need to be added in future to really help us to get involved with podcasting more. Because what we found is this is a market that we very much have enjoyed working in. And it's one that actually has proven quite popular with people. People see Funkwell as a podcasting platform now. Even if it was originally supposed to be music, this is how it's kind of evolved. So what do we have to kind of consider next to take Funkwell to the next sort of level of being a proper sort of alternative to what's currently out there? The first thing that strikes me as necessary is Funkwell currently allows you to import RSS feeds from external podcasts. It currently allows you to follow podcasts on the Fediverse, on Funkwell, and it currently allows you to publish your own. But what we don't have at the moment is any way of finding external podcasts. You still have to leave Funkwell to go and find the RSS feed that you're looking for. You still have to go and see where things are. Go and find them on something like iTunes or Feed or Spotify and grab the RSS feed and bring it back to Funkwell. Which of course from a user experience point of view is not great. It's basically meaning that Funkwell is not yet the one-stop-shop podcast that we might want it to be. So one of the things that I would quite like to see come in in future is podcast discovery for an external sore front. I have built myself a kind of proof of concept of how we might do this using the iTunes API. But there are different things out there such as feed and others that we might want to consider looking at. The other thing is an improved sort of publication workflow. At the moment the publication workflow it works. Things go in. You get a podcast out of it. It generates an RSS feed for you. But we have had people raise issues with it specifically around how do I edit metadata during that upload process. The problem I think is because of the way we designed the front end it was more in line with how we'd worked with music previously. Which is to say upload many files which have been previously tagged and just kind of let them be. Whereas of course if you're doing an upload of podcasts you want to basically upload an episode. Title it, tag it, put some artwork with it, give it a license, do all of that stuff and then move on to the next one. Or if you know you're going to be uploading multiple episodes of a series you might want to have a tool say that you can put them all in a series and say number them automatically. At the moment we don't have that. If you upload multiple things a pencil icon appears next to each one and you can click through them and edit them all but it's not very obvious how you do that. So that's been raised as something that needs to be addressed and we've had some designs submitted for how we might go about doing that which looks to be a lot better. The other one is something I'm going to come on to in the second part of this and that is the introduction of links to donation services. At the moment hosting your podcast on Funkwale is great but it's the same as hosting it anywhere else. What we want to be pushing people towards or encouraging is this idea of supporting people who create and the best way to do that in our eyes is to promote the idea of donation services and promote the idea of helping to support the podcast that you like. We don't want to be a payment handler obviously but we do want to help make it a lot more visible when there is a service that you can actually put money towards. And the last one it's been on the road map since channels were introduced it's very very complex. As somebody who does not work on the back end I don't really have the technological knowledge to go into it but there is this idea of channel claiming where if somebody uploads some music to a channel and it's not their music the person whose music it is should be able to claim that channel and take control of it. As you can imagine that's a very very complex thing to do particularly over federation because you have all of the different implications of the wider fediverse to take into account there. So it's our biggest boon it's also our biggest challenge day-to-day is working with that federation. But that moves onto my next point which is all about sort of decentralized podcasting. This may seem like a strange concept to people who do podcasting because podcasts are decentralized by design really. I didn't know a lot about podcasts going into this as I say it was a very much a learning experience but the more reading I did into podcasts as part of the research that we did for this the more fascinated I became by how they work and how they're set up and the thing that struck me was podcasts have this they occupy this unique space of being very very disruptive low tech you know certainly audio podcasts video podcasts as well sort of disruptive low tech standards compliant ways of communicating a lot of information. So podcasts can be hosted anywhere as long as they generate a valid feed anybody can capture them into a podcatcher and play the files linked using a relevant piece of software. That means that the the potential listener base is enormous much more so than you know anything based on you know a single platform a centralized platform and this was one of the reasons that when we were designing the podcast publications tools we were so emphatic about being a part of that existing infrastructure making sure that we didn't try to sort of lock people into our way of thinking but instead follow what podcasting was already doing because it already seemed pretty great we had you know things like rss feeds we had sort of good encodings being used like mp3 which could be so widely used it's it's kind of ubiquitous at this point and that's kind of a really important part of it and the reason that this came to my attention was during some of the conversations we were having with podcasters and specifically when we were looking at funkwell as a podcatcher so something that consumes rss feeds and plates them back um somebody had said something about a specific podcast i think it was called the the last podcast on the left and they said basically it's a shame i won't be able to play this through funkwell because they are going spotify exclusive and so they're not producing an rss feed anymore and this worries me slightly um it's a concerning kind of trend away from what podcasts stand for from from from my understanding of what podcasts stand for um because when you go exclusive to something like spotify you have the introduction of drm and sort of um you're sort of creating a walled garden around content and certainly for content that used to be free and and open so you know it used to follow the same rules as everything else for it to suddenly go into a platform specific um publication is a big break and there are a couple of reasons for this but the primary one is let's say that with podcasting the only limitation for a user is that they have a machine that has software that is capable of of listening to that podcast it's capable of reading the feed and playing back the the audio that's your limitation if you put it onto uh something like spotify you actually divide this into four four different experiences the first two are users who live in a country that have access to spotify um and those people will have two experiences one they will either listen to an ad supported um uh version of the show and the second one is that they pay for a um a subscription to the actual um the actual podcast uh sorry to the actual um um uh platform then you have people who go into other or live in other countries um which don't have spotify served up to them and those people have more experiences one is that they have to pay for a vpn and uh basically access spotify externally using the ads and then again access externally using a subscription and then there's that lost fifth one which is they don't have the money for any of this so they can't listen so we fractured the user base by centralizing the um uh by centralizing the content into a certain place and the problem with something like spotify is at that point when you've done that and you've taken that sort of um you've taken that decentralized nature away what you have left is not a podcast it's essentially corporate radio and like i say for something that started off as a podcast there's something that started off freely available having it move in that way is somewhat concerning but at the same time we have to look at why does that happen and generally the answer is podcasting is expensive um everything that takes up people's time is expensive and podcasting from the little i have done of it is very expensive you've got to take the time to script and record and edit and work with you know all about audio and video you've got to find a place to publish it you've got to do all of the um you know promotion around it and if you are looking to make money off of it you have to search around for uh you know sponsorships and and ad deals and things like that so when a company like spotify comes along and says we'll take all of that complexity off of your hands we'll give you a good portion of money um to pay your staff and to to make you make sure you can make a living it's very very tempting um and you can kind of understand why it happens and one of the things that we kind of found was that um the free software community in general is not always the best equipped to deal with that kind of thing we don't um we can't make a counter offer to that um our weapon here and what we can do about this is as i've said before kind of try as much as possible to make it easy for people to make the decision to continue listening outside of those platforms make it easy for them to continue to support their um their favorite podcast directly um which means lowering the sort of barrier to entry for um payments lowering the barrier of entry for sharing for supporting for for getting things out there um but it's an inherently sort of difficult thing to to come up against and something that you know we haven't found the answer for yet um it's something we've done discussions about um how we how we might help podcasters support themselves how we might help people support podcasters uh and musicians as well as this stretches to all areas um but the answer is is is a difficult one it's not one that sort of um you know comes very easily um now i've purposefully sort of left this i think i've got it exactly half an hour that's good i purposefully didn't want this to go on for too long um it's it that's kind of the journey that we've had um the first thing is podcasting is fun uh from a sort of user perspective podcasts are wonderful to listen to um having a good place to put podcasts is great for um you know people who make them from a software perspective uh they're a bit of a nightmare especially when they aren't what your um software was originally sort of um set up to do there's a lot of work goes into it it's um i think it's underestimated in general um but you know it's worth putting the effort in to to get something like that um free software worlds the open source software worlds um we we still face some significant challenges um with assisting people with things like anything to do anything to do with finances is something where we struggle and um it's because we don't have that monolithic approach it's because we don't have that um central financing um so it tends to be that you know we need to focus more on improving uh the experience of working within a sort of direct donation world and a direct sort of um way of of working um and yeah this this this whole sort of trend of existing podcasts being picked up by um companies and you know things that used to be so free and easily accessible becoming walled off inside i only know of Spotify doing it but i can imagine the same thing happening with apple music and deezer and a lot of others um is kind of a concerning move which is diluting what was really quite a fantastic sort of idea and it's a shame that it happens to some of the ones that people find you know people connect with the most strongly i think um two of the most popular podcasts that have been picked up are things like um uh joe rogan and the last podcast on left which is it's a shame um because high profile things being taken over has meaning and um you know it will normalize it in in my eyes at least but with the use of free free software tools with the use of you know these open standards real podcasting will never go away it will always you know bubble up underneath we will always see people continue to you know to put things out so yeah it's it's not all hopeless this wasn't what that talk was about it was merely just about this is something i think is very important and something that you know as a project we're really striving to support um so i think that takes me to quite nicely 35 minutes which is exactly what i was aiming for if anybody has any questions um i think that the um i think that the uh i think that the number has been put into the chat it's plus four nine five three six one uh eight nine zero two eight six eight zero zero one uh and if you're using event phone it's just eight zero zero one um i'll just have a look and see if anyone asks any questions in here uh so look yeah how do i find how can i find a funquel instance for a podcast i'm planning that suits me my needs and my content the best um yeah so the link there is is a good idea the uh get started guide um we actually have a um a sort of a pod picker we call it um which is uh just something that sort of takes you through the summary of different pods um which is what we have we referred to servers um people can write a summary of what sort of content they want from there um the two biggest servers um are open.audio and um i think Tanuki tunes which is my server is quite sort of uh big and open um there are lots of servers out there so you know if you find one the way you think it would fit in here then great um you know usually just find one that has open registrations and sign up or if you're feeling brave um install it for yourself it's it's a fairly easy install there are some hosts that will host it for you um they're listed on the funkwell.audio website so if you just wanted somebody to set it up for you so that you could host a podcast um then yes you could sort of uh put it in there uh do you know the podcast index.org projects uh i don't personally uh i will look it up after this that looks interesting uh if there's a solution that is to be found that could work for podcasters could it also be applicable to indie musicians or all the two fields uh way too different in order to accommodate both uh i'll just finish this one i think i've got a uh telephone person coming in so uh if there's but i mean yes and no i if we're talking about supporting um financially then yes in theory we already have some of those i mean there are already donation platforms which kind of work for a multitude of things um so really i think we should be you trying to to sort of lean into things like liberapay kofi maybe patreon um rather than sort of trying to solve that problem within the publication software because those features already exist and because that's already quite uh well established um having better interoperability between those tools um is probably the best way forward you know you just want to take the complexity away from the person listening it'd be nice if they had something like for example you're listening to a song you really like it so maybe you preload a certain amount of you know credits to your account every time you sort of play a song you really like you can throw some credits that way i don't know the complexity of the actual implementation is beyond me a little bit as i say i'm just a front end guy but um i don't think there's that big a difference between them uh from from that sort of perspective um yeah uh the servers were so open.audio is the main sort of flagship server and my server is called tanookietunes.com i'll put that link in um but there are lots of there are lots of servers as i say if you go to the actual funkwell.audio website they're there um so why should i as a podcaster decide against a centralized platform with lots of users for a decentralized one with only a few users how can we dramatically increase the visibility of my project now my product on funkwell um it's a good question i mean the the thing is with a centralized platform um is you may be on a platform with a lot of users but that doesn't mean that you're actually going to be seen by a lot of users um there is a lot of stuff on Spotify which never gets played um that that's just the the fact of it there are there are so many there's so much content on there that you are just you know you're just a grain of sand um obviously if you've got a sort of an established fan base and you've got a lot of people already listening to you then that doesn't affect you but in that case it also wouldn't affect you if you were decentralized those same people would still be listening and in fact you would be able to reach more people um podcasts uh kind of allow for word of mouth in a way that something centralized doesn't it can be passed around a lot more uh sort of virally um as for you know funkwell i mean funkwell's greatest strength is the fediverse um with this uh so the fact that the audio can be shared between people's servers and sort of streamed directly from server to server the fact that it can be followed on a multitude of different uh platforms is where the visibility would come from it's that sort of viral sharing but the fact that it also works outside of funkwell it also works uh just using a traditional sort of podcatcher also plays into its favor and that's where Spotify kind of falls apart um yes but if i have a lot of users but um you do kind of cut off an entire core audience which is the concern um yeah it's it's not there's no simple answer to this it's kind of the way it goes but um i feel like um the point made earlier in the chat which was that if you centralize it and you lock it behind a wall garden it's no longer really a podcast it kind that kind of stands it's not a podcast technically anymore it's something different and that's not necessarily a bad thing but it is true it's no longer what it was originally supposed to be um so you know it is best i think to try and make use of uh you know tools that fit into the existing podcast infrastructure okay that looks like all of the questions i don't think anybody's calling in which is fine so with that being the case if there's no more questions um thank you very much for listening to me ramble about um podcasts for 40 minutes um obviously if you'd like to check the project out it's just that funkwell.audio um but also go out and support your favorite podcasters whatever platform they're on um you know god knows they'd appreciate it especially in these times uh thank you very much um i think that's where i'm going to call it quits i think we have a phone call okay someone on the phone uh yeah hello hi hello oh wait i might be excusing for that one uh i just want whether you're familiar with the website called for godify.com you brought up earlier that there's like tons of audio that has never been heard of and that's basically site so it's like a song or a piece of material Spotify that has never been heard of before hmm what was the name of the site again sorry uh for godify.com oh no i've not heard of that that's quite interesting so is it it just plays stuff that doesn't get played much on Spotify yeah just click click on the button it literally shows you like a random song or a random piece of audio that has been like distributed on Spotify but never heard of before i even heard some tracks from 2009 i'm not sure that's great i really like i really like that idea yeah i that that is a genuine concern i when i was um i used to use google plus a lot because i'm that kind of person and i was part of um sort of publishing musicians uh club and i had people on there who published on Spotify and they never got listened to you know it does take quite a lot for you to to actually get picked up by Spotify's algorithms and to be sort of prioritized so i it's not the best solution for podcasts there's i think there's a reason that only already popular podcasts are getting picked up for Spotify circulation but you know that that sort of project sounds really interesting because it'd be fascinating to see what gets forgotten down the sort of cracks of the seat so to speak yeah it's also very interesting to play the game of the art for instance though i think that's one of the main reasons why i'm making music myself thanks to all nine personally so that's why i'm yeah yeah it is it is anyways thanks a lot i'm not i'm not affiliated with the side of the site i found it very relevant and decided to share that thanks yeah no thank you very much that's really interesting take your own thank you bye okay i thought we don't have any more calls going once going twice okay okay a lot more cards okay thank you again for for coming to to watch and i hope you have a great rest of your conference it looks like it's going to be a lot of fun