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Funkwhale Wants to Filter Out Far-Right Music
(wedistribute.org)
Lame.
Sounds like a fantastic plan.
The handwringing about if we're being nice enough to the alt right is directly contributing to why we have so much mess we're now having to deal with. The approach seems sane to find music that's very specifically nazi rock, so they're being extremely limited in response, imo.
Screw em, kick them out of anywhere you find them, and then nail the door they used to get in shut.
The intent sounds fine, but as @deadsuperhero@lemmy.world points out, it offloads the actual responsibility of filtering on MusicBrainz and WikiData.
It's not hard to imagine MusicBrainz being flooded by users trying to circumvent bans by editing tags. Or incorrectly tagging bands they don't like or agree with to get them banned.
Funkwhale probably isn't big enough in itself to make a huge splash, but this proposed ban does add another target to the extreme right's hit list. It seems a little iffy to me to make an open project like MusicBrainz that target?
You can decide what music you listen to. Anyway a band being too politcal won't make bad music, you don't have to agree to their ideas to appreciate the music
Isn't that the age old "Is Burzum NSBM" discussion. Vikernes is definitely a Nazi, but his music, as in texts etc, isn't infested with Nazi ideology much unlike much more clear-cut NSBM: It's not National-Socialist Black Metal, but Black Metal than happens to be created by a National Socialist.
IMO in the end I don't mind you listening to, or even liking, Burzum, but please have the moral wherewithal to pirate. If that means you can't have them on the platform because you'd be exposed to lawsuits, then so be it. Fuck Vikernes, he made his own bed.
This is how you get republicans wanting to use RATM on the campaign trail
That's kinda funny
This seems like well intentioned but ultimately pointless. Nothing is stopping a nazi group from just forking off an older version like how gab did with mastodon, and no currently active funkwhale pods allow right wing content already.
They have benefitted from and encouraged 'but if you do that you're no diffrent from-' spinelessness.
Their entire gameplan has been to whine and sob and play victim while demanding 'we' march to where they are, while they take two more steps back and whine and sob more at how we're extremists.
So. Fuck 'em.
Their 'compromise' is 'we give them everything, and get nothing in return.'
Show them that they are not welcome or wanted.
Are you taking about funkwhale or the right wingers?
Rightwingers.
Ah, your original message does not make this clear. In fact, since the post is about Funkwhale, it seems like your talking shit about the platform, even though its not apparent what 'shit' refers to.
Fair criticism.
Just ban country music and you've covered like 80% of it.
As a fan of the odd bit of black metal, I would appreciate the 20% being dealt with
At least most nsbm sucks and/or have names like "ss wehrwulf division 1488" so it's usually really easy to avoid.
Still, be great to have another tool to filter bands.
Edit: looks like it's going to be based on musicbrainz metadata, checked Burzum because Vikernes is a Nazi and Peste Noir, neither of which have an nsbm tag, nor do Grand Belial's Key or an actual band called Wehrwolf, probably because of how niche black metal is.
I've personally used this list as a place to start, not perfect but it's something. Metallum lyrical content helps as well.
But there is a load of really dodge black metal that is much more cryptic, not being blatant but made by Nazis like Deathspell Omega, Mgla, Drudkh and Winterfyllth. I've been in the scene a long time and been fooled by some of these.
Oh for sure, there's exceptions to the rule, I've been fooled too. Peste Noir, Drudkh, Deathspell Omega, Burzum all end up on essentials lists, definitely contributes.
"Wehrwolf" would make for an incredible semi-comedy horror movie. It howls at the moon because it's the one white thing in a black night sky. It definitely dies when someone breaks a WWII tank out of storage and shoots it with a silver tank shell
What exactly is funkwhale? It looks like a federated music platform of some sort?
It's basically an open source, federated clone of GrooveShark, which was kind of like Plex but just for music.
Huh. Well that seems pretty cool
[from the original announcement]
If you are a liberal or if you want to have fun, have a look at "Aamer Rahman: Is it really ok to punch nazis?" :)
haha, nice. And this makes the Funkwhale announcement author's position clear: combating fascism is more important than defending lofty ideals, like their liberties. They treat Funkwhale as a community, not merely a tool.
Some of the points Sean brings up may be reasonable critiques, I don't know enough about music tagging to know how easy or hard MusicBrainz is to use, and there is also the question about what if a formerly RW artist reforms (many, many have deradicalized or left the movement, fun fact: this is an important source of antifascist intel). I know about a dozen artists who, as teenagers, were in edgy right-wing circles and echoed that in their works, and are now very far away from that and regretful, but if they hadn't taken up new aliases, they'd probably be lumped in with their unwelcome past works. So I do see merit in the complaint about that project lead failing to implement a way to handle special cases.
With all that said, I'm definitely in support of this move. I just hope they implement and improve it well - that will make or break it.
This reminds me of Mastodon (like Sean mentioned in the article) and Lemmy. I'm not experienced with Mastodon, but I am aware of how they reacted to Gab (formerly a Mastodon instance, before getting bullied by almost everyone), and how most of Lemmy divorced Wolfballs (run by a US-Libertarian, think 🧊🍑 + antivax, but soon populated by white supremacists and neo-nazis; eventually shut down, among other reasons, when the admin realized the Nazis on their instance weren't just pretending for a laugh and that many were commercial bots. Probably didn't help that their admin had a non-white partner and jewish friends) and exploding-heads.
These are examples when a FOSS tool takes a community stance, rather than an idealistic liberalist freedom-above-all stance.
Ever heard the saying, „Your freedom ends where someone else’s begins“?
Exactly. Don’t give them a platform
Somewhat off topic but I was totally convinced that Funkwhale had died so I ditched my pod and moved to Navidrome, I wasn't using federation so I wasn't really the intended audience. I'm glad they are still going though. But personally I've had a better experience with Navidrome with Feishin as a player.
If only funkwhale wasn't such a royal pain in the ass.
And had a way to support artists
How would you do it directly in the software?
Ability for artist to host their own music and a way to pay them
Yeah, the UX is historically not great. I'm also pretty sure that the federated social layer is still kind of non-existent at this point. It used to be that you could upload your own music and share it, but you'd never see replies from anybody.
It's like someone took a Grooveshark clone, shoehorned federation into it, and then kind of made some features act like SoundCloud, if you squint. But, they didn't really finish the transition.
Setup is also huge pain and it has compatibility issues with clients that use the subsonic API. Every step of the way something I needed from it had issues. I gave up running one funkwhale instance for multiple users and instead spun up 4 Navidrome instances. Not only was it easier and more stable it also uses less resources than one funkwhale setup.
As much as I love the idea of funkwhale it's just so far away from usable.
Can anyone tell me why I can't login to Funkwhale with my instance? No matter what I do I can't use it. I tried using one of their suggested instances too and nada.
Which instance do you use? Mine had been having issues recently
World. But I did use one of the ones they suggested and that didn't work either.
Why is the right wing here,the fediverse is a socialist communist ass concept, so against capatilism born out as an indrect response to how republicans have led america
You'd be surprised, this has always been something of a weird schism within open source. There's a synthesis between socialist and libertarian ideals, the overlap of which is broadly seen as a beneficial social good. So, you get contributors and users that fall on opposite ends of a spectrum. This is just as true for the Fediverse, only the dynamic is much more pronounced, because it's a social network populated by people who got off of other social networks.
People who want to give stuff away for free to beenfit everyone and people who want to take advantage of it to make money?
this post was submitted on 01 Mar 2025
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