Submitted 5 weeks ago by deadsuperhero@lemmy.world to fediverse@lemmy.world
https://wedistribute.org/2025/02/funkwhale-filter/
The Funkwhale music platform is alive and in active development, and they’re working on a feature to filter far-right artists off the network. Some Fediverse self-hosters are divided on letting a third party decide what should be allowed in their library.
Just ban country music and you’ve covered like 80% of it.
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.
I fail to see how it’s even possible for an open source project to dictate what content is acceptable. Also, the entire project is contrary to rms’ FOSS goals (for any purpose), other than being completely ineffective. I can understand the need for agency and contribution to whatever resistance can be mustered, but this is larping.
Also, the entire idea is contrary to rms’ FOSS goals
Perhaps, and I don’t see how that’s a problem. Saint IGNUcius isn’t the divine dictator of FOSS. The original Funkwhale announcement’s author makes it clear at the end that they don’t hold freedom-as-an-end-goal (liberalism) as their ideology.
LARP
Not LA nor RP, my friend.
As you hinted, a determined admin can disable the blocklist, it probably isn’t too technical to patch, but this makes a clear statement, which if you’ve seen any right-leaning tech forums, has a real impact on them (see their discussions on Firefox and Rust, or better yet, don’t).
It’s not even liberalism, it’s pragmatism. It’s simultaneously giving software as a commons and trying to restrict it, an extension of culture wars that’s so ineffective it gives the other side an easy win once they set up chudwhale as a scripts that forks the latest codebase but with no blocklist and a pepe mascot. Just time unspooling. I might be depressed.
Reeks of bullshit ass slippery slope censorship to me.
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.
This is how you get republicans wanting to use RATM on the campaign trail
That’s kinda funny
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.
Lame.
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.
[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.
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?
Horrible idea. Let people share what they want and give the means for individuals to hide content they don’t want to see.
We shouldn’t be deciding for other people what they are allowed to see.
Why is the right wing here,the fediverse is a socialist communist ass concept, so against capatilism born out as a response to republicans
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?
Maybe Im off base here but I’d say like 10% of music means right if center?
This idea sounds dumb. Just don’t listen to kid rock or ted Nugent, or most country, and you’re basically all set.
Then there’s like 3 bands per genre that are dog whistlers or overtly shitty humans.
Done?
From an American point of view, that’s true. European metal has a bit of a Nazi problem.
Can anyone tell me why I can’t login to Funkwhale with my instance? No matter what I do I can’t use it.
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.
Fizz@lemmy.nz 5 weeks ago
While that is funny and certainly deserved. Normally I would say that its not their place to decide that but fuck right wingers they deserve to be purged out of every single space they have.
deadsuperhero@lemmy.world 5 weeks ago
Generally speaking, I agree. It’s just interesting to see a platform force a mechanism into itself that admins can’t turn off. The only thing that really bugs me about that is that admins are kind of supposed to have the final say on what their server does, and some of the infrastructure for this idea seems a bit shaky at best.
Fizz@lemmy.nz 5 weeks ago
Its open source, the admins can turn it off by reverting the patch. The person who coded it has the final say on what their software does in an open source world if you dont like it you are welcome to fork it.