Reflections on #BeYourOwnPlatform July 2024
It has been 7 months since my previous blog post where I explained how I was dipping my toes into the movement called #BeYourOwnPlatform so I thought it was time to write a good long update with some reflections on how it is going.
If you havn’t read the previous post #BeYourOwnPlatform is a movement on the internet where artists are trying to be more independent from locked-in systems that can change and delete everything you have built up there. It (with a name and everything) started as a reaction to Bandcamp getting sold two times, a bunch of people lost their job etc.
While nothing (as far as I can see) has changed on the Bandcamp platform this is a reminder of the general enshittification of the internet that seems to happen to pretty much every venture capitalist backed platform. Bandcamp is actually mentioned on the list of examples on the Wikipedia article even if nothing has changed for the end user yet.
What I covered in the previous post and what’s changed
Faircamp is still great and Hyper 8 joins the team
Faircamp is a static website creator that let’s you build a sleek website where people can stream your music. There are options for letting people pay and download your music, but I am not using that feature right now. Faircamp is simply the place where you can check out to all my music for free.
I currently have three (!) Faircamps on my website:
- The main one where I put my released music
- The bonus stuff (interviews, fieldrecordings etc.)
- A super secret preview site for giving people previews of my unreleased music.
Faircamp is made by Simon Repp who describes himself as someone who creates code, media, and systems with a focus on ethics, simplicity and sustainability. He has now made what can be described as the video sibling to Faircamp, called the Hyper 8 video system (Hyper 8 for short).
Simply put Hyper 8 creates your own little video streaming site similar to how Faircamp makes an audio streaming site. I am still deciding on what should be a collection and what should be a playlist, how to best organize videos and how many resolutions to upload etc. but I think it is very cool to be able to have a nice little video archive as part of the website.
Why not just use Youtube?
First and foremost I think that for me a lot of this is an experiment. You can call it an art project if you want. You know, it only takes one semester as an exchange student from music technology to art school to feel like most things in your life are art projects.
I am curious what happens, how it feels and if I change as a result. I am not going to ditch Youtube, at least not for most my stuff, because there are some nice people there (true) and there is some discoverability there (AHEM cough cough), but already I have some early observations.
When you are not trying to make titles and thumbnails for an algorithm you see so clearly how awkward and embarrassing those are. I never went full weird-face-thumbnail and YOU-WONT-BELIEVE-title on my regular videos but still I feel how the platform nudges your stuff in that direction.
When there is no view counter you focus more on internal validation rather than external. How well do YOU like the video you created. Oh well, then you know how you feel about it. This is very nice!
Minor things like being able to reupload a fixed version of a video but still keep the url is nice if you have given someone the link already. But then I think some more about why it is such a crisis to have to reupload a video on Youtube (and loose the old link) and that is of course back to the f-ing view counter again. Youtube is gamified like a big slot machine where you can win the algorithm lottery and get all these views which = number goes up. When you just remove this you again see it for what it is.
There are no users or comments. I experimentally put a subscribe button under the videos that links to my newsletter, but of course when I upload a new videos I usually put it in a blog post anyways.
Anyways the archive is nice. You can even have secret videos and playlists which is very useful for applications, bookings etc. Nice to get all the numbers and distractions out of the way so people focus on the internal – how they feel about the video itself.
It has been very interesting to see the same video material that I have on my Youtube channel presented in a new way. It will be interesting to see how I feel in another 7 months.
Notifications: Email and RSS
So the mentioned newsletter lives on and is better than ever. I recently switched over to Keila as my newsletter provider which is an Open Source newsletter tool, made in Germany and hosted in the EU 🇩🇪 🇪🇺.
I make an effort to only send out emails when I feel like I have something of value to offer. The last thing I want is to turn into one of those shops you shopped at one time and now they send you a new email every week. I also make an effort to keep a personal tone in the email so you actually feel that it is coming straight from me to you, which it is. The last things I would want (even less then to turn into a too frequent emailer) would be to have some Ai tool spew out emails in a generated way. That is actually the only real problem with the newsletter. People get so much advertisement emails that sometimes it feel overwhelming and they might actually forget to read my email even if they want to. But at least you got “on top of their feed”.
There is a separate newsletter that is dedicated to notify people when I go live on Lislegaard.stream, my Owncast based live stream server that I will start streaming on after the summer.
RSS
I still also handwrite the RSS feed for the blog which I will continue doing. I had some feedback that people wanted the RSS feed to include the full posts and not just the intro + “read more”, so I started doing that. It takes some extra work, but it feels worth it because I myself love RSS so I want to support it for others that do. I have a blog posts from 2022 when I first introduced RSS here.
My biggest tips if you are going to handwrite your RSS feed: have a secret one that only you subscribe to and test if there are any problems, then fix those, re-check and then publish to the real feed.
I currently have 87 (minus two of my own) people’s RSS feeds in my reader that I check every day.
The shop
I made a cute little merch shop as well. It simply lists a few things you can buy and where you can buy them and then links to those platforms. Again #BeYourOwnPlatform is not necessarily about having to build and host everything yourself, but to have your website as your home base which is where people go and subscribe to. If you don’t need to buy anything but still want to support you can also just make a donation.
The shop’s categories
The contributer
The super fan
- Physical stuff (my cassette tape) on Bandcamp.
The supporter
The music maker
- Music software (my Organelle patch) that you can get on Gumroad.
What’s next? – #BeYourOwnPlatformTOGETHER
There is a little bonus part of the slogan that I started commenting pretty much as soon as I got involved with the movement – Together. It is good and all to be free from the digital overlords, but it is even better if you can do it with your friends.
These days I am thinking a lot about how we can bring some of the social elements into this whole project, without ending up back with all the problems that started this movement in the first place. I keep thinking about different networks, ways to fill some of the gaps left now that you don’t need a label anymore etc.
I even made a website where I tried out how it could look and started asking for advice. But I soon realized I was getting a bit ahead of myself and there is a reason why this things are not everywhere and thriving in the first place: organizing people is often hard.
Is the new way to go offline again? Make fanzines and meet more people in real life (which means more travel). Is it more livestreams and interactions that way. I guess there is also a reason why there is a million mediocre (and some good) interview podcasts now. People are trying to connect.
One thing I have noticed is that I like email again. I used to not like email. Why? Because I got so many bad emails I didn’t care about. Now I unsubscribe to everyone I don’t want emails from and the ratio between emails I want and don’t have shifted.
Of course it is much more friction if you are going to write someone an email instead of a comment under a video, but the benefit of this is that instead of 15 people putting fire emojies in the comment section you instead get 1 very thoughtful email.
It can be a great experience. I really like getting and writing emails now. If you have gotten this deep into this blogpost why don’t you send me one?
Anyways. I still havn’t finished the computer game called BeYourOwnPlatformTogether yet but it sure is an interesting playthrough!