cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/41807814
Before anyone says it: yes, I know about Funkwhale.
Funkwhale is great, but what I’m imagining is slightly different.
I’m not just talking about a platform where users upload their own music, but something closer to how YouTube Music actually works. Artists would upload their own music and videos, either to a shared instance or to their own instance, and listeners could then stream them across the fediverse.
Something similar to how Peertube, Lemmy, Pixelfed, Mastodon, etc work.
One of the big appeals of YouTube Music (at least IMO) is that since it runs off YouTube, you get an absolutely wild mix of content. Official tracks, obscure uploads, forgotten demos, weird one-off videos, hyper-niche stuff that would never exist on Spotify or Apple Music.
The closest alternative to it would be SoundCloud, but even then, SC is more underground music scene.
In theory, I could imagine a potential federated alternative that hooks into PeerTube. Maybe users log in with their PeerTube account or instance, and music-focused instances federate with video-focused ones.
Something like “PeerTube Music” or a dedicated ActivityPub music service that interoperates with PeerTube.
Obviously, you’re not going to get big-name artists right away (or maybe ever), but that’s true of basically every fediverse project at the start. You’d still get regular users, indie artists, experimental musicians, archive uploads, and all the strange internet music culture that YouTube Music accidentally preserves.
Curious what people here think:
Could PeerTube realistically be extended in this direction?
Is it feasible with current ActivityPub tooling?
Are there projects I’m missing that already aim for this, beyond Funkwhale?
Or does Funkwhale already cover more of this than I’m giving it credit for?
Interested to hear thoughts.
I would love to help with something like this, but, unfortunately, I lack the time and energy.
Personally, if I must listen to music through streaming, I don’t have much of a need for the Youtube Music variant, so my opinion below stems from that.
Now, I think Peertube could retrofit that and benefit from it. I’ve seen discussions that it doesn’t improve as much as other ActivityPub platforms because videos are so big few end up making instances of them. But as musics are so much smaller, uploading them could give Peertube a boost in interest.
And instance-wise, there could be instances focused solely on musics, or akin to Bluesky and Piefed, that offer lists that group channels/profiles/etc. based on common subjects.
Also I know other instances can display Peertube contents, so maybe playlists that propagate through ActivityPub could be made too to work as some sort of radio?
Having music in peertube would be nice, but I think the artist would have to have some kind of paywall or a Patreon…
Perhaps use something like CrowdBucks?
https://www.crowdbucks.fund/auth
https://wedistribute.org/2025/08/introducing-crowdbucks/
https://www.youtube.com/c/Crowdbucks
They just demoed at the 2025 Fedicon.
https://bsky.app/profile/wedistribute.org/post/3lwsvp3t6j22h
You can also fork it
https://bsky.app/profile/wedistribute.org/post/3lwsvp3t6j22h
Here is the official website:
https://crowdbucks.org/