Funkwhale Wants to Filter Out Far-Right Music
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.
I support that fight against Nazi content, but hard-coded blacklists in a open-source Fediverse software? Something is off here.
Hope they find a better way. Make it the default behaviour, include it in all tutorials, defederate.
On the other hand, open-source software enables one to disable or edit those blocklists with a simple patch. It's just an extreme way of making it the default behavior, and therefore making their political statement stronger.
There might be a better way, but I'm not really concerned with this implementation.
Yeah I like being able to opt-in to a specific block list, or having it enabled by default but individual instances can disable it (more to neutralize bad faith arguments from trolls who want to normalize nazism), even though I want it effectively banned.
I thought funkwhale was dead. Well thats neat.
Also I think it'll be pretty interesting what they deem as alt-right. Lotta country music's gonna get banned.
i think they're only banning explicitly nazi and ws shit
So all I have to do to fuck with Funkwhale users is tag some popular artists on a different site?
It's like 6 or 7 tags that all have the word "nazi" or "white power" in the tag. As long as Sam Hunt tracks are not being encoded that way he should be good.
How decentralized is Funkwhale? Does everything go through their website, or do you host your own version and you get the music directly from the artists?
It's self-hosted. Originally, Funkwhale was an open source Grooveshark clone, where users uploaded music libraries to stream to various devices. A newer update introduced Channels, where artists could create their own profiles and upload their songs. So, Funkwhale kind of straddles a line between federating user libraries and artist uploads.
is it the app like lemmy or the servers moderated by diff people
Servers are hosted and operated by different admins.
Yeah, I don't even know how you would do that but if a platform I'm hosting and managing tries to tell me what content is or isn't permissable it's going in the bin.
Don't need some big brother crap on my system controlling what I do with my hardware.
they aren't controlling what you do, though. they're just refusing to enable far-right content. software isn't a natural right that is taken away when someone refuses to help you do what you want. it is a fruit of labor that enables you to do something you wouldn't be able to do otherwise
Right, but for them to do so requires a level of monitoring what you use and open piece of software for, which is unacceptable to me. If you had an old style mp3 player that refused to play certain songs it would be seen as broken at best. If that selection of songs got updated at the discretion of some third party you start walking into ministry of truth territory.
This is different from something like YouTube or whatever hosted service refusing to platform content, this would cross into directly controlling personal consumption by forced removal. We call it bad when people start banning books, but it's ok so long as it's our person selecting the bans?
The existence of Mien Kamph in a library's collection doesn't make the librarian a Nazi, and it doesn't force the content onto the public.
it’s going in the bin
oh no! anyway.
tell me what content is or isn’t permissable
Nazism being the content
@deadsuperhero Laughing in MONO 🔊
Are they blocking illegal content (such as content that promotes violence or issues threats) and content against the terms of service (like hateful, trolling, or disrespectful content)?
Or are they banning people based on their political beliefs or who they voted for, even if their content is not political in any way whatsoever?
And how are they defining alt right? A literal Neo Nazi? Or someone who voted Republican?
For the time being, it seems like they're primarily targeting White Supremacist and Neo-Nazi content, but it's one of those things where the scope could open up to include a lot of different music subgenres. That being said, the mechanism is purely genre-based, it doesn't directly target individual artists.
based on their political beliefs
Nazism being the political belief.
And how are they defining alt right?
It's music tags that literally have phrases like nazi or white power in the phrase.
The article does explain some of these. Look at the list of banned genres, it's literal neo-Nazism.