Logbook, week 2 (2018-50)

Written by funkwhale / blog — December 14, 2018

Development

This week developments have been focused the moderation tools, as last week. The work is going slowly, but I've started to implement the UI so I should have things to show you next week ;)

I could not spend as much time as usual on dev though, since I had to focus on various tasks outlined below.

Gitlab migration

The main reason I ordered a dedicated server for Funkwhale is that until last week, critical sites and tools for the project were still hosted on my personal infrastructure. I think it's important to have a clean separation between my personnal assets and the project ones.

Funkwhale can now leverage a dedicated server with enough resources to grow.

Hardware specifications for Funkwhale's new dedicated server

I've migrated our Gitlab instance, from code.eliotberriot.com to dev.funkwhale.audio which took me a full day, as it affected many components and sites (Funkwhale's wesite, contribute guides, documentation, CI runners, code repositories, etc.)

The migration is now complete, backups are in place, and I feel quite relieved it's done!

Ownership change for Open.audio

Open.audio is one of the only instances with open registrations. It was started a few months ago by the same person behind Mastodon.art, and offer hosting for Creative Commons content.

Curator contacted me two weeks ago, asking me if I wanted take ownership of the instance, as he wanted to focus on other tasks.

I've proceed to the migration on thuesday, and Open.audio is now hosted on the same physical server I mentionned earlier. From an end-user persective, this should not change anything at all: you can continue to enjoy the service and upload your Creative Commons content as before.

Screenshot of Open.audio landing page, on December 14th, 2018

For the project, however, this makes a big difference, because we now own a public instance were we can point people at and put content that will be accessible to anyone on the federation. We still have to figure out how to maintain and moderate this instance, and also ensure it does not become a Single Point of Failure (SPOF) in the network.

Thank you Curator for starting and maintaining this instance in the first place :)

Mirroring of the Free Music Archive

I've mentioned in a previous entry that there was an interesting thread about free music going on in the Fediverse. In this discussion, someone shared a link to the Free Music Archive (FMA), a collection of more than 100 000 thousands audio tracks under Creative Commons licenses.

The FMA was supposed to close, by lack of resources, and the content was mirrored on Archive.org to ensure it remained available even after.

Apparently, they found a way to survive, which is great news! But before I learn about that, since I had a brand new Funkwhale instance with Open.audio, and spare storage on the new server, I imported a third of the archive on Open.audio from the Archive.org mirror. That's approximatively 6500 albums for a total size of nearly 400GB, of all genres, carefully handpicked by the FMA curators!

Screenshot of Funkwhale's library with the FMA content

Mirroring the FMA on Open.audio serves multiple purposes:

Ensuring the recent developments on license handling in Funkwhale work as expected (apparently, they do ;)
Injecting public content on the federation, for everyone to reuse, to help the growth of the network (Send a follow to https://open.audio/federation/music/libraries/ce1fb6d4-fae6-464a-a34a-bdd46209ee82)
Providing an alternative way to access this content (in addition to the FMA and Archive.org own websites)

I'm not sure when I will import the remaining two thirds (it may require some additional storage), but it's in the todo list. If you're interested in doing this yourself, the code I used may be found here, and it should work with any Archive.org content (and not only audio).

Huge thanks to the FMA team and members for the work they are doing, and also to the people at Archive.org for setting up this mirror!

Personal

I feel like this second week went really, really fast compared to the previous one, I'm not sure why though. Maybe it's the fact I worked multiple tasks and did lot of system administration?

See you next week!

This article is under the CC-0 license.

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