State of the Station Report August 2023

( please do not follow this account, this is for long form reading, expanded masto posts, specialty pages/posts and archive reference. Please follow and interact with us at @radiofreefedi@musician.social where we announce and link the material here)

The state of the station is exhausted. Just as we were assembling plans to dig out of our personal gear dilemma, the server our main account resides on was wiped out of existence by a hosting provider. We won't go over that again but if you need a debrief check out a anotomy of a dissapearance. We gained many new friends while you all helped post that we were back online around this incident which is awesome, but sadly with federation it is very hard to know how or why hundreds have not reconnected. #StateOfTheStation

OK onward!

Reminder the new Specialty channel is playing themed blocks with heaps more tracks you won't hear on the other channels expanding depth, length and diversity. Schedule yourself some strategic drop-ins.

RFF Calls to Action

  1. Keep listening, finding new artists to support materially and with kind words and be awesome.

  2. Don't be shy to tag #radioFreeFedi

  3. Many of you have and cheers for that, but could you try to reach out to any friends who might be a fedi musician about submitting material? There are many corners of the verse still to reach.

  4. Musicians have you thought about submitting and never have? how to submit

  5. Writers do you have poems, microfiction, short stories you'd like to read or have read by our announcer team? Fedizens would you like submit a fun station ID in your style/language/fedi persona? DM @radiofreefedi@musician.social

  6. Is there anyone out there that would like to assemble (resize, slideshow, merge, credit) visual material being submitted into backing video for the video/chat simulcast and/or help us collating material for full video programming? DM @radiofreefedi@musician.social

  7. RFF artists we have tools and initiatives for a number of new programming and event options and need to be able to gauge interest and feedback ahead of public posting. Can you please DM your matrix ID so we can invite you? ^1

  8. Do you have any contacts, means, ideas for reviews/interviews/posts from publications, podcasts, accounts, allies, anything that might like to amplify our community message and ethos of celebrating agency and consent and supporting independent fedi artists? Our head is always so far down in the operations of the station and the artist side of community management there is seldom spoons or oxygen for identifying other types of outreach.

  9. Artists, as above regarding head down making the sausage, it is very hard to traverse the verse and see all of your release schedules and plans. We stopped trying to do regular posts highlighting RFF artists releases, singles, albums, collabs, remixes whatever even if you hadn't submitted it for play. If you could please build in to your release plans notifying RFF that'd be wicked. Many of you have been doing advance preview on RFF which is amazing, but even if timed closer to release, please do keep submitting new works. We may have seen it coming but most weeks do not have the capacity to message out requesting.

We were admittedly trying to do a few too many things and many weeks RFF is a full-time job or two. Back to back and adjoining gear and fedi account disasters did not help.

The music will go on but we need to offload or share some tasks to keep improving the reach and impact the community can have for supporting fedi artists.

Keep fedi weird.

Support fedi artists!

Noho ora mai

Notes: ^1 The account loss incident made us think again about the absolute need for side channel for behind the scenes help and discussion on station initiatives, direction, and content planning as well as incidents like server burps, outages, or other useful things like artist mutual aid. This will hopefully to incorporate some new energy, help out the sole volunteer with feedback, and keep this discussion less public since it may involve projects, content, programming that may or may not eventuate based on the response of the contributor community. During onboarding we never asked for or required an email, and RFF was an absolute seat of the pants real-time have a go and see what happens experiment, so now we are faced with 280 artists, announcers, patrons, advisors and masto DMs just ain't the go to quietly reach this group. We tested multiple fedi group tools and they were neither private nor durable. A few weeks back we posted this when we deleted the group we did test rollout to the community, asked for emails as another option and received 2 of 240 artists. We can build in asking for email or matrix ID during onboarding new artists going forward but here we are for now. We have to have something so after much consideration as with everything, on balance we have a matrix room. The use case does not demand hyper privacy or self hosting as we are only talking about syncing promo for releases, new content initiatives, special events planning, and just needs to be outside of public posts. Artists if you can DM a matrix ID if you got one, that'd massive.