State of the Station Update October 2024
The state of the station from the perspective of the listener and contributing artists is 19/21 platypus at a garden party enjoying fabulous sandwiches and rising!
Listenership has been consistently outstanding and growing across all the music channels. You all absolutely LOVE the Comfy channel and I can't blame you.
Participation in live events throughout our second year has been truly amazing and uplifting. We've done quite a bit this year and we are currently in another nice run of events with quite a few more on the drawing board before the end of the year.
We now have over 400 and growing artists active in the station catalogue and with further writers, announcers, readers, other content makers, advisors and patrons we are well over 500 strong embedded in the streams you are hearing! RFF exists to be a point of discovery, a rally point for community, and a jump off point to go and directly communicate with and support the amazing talent and friends you find. But you are all not just talented but so cogenial and supportive which sadly all feels a bit rare in the modern interweb. Stay amazing out there friends!
THIS IS WHAT COMMMUNITY SOUNDS LIKE!
The amount of positivity and support flowing to, between and amongst artists, listeners and friends is truly the thing that keeps me fighting to not hit delete on the servers when it feels beyond overwhelming. This kind of organic interaction, collaboration and positive spirit, a pillar of our project ethos to try and rally and normalise, transcends the fungible metrics and growth at all cost and the vapid fake number goes up attitudes. Those attitudes and platforms of the walled gardens, corporate silos and even the fedibro tech “leaders” almost always hurt independent and marginalise artists and users alike.
I love seeing it out there in the feed when RFF gets tagged or folks tell me about lovely experiences of support, collaboration and other positive fuel for independent creatives to survive, keep creating and hopefully maybe even thrive.
I can't possibly see all these things, and I don't have to. I know they are going on out there. They can't all be quantified either. That makes the very organic and lovely things those of us here embrace rather unimportant or invisible to the clout cannons, tech “leaders” and unhuman platform norms many of us are trying to avoid when looking for a supportive and engaging community.
These organic and human examples of support and care are the very thing that keeps me from ending the project even on my darkest days because I never know when that next discovery or connection is going to be made via RFF or the adjacent community that will lead to some support, collaboration, creation or joy for my creative cousins out there. Stay vertical.
The stark reality is that after almost throwing in the towel after the new year, the lone hamster sprinting in the wheel has tried during this second year of RFF operation to engage others for help to make the project less of a bus factor but sadly, aside from great resonance with the small things out there in the feed that we all absolutely should very much keep doing, this has been quite difficult at the core functional guts of the project level.
Work addressing RFF sustainability
In recent months a number of excellent artist colleagues have been listening and helping me with mapping out what work I do, what community services we might try to retain and maintain, and what additional things we might build or achieve with at least a team for advising support if not also spreading more workload.
We have achieved some success with team coverage and crossover support for basic community event management, promotion and moderation for things such as live streams.
We have made progress on refreshing the pool of consented written works to soon have our refreshed list of community readers get onto. This creates more work for editing, cleaning and processing but we do have some team help for that as well. This effort will refresh theNews and theTraffic on teh Main channel as well as add more content to the new Word channel for non music that we are testing.
I have been working on extending the artist database to be more accurate and helpful. We have volunteers for some data cleaning and gathering tasks to be undertaken. I've had help cutting in some code to be able test new functionality around these efforts to do as much as we can to foment more, better and easier discovery and support for independent artists!
I've met with a pile of other music and promotion and fedi adjacent or present projects recently in the hopes to build some network of mutual motivation and hopefully find kindred spirits that are unapologetically pro artist, who know we can't all be all the things, shouldn't all be reinventing every the wheel, and might ideally work together to build layers of discovery for for the actual benefit of independent creatives, not skimmers and scammers.
This was kind of a grim exercise to be honest for many reasons I won't expound here, but I have at least tried. There will be some small progress soon toward streamlining some repetitive things we as artists must endure when infinintely platform testing and hopping as well as some small steps toward better discoverability initiatives.
OK that's some of the news at least what I can manage to type at the moment.
Please keep submitting your music, writing, and voices. Please keep dropping in to discover amazing and talented artists from the digital neighbourhood that are only a tag or a DM away for encouragement, collaboration and via the artist chosen links we always provide, direct support if you have means!
Keep the positivity flowing in the feed. It is rocket fuel and it might keep someone going mentally, spiritually, creatively or quite literally materially. Keep helping to normalise supporting independent artists as directly as we can and as amiably and non judgementally as we can via the methods and the platforms artists can manage to navigate and maintain.
Kia kaha
Ngā mihi me te aroha nui
dj Hamster G
Please read on only if you have a deep and sincere interest in understanding some of the backstage need for help in real and durable time or a very ethical and community friendly pivot to sustain the project and people health fiscally for less extreme volunteerism.
Otherwise, keep listening to the streams and I'll do my best to keep some form of RFF transmitting in solidarity with our creative cousins. While some of the work we are achieving above is very positive indeed it is still overwhelming and unsustainable for the core maintainer even if they were in good health.
Thank you friend for being here.
I want to apologise if any recent comms slipped thru the cracks or my responses have been even worse grammar and typing then usual.
This is partly due to exceptional busy times with station events, tasks and new build initiatives plus serious personal circumstances degrading my abilities. I've fought to not let it stop RFF from existing but hit new levels of rock bottom recently for exhaustion, demoralisation and the project being unsustainable.
In addition to the multiple jobs that running the station and community services are, I've been trying to coordinate with a small group of artist colleagues toward a path to save RFF from sunsetting.
This work has been around identifying any tasks and processes that can help maintain existing RFF community services and expand general knowledge sharing and coverage to make the project less of a classic bus factor.
It is heartening to have skilled and trustworthy friends who understand the RFF points of difference for ethos, operation and vibes. Some have put their hands up to help, but it is still a heap of more work and challenges to train and coordinate other volunteers based on compounding schedules and availabilty if there is durable availability.
We are taking a train the trainer approach where we can and hope to build resiliance and redundancy this way.
It is a slow process and there is always space for more genuine offers of help from friends aligned with the ethos you should hopefully find and feel from the streams, the comunity feed, previous blogs and on our main site.
Many have asked what exactly they can do. It's been mapped out from tiny to regular bigger tasks in multiple formats on feed and in the blog, but the reality of present, available, durable help is quite the unicorn.
That's fair, everyone is busy or struggling themselves to survive so it's a big ask to try and get others to join me in the extreme volunterism that has been embedded in the community organising, intended quality and stance of the RFF project that I am honoured and humbled to hear has resonated deeply.
It has never really been doable alone so this is one last effort to find a path to sustain, grow, cut back or sunset. The project doesn't need money as far as keeping the lights on until March. That has never been a problem as the awesome community quickly rallies to sort that when asked. That is another reason the project hasn't ended for although the time commitments have always been wholly unsustainable I have never been out of pocket fiscally for technical infrastucture.
I want to thank the absolutely amazing and supportive artist colleagues and friends that have been there for me to plot, vent, laugh, scream, cry and all the things over the course of the RFF project. And my gratitude goes out to the small group that has assembled to try and find time to help in more ways to keep the project going, growing and to further support the hamster in attempting to facilitate and coordinate such help and project sustainability against an unfortunate set of circumstances for an amazing project that is a bit of a victim of its own success.
Do you love what RFF has been to you and to others and what it could continue to be or become?
Do you have durable time to commit to help the station survive and thrive? Do you have serious ideas for other resources or assistance.
Please try to respect some privacy and dignity in that I do not want to be even more personal in the public forum but do understand the situation is severe. There is no health or time available for reckons, further requests or demands on time, throwaway commentary etc.