( 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.

a community perspective on losing a federated conduit

( 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)

Some time overnight RFF HQ time, whilst we were having a rest, multiple instances including musician.social where the RFF main interactive account lives quite literally disappeared.

The basic synopsis is some very bad update flagging processes on a hosting provider did some wild overwriting completely blanking the instance.

Ok, that's not irreparable. No it shouldn't be but then something else went wrong with supposed tested backups through we think another provider making them apparently borked for some time having falsely reported on manual checks that they were regular and in good health. So yeah, wombo combo, literal wipe with no rollback state. yikes.

Upon being greeted with server downs this morning and then realising the instance was redeployed with the same name but on a new server/host/id and reading that yes all data was gone (didn't exist), the panic set in that the community conduit that has rallied to lift up each other was “razed to the ground” in a few CPU cycles.

Is the fedi account RFF? no. Were any other services that RFF are in control of affected? no. The music kept playing, we just lost the primary means to communicate with each other.

RFF is all of us and let us just say how in this crazy panic time how nice it was to reach out via alternate channels to some amazing and trusted sounding boards to figure out our options, and to see many of the RFF community help to get the word out as to what happened, how it was beyond our control and how so many were ready to help, organise and communicate as needed. Awesome!

So we scrambled to whiteboard:

-If our original instance had come back in a new install/location with the same name, what would be the ramifications getting back on the same name for existing relationship at all, asap, or after time if any relationships degrade based on other's federation rules?

-Where could we go to start fresh with reasonable and safe fediquette server federation that would still maximise our ability to see and support artists as far and wide as possible balanced with also not resource pummeling a small resource or hobby instance.

-How feasible to push for even more community support to standup a single user RFF instance with the irony that we could not reach the community. We were ready to burn some of the community infra fund if needed to act quick on this.

-And who was lined up to help with any of these options.

We are so thankful that we had friends ready to hear this frantic white boarding and help us with any and all of these options to make sure RFF didn't go away and/or came back stronger.

Was this demoralising, heck yes, was it also affirming of the kick ass folk that support this community, ALSO HECK YES. Did your hamster in a wheel need the stress while still working in alternative manners to get station stuff done after our local lappy failure, heck no.

Where we are at: Since the original instance name was brought back on a new host so quickly (credit to the admin), we decided on balance to risk any paradoxes, collisions or federated weirdness of putting our same account name on the new version of the instance and see if any followers restored.

There are still some server settling in, federation, images, etc issues to calm.

All old posts are gone! Whereas you can still see them to some level as posts stored out on federated servers, they are now dead links if you try to browse to original.

We have plenty of our own backups locally and out here on the blog to recreate important pinned posts and things going forward. Just be advised all older posts are effectively gone as federated copies degrade.

We will have lost any music submission DMs from the past 4 or so days that had not been finalised into a station update so please re-send if that was you.

We have lost a few follows from the past week or two. We have used the RFF follow file to get back many but that also may need some time and/or manual sleuthing to get back to where it was.

We sadly also lost any DMs from perspective visual artists from the recent post asking for contributors for backing imagery for the video channel so we will resend that when things settle.

We have been testing and workshopping how to be able to side channel communicate with the RFF contributor community and this incident has galvanised that need, not just for discussing new content and station initiatives but also mobilising for other things like today's event in a less public than fedi posts and more tidy than lost in hundreds of DMs.

A surprising ~80% of station friends have popped up again as followers as federation reconnected with the new server.

However, we are still missing at the time of posting about 600 friends from previous followers. No idea how many are lost in queues, need more time, or may never automatically line back up. Just us posting going forward and you all interacting should help get more of these accounts aligned.

**So we could use your help getting the word out that folk may need to un and/or re follow @radiofreefedi@musician.social **

Sorry for the disappearance especially after we'd recently been struggling to keep up with station initiatives and updates due to personal gear and life troubles.

Let's get back to the music and as always how to listen, contribute, help is at: https://radiofreefedi.net

With your continued support we hope to keep showing how kick ass it is to support fedi artists!

Keep lifting each other up and stay awesome out there friends.

Kia ora rawa atu

Kia kaha

#radioFreeFedi

or I was washing the dog 17 minutes ago and missed an awesome song's information

---

** Update January 2024 ** We've deployed a new and testing now playing account, @rff@nowplaying.radiofreefedi.net to our own server for a number of reasons. It's in our sphere of influnce, it's not Mastodon Inc TM PP esq, it's discrete single user server so mute/blocks might less overly affect us or others. Most importantly, we can make all posts public meaning if you do follow or List mode the account, hashtags will be searchable unlike our current throttled account on botsin.space. We will leave that one working in parallel until we are confident the new setup is durable.

#RFFplays is tagged on all three channels' output. #RFFmain , #RFFcomfy and #RFFspecialty are tagged only on their corresponding channels' posts.

The probable use case is follow, mute, unmute when you want to hashtag search or temporarily get a chain of awesome artists to check out.

Or just reference the public feed as needed without following.

Or you might pin a “List” with this account to your web interface and “Hide posts from home” timeline option ticked. Hashtags will be searchable in this mode but posts will not blow up your home timeline!

Yes it would be convenient for those doing the follow, temporarily unmute or the List method to have the fedi accounts in a hot @ format. This is an intentional omission to not force muting or annoyance upon the artists, and imporatantly because we also use that field as a valid and helpful link to the artists in muliple places that need a proper url not a fedi @ handle.

---

Of course there is always recently played artist information and links for each channel on the main website radio free fedi

We show linked now playing on all three channels on our community video channel so it's available no matter what channel is simulcasting or having a chat hangout.

And we keep about 1.5 days worth of tracks as csv txt files, also with artist support and fedi links for each of the three channels. You might find this handy as well for contextual finding something you missed, or just as another tool for discovery. These are also linked on the main site under each channel:

main channel np txt | comfy channel np txt | specialty channel np txt

If you have a need or idea to help the community for ingesting some now playing or recent played data that does not break our ethos or artist and listener consent and agency, we are happy to try and help.

Keep fedi weird.

Lift each other up.

Support fedi artists!

#radioFreeFedi

Noho ora mai

This is the current block times and vibes for the rotating theme specialty channel of #radioFreeFedi

UPDATED 26 SEPTEMBER 2024. We will keep this updated as things shift or are added.

EXPERIMENTS IN RFF – 0000, 1000, 1700 UTC experimental, avant, counterpoint, drone, noise, sampling, collage, sculpture, avant spoken, power electronics, generally weird, might well contain conflicting sounds or harsh frequencies side

RFF IN THE ATMOSPHERE – 0100, 1100, 1800 UTC ambient, soundscape, atmospheric, epic, orchestral, soundtrack, space, more floating or rhythmic than beat orientated

RFF SINGS – 0200,1200, 1900 UTC not an instrumental in sight, from the diverse voices of RFF with eclectic sonic underpinnings. Pull up a chair it's story time. Vocals, singer songwriter, storytelling, piano, folk, electronica, eclectic whimsy, all voice focused.

RFF CHIPS N DIPS – 0300, 1300 casio jams, chiptunes, 8bit, 16bit, all the bits, bleeps and boops, chirpy synths, gaming sound, anime sound, vocaloid sound

RFF IS GONNA ROCK YOU – 0400, 1400, 2000 UTC yo dawg we heard you guitar the guitars!, all uptempo rock, metal, industrial rock, punk, power pop, a bit heavier fair with a plethora of riffs

RFF SYNTHETIC – 0500, 0800, 2200 UTC synthpop, synthwave, cyberwave, vapourwave, new wave, new new wave, such synth very wave

NHAM MONTHLY MIXTAPE RFF EXCLUSIVE – 0600, 2100 UTC RFF exclusive monthly announced and curated show featuring fedi and independent artists from outside the walled gardens. New monthly episodes will premiere on the 1st of each month at 2100 UTC on the Specialty channel and also that premiere slot will be simulcast out to our video and chat channel for a regular and always fun hangout with the RFF community and artists. Then the show plays daily at 0600 and 2100 UTC for the month so there are ample chances to hear the lovingly crafted selections to fun and light hearted themes. The NHAM Mixtape series by Sam @ethicalrevolution@climatejustice.social

RFF NEW MUSIC BOAT – 0700, 1600 UTC AHOY! Get onboard for a block highlighting some of the newest releases featured on RFF. Only the newest releaes. Wildly diverse and eclectic, mostly following the vibe of the main channel so as not to completely rip the paint off the wall. Although you will encounter all possible genres in the generally friendly RFF waters of the NEW MUSIC BOAT.

CLUB RFF – 0900, 1500, 2300 UTC BEATS, techno, dnb, EDM, EBM, house, industrial dance, electro, hip-hop

how to listen: https://radiofreefedi.net

see also the Specialty channel lore and origin

a wild new channel appears

( 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 RFF Specialty channel expands our mission to promote and discover independent artists by offering a slightly more genre or thematic option for “scheduled” listening for the RFF community.

There will be hour long blocks of loosely related “genres”. These themes are rotated throughout the day to give multiple chances to catch something you are keen for and each time a block plays it is 100% randomly populated from affiliated tracks. We envisage more themes could be added such as long form spoken word or readings. For now we have leveraged the best we can, what the community has offered.

These themes are meant to absolutely include overlapping works from the main and Comfy channel, but also showcase MORE works from outside that set, and more diverse and more specific as well as longer formats!

Our hope is that this provides a part-time light version of a more targeted or focused discovery to alternatively drop in and discover but not quite be a set and forget full-time of any genre.

As mentioned in multiple State of the Station reports, RFF will never be 10 specific genre channels as end points for consumption. We will also will never be hyper algorithm'd or on demand playlists. As a volunteer community service we can neither afford that model nor want to pull focus from the discovery emphasis for our community of independent artists. We will always be an absolutely community driven, non-commercial, free form, stream only delivery that celebrates consent and agency of artists and listeners.

The Specialty channel has been a monstrously big undertaking and will be the absolute most curation we can undertake as a volunteer community service.

RFF encourages you to drop in, discover and LEAVE to go interact with artists and support them on their platforms! We want you to step out of your wheelhouse a bit and embrace new to you art. However, we hope having a way to be even more inclusive and promote even more material with this slightly tighter scoped option will be an awesome extension of the RFF community.

The programming block themes rotate at approximately the top of each hour (2-3 min window explained at bottom of this post) and are indicative of what the community of artists has offered to date:

EXPERIMENTS IN RFF – 0000, 1000, 1700 UTC experimental, avant, counterpoint, drone, noise, sampling, collage, sculpture, avant spoken, power electronics, generally weird, might well contain conflicting sounds or harsh frequencies side

RFF IN THE ATMOSPHERE – 0100. 0600, 1100, 1800 UTC ambient, soundscape, atmospheric, epic, soundtrack, space, more floating or rhythmic than ultra beat orientated

RFF SINGS – 0200, 0700 ,1200, 1900 UTC not an instrumental in sight, from the diverse voices of RFF with eclectic sonic underpinnings. Pull up a chair it's story time. vocals, singer songwriter, storytelling, piano, folk, electronica, eclectic whimsy, all vocal focused.

RFF CHIPS N DIPS – 0300, 1300, 2000 casio jams, chip tunes, 8bit, 16bit, all the bits, bleeps and boops, chirpy synths, gaming sounds, anime sound, vocaloid sound

RFF IS GONNA ROCK YOU – 0400, 1400, 2100 UTC yo dawg we heard you guitar the guitars!, all uptempo rock, metal, industrial rock, punk, power pop, chunky riffs and wah wahs

RFF SYNTHETIC – 0500, 0800, 1500, 2200 UTC synthpop, synthwave, cyberwave, vapourwave, new wave, new new wave, such synth very wave

CLUB RFF – 0900, 1600, 2300 UTC BEATS, techno, dnb, EDM, EBM, house, industrial dance, electro, hip-hop

These blocks will give you a rotating scheduled option to tune in for a more specific sound if that is your jam. This gives a bit more leeway to include more tracks from the community of artists on Main/Comfy and since people will tune in knowing what the block's vibe is and have choice, it provides a better venue for wilder sounds and longer run times.

Everything about submissions for the specialty channel is just as the others, we still will try to introduce artists to the station via the Main/Comfy channels if possible, still manually screen and process for relative sound attributes, data accuracy and the trust and ethos RFF hopes to uphold to avoid harm and untoward actors.

The main and comfy channel will always remain the same weird and wonderful drop in and discover community/college radio vibe. The new specialty channel gives us a place for future special programming from the community to be determined that will not break the core function and vibes of the Main and Comfy feeds! This could easily simulcast to our video channel for interactive chat etc. Special fedi artist related programming from the community, release parties, performances, Q+A's, roundtables, tutorials, interviews, long form spoken word, performances...

What do you want to bring to your 24/7 #fedi #community #radio ?

Thank you all for your support and aroha to the station and to each other!

No matter if you are an artist contributing music, a fedizen contributing station reads, a listener supporting artists materially or with a kind word, or any of the amazing multi-directional collaboration, promotion and support we have had the joy to witness between all of the above, radio free fedi is YOUR community station.

If you aren't already listening right now, go and listen and discover!

Keep fedi weird!

Support fedi artists!

https://radiofreefedi.net

RFF Specialty Extended Remix Behind the Sausage errr Music:

Another huge thank you to the community patrons that have made it possible to keep extending RFF's ability to experiment and expand ways to maximise promotion and discovery for the amazing pool of fedi talent sometimes hiding in plain sight. There is no way we could have funded the infrastructure to sustain this project much less expand the service to the community without you.

And to everyone who has had patience with our physical inability to laser focus on every communication or request and to anyone who has offered words of support for our volunteer running in the hamster wheel of this effectively full-time job, THANK YOU.

Some new channel specific thoughts and pardon our dust issues.

We have endeavoured to massage the station management system to as close as possible rotate themes in hourly blocks. We are balancing trying not to have tracks extend too far into the next hour when you are expecting a different theme while also not cutting off tracks just because the top of the hour hits.

Therefore you may find a theme may end/start within 2-3 minutes either side of the top of the hour. We have hacked as hard as we can and this seems the best balance to get this channel launched and not dis an artist by cutting away or harshing a theme too much by hearing a thing you didn't tune in for.

In it's early days we may have gotten a few tracks not quite right for vibe and we will do our best to tidy up as these are heard, bearing in mind we have been working through ~1000 tracks that were baseline in the system for Main and Comfy as well as >2000 submitted to date tracks overall to select more to go into the specialty channel playlists. The difference is not because of omission , but rather because of manually selecting indicative tracks rather than blindly dumping whole album submissions into an autoplay.

The Main and Comfy channels are and will always be the core of the station! There is nothing wrong with them and despite the occasional variably motivated protestor, we respect the overwhelming appreciation of the model. In mapping themes for the specialty channel we hope we have carefully considered what can be helpful as an extension to the service while keeping the importance of Main and Comfy at the fore. That is why the specialty themes are mostly quite pronounced, meaning if it's a bit more jangly rock, light alt rock, trip hop, chill, downtempo, pop tinged, etc it can be primarily showcased on Main and Comfy and/or there is just not the depth of submissions to sustain a theme block yet.

Here are some use cases that we reckon have served the community well to date and will still apply to having a loose run time cap for the Main and Comfy channels:

• you have limited time to tune in, we want to avoid you only hearing two artists in a half hour session, and maximise discovery for the contributing artists

• for our many neurodiverse friends we want to avoid overwhelming and make it easier to stick around or know they can drop back in shortly if something is uncomfortable but hopefully not uncomfortably long

• and for general comfort of ALL who are hopefully more inclined to stick around even if a single track is not their cup of tea, because they can rest assured something different is coming in a few minutes. This not only helps with listener expectations and willingness to discover but helps us present more artists toward our mission of being a fun promotion and discovery layer to generate love and support for independent fedi artists!

We love independent artists AND each other so we work hard to find community supporting balance in every facet of our operating ethos. Huge gratitude to the artists that have not so much come along for the ride but rather gathered in such awesome solidarity showing there is so much support and respect out there and that art isn't a competition.

While we do things a little slower, organically and a little outside the box, it is always with the hope of doing right by the beautiful community that has formed around this project with the core of helping promote independent fedi artists and acting as a transient layer to spark communication and support directly to artists.

Going forward we hope to always maintain the community trust and love we are trying to amplify regardless of external pressures because as a community we owe no one a platform, but we do endeavour to show everyone the most empathy and support we can muster.

Keep lifting each other up and stay awesome out there friend.

Heoi anō tāku mō nāianei Kia ora rawa atu

#radioFreeFedi

Welcome to radio free fedi and thanks for dropping in to discover amazing independent fedi artists. You can find many helpful posts on our main masto account and long form expansion and context on how things are going or get going here on this blog.

Here is some helpful information on how to listen to RFF.

The easiest thing to do is visit https://radiofreefedi.net and you have multiple options.

On our site: Hit play on one the embedded web players available for each station. That's it, a single javascript solely on our local domain is used to update the now playing and recent artists information for your discovery delight and so you can communicate with and as directly as possible support the artists you find.

In your media players: Please note there are links listed for each channel listed on our website that you may use in your local media player of choice such as VLC or MPV etc.

As players and systems vary wildly you can use https versions of our links but if you are having trouble with a feed playing or receiving good song info you might try changing the link to just http.

Here is a playlist file for VLC etc with all four channels using http links as listed on our site.

Other apps and sites: We are listed in the very large and open radio-browser directory of radio stations and streams. This directory provides a standard for third party sites and apps to search all the listed stations.

You should be able to use almost anything on this list and just search for “radiofreefedi.net” and be all good. As these are third party sites and apps, we can't guarantee their excellence or durability 100%, just that they are a way to get the original stream delivered by RFF in other ways you may use especially mobile.

I have no idea why there are so many damned duplicate entries in the radio-browser listings. I was super careful depricating old public streams and submitting new relays to have one clean listing per channel. Somthing glitchy with their directory, or something rogue, or some “helpful” individuals have created a hot mess but so long as you see a relay dot radioferefedi dot net as a prefix, that is the current public stream source for all our channels.

Chat Hangouts, Video Simulcast, Special shows/events: Our Owncast server, thanks to good sorts at @owncast@fosstodon.org simulcasts at https://party.radiofreefedi.net when we are not live with chat turned on for a moderated chat hangout, of for special listening parties and commuity performances and events.

Other listener and RFF community made options

Roku: RFF contributing artist and friend of the station @limebar@mastodon.social enjoys listening in the lounge and made a Roku app

MPD: @neil@mastodon.neilzone.co.uk has posted about a simple conversion to m3u for personal MPD player usage

---

For sharing now playing information to facilitate interacting with and supporting fedi artists, we have various web pages, json, csv and a now playing bot @rff@nowplaying.radiofreefedi.net for all channels. Reach out via DM on the station account if we can be of help.

If you are interested in offering more options to access the unaltered RFF streams AND show real-time artist support, contact and license info we are totally onboard with helping when we can to provide station info for ingesting.

Our website, owncast site, now playing bot, and as many other places as we can show data that is not generally passed around by radio streams such as artist fedi link, artist support link and artist license. Our entire mission is to be a discovery layer, not an end-point for consumption. We WANT you to go away (so to speak) and interact with artists on fedi which has proven to be a powerful fuel for creativity, collaboration and drive. And we want you to support independent artists on the whatever platforms they can manage being on if you can be at all amiable.

KEEP SUPPORTING EACH OTHER AND FEDI and INDIE ARTISTS

and keep fedi weird

this is your 24/7 fediverse #community #radio #radioFreeFedi

Kia ora rawa atu

( 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)

OK Team, something light and fun. Do you wanna rep RFF to everyone standing over your shoulder or on that jitsi call you are sharing your desktop to? Well good news fam, here are some 1080p radio free fedi wallpapers for you to rock out with and/or curate a comfy desktop.

RFF tower logos are all by awesome friend of the station @RobCubbon@mastodon.art

Enjoy!

how to listen/submit/contribute: https://radiofreefedi.net

KEEP SUPPORTING EACH OTHER AND FEDI ARTISTS

and keep fedi weird

this is your 24/7 fediverse #community #radio #radioFreeFedi

Kia ora rawa atu

Born of a fever dream wish it into being challenge from a fedi friend, radio free fedi was a classic smell of an oily rag let's get it going and see what happens after that kind of story.

#StateOfTheStation

The reality

We appreciate the patience and love so many of you have shown in helping us to navigate how the sometimes overwhelming levels of communications and noise we need to organise and manage which can impact our ability to respond or act immediately. The reality for us as a single, disabled and IRL unwaged volunteer is that our daily tasks require a great deal of coping mechanisms and grouping of tasks that includes:

managing submissions, editing/cleaning/recording voice content, adjusting music submissions that may not meet basic format clarity or level thresholds, cleaning track meta data, cleaning imagery, adding extended meta for every single track with fedi link/support link/license so that multiple services/sites can ingest and highlight, all artist and station communications, ALL customer service inquiries, ad-hoc community support, vetting new contributors to not platform any fascists etc, previewing and queuing station adds, playlist programming for both channels, multiple website management, reviews, interviews, archive blog, care and feeding and maintenance for multiple server platforms, development and tuning for systems, station expansion planning, balancing costs, catering, other duties as required...

The great news:

As we have stated before, RFF would not be “on the air” or growing such amazing organic connections amongst artists and listeners and supporters were it not for some amazing patrons who love the vibe and love their fellow fedizens and independent artists. The bare minimum to keep the lights on is funded until NOV/DEC 2023. Awesome!

As a community we have not only helped each other with artist promotion and instigated fiscal and real world support out there for the contributing artists but also generated an incredible amount of love, support and goodwill that while it cannot buy groceries, is a strong fuel to carry on and create. The amazing support of all kinds including emotional from listener to artist, artist to listener, artist to artist, listener to listener has been an absolute honour to have had even the smallest part in facilitating.

The less great news:

The volunteer has no personal resource to cover any gaps so there may be some tough decisions on the horizon. In terms of content and news and updates and community events we want to do all the things but we cannot afford the time and there is sometimes a lack of understanding of how much free stuff can cost.

If the community rallies to cover the non-human costs, we will do our best to carry on. Given the scope and scale and spoon count and the collective desire to do more cool stuff that has proven to massively resonate with the community, there may begrudgingly but certainly in line with our community driven ethos be a separate support mechanism for the human at some point. Again, community willing.

Until then, we keep sending out positive vibes and try our best to expand the ways we can walk the walk as a non walled garden, non-commercial, consent and agency promoting, as transparent as possible discovery platform that invites, nay encourages listeners and supporters to leave it and interact with and support fedi artists!

Rationale

RFF launched end of Jan 2023, we received our first donation in Feb 2023. We are therefore mapping things to try and survive the first year meaning FEB-FEB. At time of this post we are funded until ~DEC 2023 and about $80 short of making it a year. Infra costs have already gone up when we added the comfy channel and our next expansion will shrink how far we are funded.

For anyone casting any doubt on the intentions or ethos, THE SOLE VOLUNTEER building, managing, running all operations and community work for RFF has taken zero donations, rather have tried to commit to securing infrastructure stability for a stable time into the future.

RFF would have been folded up early in if not for the amazing community of patrons (some also contributing artists) who have covered the infrastructure costs that are very reasonable but not doable for said volunteer. We are posting this for transparency and a reference as needed if there is any question of what we are trying to accomplish with limited resource and solely community driven.

money money money money......MONEY

We always want the focus to be on the music, not about any human curator or algorithm or platform, or hyper curated dead-end consumption experience. We are dead serious when we say, drop in and discover, and, support fedi artists!

All figures in $NZD

RFF annual expenses if no cost increases and prior to pending JUL expansion ($NZD) $26 Domains $208 Public facing streaming servers $104 Static public facing sites' hosting $364 virtual servers for station management systems, storage, drop/sharing

TOTAL expected annual infra costs: $702

Donations: $136.00 LP (liberapay) to date $256.00 Ko-fi to date $75.00 Other $158 LP promised

Total in to date: $625.00 Projected annual over/under: –$77.00

VOLUNTEER HOURS JAN 220 FEB 212 MAR 160 APR 100 MAY 80 JUN 56 JUL 168 projected (will be more due to expanding services)

TOTAL HOURS TO DATE: 996

OK, let's get back to finding more ways to promote amazing fedi artists eh?

how to listen/submit/contribute: https://radiofreefedi.net

this is your 24/7 fediverse #community #radio #radioFreeFedi

Heoi anō tāku mō nāianei Kia ora rawa atu

( please do not boost or follow here, this is only a long form reading and archive reference. Please follow and interact with us at @radiofreefedi@musician.social )

Artists supporting artists.

Listeners supporting artists.

Listeners supporting listeners.

Artists supporting listeners.

Fedizens supporting fedizens!

We've said it before but here it is again. It is truly amazing seeing and hearing of all kinds of mutual love and support organically traveling out there from you all.

As artists of diverse means and situations fiscal support is of course always appreciated because cause paying the grocer is needed. We hope RFF is a useful discovery layer for this where possible.

But do not underestimate the power we all have for a kind or supportive word.

When you hear something new to you and it resonates and you take a moment to drop a note to an artist you are a force multiplier of energy and GOOD that is hard to quantify but fair to say HUGE and often reciprocal.

It is hard to avoid much of the latest dramas in social media and the fedi.

What we will say is we are so amazed for the community that has formed to lift up RFF and each other.

Do we put energy into promoting each other? YES.

Does that equate to or need the vices, traps and negative fogs of clout cannon influencer culture and anti independent artist walled gardens? NO!

This is what the fedi and RFF is to us and we are so happy so many of you have come along for the ride.

Here's to keeping fedi weird and full of support and amazing organic collab and discourse.

Everyone can contribute here. Artists of any genre submit your work. Anyone can submit fun IDs or do reads from our scripts. Huge thanks to the patrons both public and anonymous that keep the lights on. And everyone has the power to lift each other up. We've seen it heaps and it is AWESOME!

Have a kick ass and/or comfy weekend. Enjoy the tunes and each other.

how to listen/submit/contribute: https://radiofreefedi.net

KEEP SUPPORTING EACH OTHER AND FEDI ARTISTS

and keep fedi weird

this is your 24/7 fediverse #community #radio #radioFreeFedi

Heoi anō tāku mō nāianei Kia ora rawa atu

( please do not boost or follow here, this is only a long form reading and archive reference. Please follow and interact with us at @radiofreefedi@musician.social )

Music updates are weekly or fortnightly and based on flow of submissions and mostly IRL pressures and stresses. The whole midweek update post idea is often bleeding more toward weekend. We recognise there is a decided lull in fedi activity on the weekend, but it is what it is.

#StateOfTheStation

We've rebuilt the nowplaying interface on the website which expands the comfy channel recently played to the same depth as the main channel and moved a few things around and softened some of the pain hopefully. We literally hadn't looked at it or had time to think about it since launch in February. Doh!

We posted recently that we have cruised past 2000 friends and 200 contributors and climbing almost every day. Awesome!

We have seen a number of amazing collabs kick of from fedizens finding fedizens and some via radio free fedi. And even more rad, we are now getting to put into rotation on the station some of the outputs of the collabs. Totally awesome! The collab between Lehto and Socool we've been spinning in advance of their EP release this month is so so good. There is so much talent on the fediverse hiding in quiet corners. Let's shout it all a little louder eh?

The fediverse focused publication wedistribute is back and released a nice writeup on our little community project and some of the feels of listening to radio free fedi. https://wedistribute.org/2023/06/radio-free-fedi/

Thanks to the amazing group of patrons that have rallied to RFF and a few new friends joining that effort, our infrastructure is sustainable for months to come. While it is hard some weeks to donate the time we'd like for developing and keeping the station going, content gathering and review, community management, editing, data entry etc etc etc, when that monthly bill comes for the servers it is nice to report that we feel zero existential dread in that respect at least. So thank you to our patrons.

https://radiofreefedi.net/#shouts

It wouldn't be a thing without you as we would have pulled the plug for costs some time ago, and instead we are out here making amazing connections for and with artists and listeners. Awesome!

We've received multiple new station IDs and new spoken word micro fiction from a fedizen collab writer/reader team that organically formed around a fedi interaction. Awesome!

Artists you are doing pretty darn good at letting us know when you have a new release, single, EP, album, collab etc and often sending them our way for advance play which is so cool! Please keep that up. We see chatter out there that there are definitely regulars who notice and call out new stuff from artists they previously discovered on RFF which is guess what...AWESOME!

Everyone, if you want to hear more of something, send it in, or encourage artists you know and/or love to submit.

The response to the csv file for easy masto and derivative import of the RFF artists list was overwhelmingly positive. This is great for networking and promotion and is why we make sure you are ok with and give us a public fedi ID. it's a great way to catch up and add as the station adds, or pare down as you find artists that jam your way.

https://radiofreefedi.net/following_radioFreeFediContributors.csv

We update this file every single batch of station updates, as well as the txt list of every artist with their links and licences on the website, and we have started shouting out by tagging new artist adds and existing artists new song adds in the regular station update posts.

We were recently called corporate/commercial and anti diverse due to our rough time limit guideline? We hope anyone that tunes in for a few minutes or reads the website or a couple of posts will get that the entire mission is to promote going AWAY from RFF straight to the artists and supporting them. The intention of keeping things neighbourly in length is to provide more diversity for the drop-in and discover experience. As in previous state of the station reports, we cannot afford the time or infrastructure to provide hyper curated genre end points for dead-end consumption. That's antithetic to the weird, wild, fun and diverse discovery experience of your fediverse community radio. That being said if you have long form work or very experimental long loop or drone kinda stuff and don't mind providing an excerpt, the bottom of the hour theTrafficReport is an awesome place we'd like to highlight more sound collage and excerpts of other long form stuff.

If there is ever a lag in response time or we get a bit of data wrong, we apologise, please reach out via DM and we appreciate your love and patience as this thing grows and grows. We are a lone hamster in a wheel.

We have had quite a few folk reach out to do station IDs, station read, or reads of materials we have ready for TheTrafficReport and TheNews segments but not submit. We would love for a variety of fedi voices to be included in this way. Don't be shy, DM the station for info, we have script outlines and material ready to help you and some new writers have also appeared.

Reminder that our playlist bot @radiofreefedi@botsin.space account is unattended so try not to DM it on accident. It's name has BOT in the front of it. Please do use it as a reference if you were washing the dog and could not look at the screen 27 minutes ago to get links for an amazing artist you heard!

And you did it, it's the end of the message. Stay awesome out there!

how to listen/submit/contribute: https://radiofreefedi.net

KEEP SUPPORTING EACH OTHER AND FEDI ARTISTS

and keep fedi weird

this is your 24/7 fediverse #community #radio #radioFreeFedi

Heoi anō tāku mō nāianei Kia ora rawa atu