ways you can help and participate
Often folks ask what they can do to help the independent creative community via RFF. That is hugely appreciated but there are a couple caveats that often present.
Often as with so many of us, the caveat is “but I don't have much/regular time”. There is not a lot of availabilty out there for regular and stable time commitments and that's fair.
RFF is for all the core behind the scenes work a sole volunteer, quick moving experimental project exploring durable community building in alternative social spaces. Often times we (RFF) aren't really sure if an idea will ever see the light of day proper so do not want to get hopes up advertising for help with it. And/or we (RFF) are also so snowed under that we haven't had the time to make time to try and separate out exact micro tasks for helping.
Here are smaller more digestible ideas, steps, actions we can do to help the community followed by more indepth time ideas as I try to pivot the project to be less susceptible to the bus factor.
We'll update, append, and edit this page as new ideas, projects and tasks take shape. We'll highlight a small task or action or an invite to larger more scoped tasks regularly in micro posts and in our chat.
Don't be overwhelmed by the list. Everyone doing a little thing, ripples big and it can be as simple as taking a moment to make a post in your own words about how or why you like to listen. Or your experience as an artist playing on RFF. It can be the small but mighty effort to drop a kind word to an artist you found via RFF or helping to reach new corners of the verse to instigate more submissions of music, writing and voice.
These are some ideas for relatively quick and low time cost force multipliers for good the community of artists and listeners has shared and spread to date. You can help us all as artists and community to keep growing connections and support.
If there are little things out there that you or others have done or received that are RFF adjacent and we might add to the list, please DM.
Mini Calls to Action:
First and foremost, keep listening, drop-in, discover and hopefully take a moment to follow, drop a kind word, spread the word about or materially support the awesome indie artists you've connected with.
Help get more people listening, maybe do a post in your own words about how you've discovered or connected with artists, listeners, collaborators, community or anything you have liked that might resonate with others. Feel free to mention @radiofreefedi@musician.social and/or tag #radioFreeFedi
More artists and contributors! Are you a music artist, short form writer, friendly voice, and haven't yet submitted? Please do. If you have any artists in your circles and can personally recommend RFF as a fun way to discover and connect with and amazing and supportive community of artist colleagues and community friends, please do!
More comfy. The comfy channel has proven to be exceptionally popular. It is very much a subset of the potential catalogue we receive so any help in growing diversity and depth would be well received by our many friends who love and lean on some comfy. If you have listened to the comfy channel and know the vibe and know of any fedi present artists that might fit the brief, please recommend RFF for them to consider submitting music
Station IDs and Announcements. You don't have to submit music to be on your fedi comunity radio and you don't have to be a music artist to drop a station ID. DM if you are interested in doing some voice reads. We have outlines and script ideas to help. We'd love to have many more Station IDs and reads in your style or language. Join the party.
Read the latest state of the station report.
Use our venues for your events. Would you like to hold your listening party, video premiere or live perfromance on our platforms, audio and video with chat? We can make it all quite turnkey for you. Or as a community supporter would you like to host a chat hangout on our video chanel synced to one of the channels or specialty blocks? DM the station!
Make a date to explore a themed block on our Speciatly channel. This is a way we can go a bit deeper and include longer run times from the contributing artists' catalogues since you are opting in for a “genre” adjacent listen. You will hear MANY more tracks that are not on the Min and Comfy channels. Daily block time options and links to their descritpions are on the main site.
While we enjoy the fediverse as a means for micro blogging and some other media and social interactions our primary play methods and the artist support links we happily and agnostically pass along are wholly universal and do not require any fedi presence. Sharing the RFF public website here or anywhere you post or mention is helpful and awesome. It is another great way to help with discovery and support for our community of independent artists.
DM the station if you might be able to assist as a help team for other artists. Occasionally an interested artist needs a bit of help navigating file conversion, audio meta tagging, transferring, storage etc and it is good if we (RFF) have some friends to ping to see if anyone is avialabe for such small advice or assists to our colleagues and friends. This is informal and friendly. It's also possibly not a bad idea to extend out artist dierctory with services offered in solidarity or more formally as well. The more interaction going on out there in this area will help.
DM the station if you want to help producing events such as video premiere partys, special event a/v packages, and more.
DM the station if you'd like to help with occasional data collection and artist liaison tasks. An example where this will be handy is we're hoping to make our artist directory better and searchable.
Project specific tasks and help requests:
If you have an unshakeble pro-artist stance, have had some time to absorb or resonate with the RFF community vibe and ethos and wish to contribute time so that we can grow and diversify the amazing creative and supportive community organically, here are some specific more tasks that would very much help provide some cover and maybe some space to breathe for the hamster.
Technical station engineering (servers servers servers) Is the command line your happy place? Are you comfy with the care and feeding of linux and various types of web servers, file drops, “fedi” servers (GTS, owncast, write.as, etc), docker, networking protocols, volumes, backups, streaming and broadcasting tools?
Time commitment is upfront in learning the existing topography and could be as a fallback for the hamster when he is down, assisting with live event simulcasting and crossovers etc, up to as much regular care and feeding, platform tweaking, migration and improvement as you would care to assist.
Audio Engineering Production of sound elements for the channels. Editing and cleaning non-music submissions to a “broadcast standard” and producing station assets. Editing and mixing together announements, voice pieces etc with station asset files like intros and identification into unified files.
Time commitment can be pretty low and on-call when there is a batch of material that needs worked. Skill level is audio production and engineering to some pretty basic specs.
Station managment (content) Learn our station manager backend. Primarily GUI based work for loading audio, updating track and artist tags, managing playlists.
We could try and coordinate a few friends learning this at the same time. For the outlay of time this will require, this should be a dedicated community member that wants to commit to long-term help. Time commitment for this is a few hours up front to learn the layout of the system and how to work with the libraries for all the channels. Skill level can be all GUI based web dashboard admin but confident with not touching dangerous things and learning and navigating the music library, metadata and playlist structures.
Development If you are down with building some things that are wholly inline with our community ethos there is always space to help expand our offerings. A current example that has been on the whiteboard for checks watch, 20 months, is a deeper and more interactive artist directory search. We love lean and mean, substance and comunity over bloat and flash. There are always possibilities for collaborating and integrating with other platforms and having some friendly and community focused dev types for talking out these things would also be of great value.
Data Team We have a few data collection and cleaning projects that will involved simply visiting artists' bios and pages to help assess and gather artists defined info such as genres to help make our artist directory more robust and searchable, Occasionally reaching out to artists to verify links or ask if they want their info updated on what RFF displays etc.
Time commitment will be bursts around regular data checking and cleaning intiatives and project based tasks. Skill level is friendly fedizen comfy in the feeds, a music fan and friend who can understand vibes artists are putting out, comfy with text gathering and spreadsheet fun times.
Artist Technical Advising Friend Team Be on call for when fellow artists might need some requested and gentle advising on tools and platforms such as audio file preperation, transcoding, tagging, options and help for uploading and privately sharing (RFF have our own drop), and other helpful pointing in handy direction type stuff.
New Release Monitor and Friend of the Artists Are you out there in the feeds, knees deep in music like every heckin day? Can you help be a conduit to point RFF at new releases we might not have seen. Many artists have made submitting to RFF part of their release process but for those that might not have, would you be confident and friendly enough to ask an artist who may already be on RFF if they'd like to submit their latest? If an artist hasn't previously submitted you might invite them to join the community.
Time Commitment as little or as much as you care to help keep an ear or an eye out onthe feeds. We'll have a simple process to make sure we aren't overlapping requests to artists and there are some well tested bullet list submission guides you can get comfy with and point to. Skill Level, a friendly fedizen with a keen interest in the music community, comfy with basic post navigation, text gathering and maybe some spreadsheet pasting fun times.
RFF Community News Team We are still exploring the mechanism or platform that we will use for a team (to be assembled) managed account separate from the main RFF fedi account. The idea will be a defined, known, opt-in place to follow where we can go full send on boosting artists posts, events, new releases, publications, adjacent helpful information for artists, mutual aid, etc etc.
Time commitment a few minutes per day or a few hours per week basically tasking off of exploring and scrolling you might already do. Skill level, comfy in the feeds and using various fedi front-ends for exploring, boosting, marking things of interest and collating friendly and well-formed posts as needed.
Work in progress started 06 May 2024. Updated 31 October 2024.
Thank you for your love and support for independent artists and for helping RFF as we try to catalyse and rally more of that durable community and support.
KEEP SUPPORTING EACH OTHER AND INDIE AND FEDI ARTISTS!
listen and contribute: [https://radiofreefedi.net]
Kia ora rawa atu