rglullis

It all comes down to how likely do you think you’ll be caught, and what you think you can prove in court. I definitely would not want to be the first person the RIAA makes an example of.

The streaming companies only start squeezing down on the "people sharing account passwords" for economic reasons, and I don't recall hearing of anyone being worried about a lawsuit over a clear violation of their ToS. I find it really hard to believe that it would ever make sense for the MPAA to go after someone because they were sharing their music collection with friends/family.

What it first needs is a way to compensate content creators

Agreed. This is why I wrote a proposal to fund musicians, and it's also why I'm adding crowdfunding support to Communick.

I have a Funkwhale instance set up and it is part of the services provided for those that subscribe to Communick. It does have some users, but to be honest I'm more interested now in making it more appealing for musicians who want to distribute/promote their own content, rather than use it as a "music locker" system.

It doesn’t have smart playlists

It has the "radio" feature, which sort of works like a smart playlist, no?

So, how about 250GB for $29/year?

I described another case in the blog post: it would be really cool if indie labels or indie artists got together around their own instances, so that they could distribute/promote their own content with less restrictive licenses.

The libraries you share can be set to private or "invite-only". So, if you share only with a small group of friends and not make it publicly available it should still be under fair use.

I’d rather own my music.

I don't think it's an either/or proposition. Given how cheap storage is nowadays, I'm also used to just have my music collection replicated through my devices and listen locally, but being able to upload that library and share with my friends (and in turn, get access to their library as well) seems like a very nice way to discover more stuff and increase the range of available content, without losing "ownership" of anything. Unlike Spotify or the other streaming services, there is no central entity determining what should be available or not.

(Of course, this doesn't mean that is a good idea to just upload your collection to a Funkwhale instance and make it public for everyone. That will be a very fast to getting kicked out. Or worse, to be receiving a nastygram from some IP lawyer)

Flakes are only important if you want to develop for a nix system. If you are only using it or if you (like me) only writes server code which gets deployed via docker (or your language packaging solution) there is no need to think about flakes.