Okay, thank you so much.
You're also a celebrity to me, of course.
So my name is Simon.
I get right to the point.
Today, I'm here to talk about Faircamp.
And Faircamp is a static site generator for audit producers.
And that means it's a tool that you can install on your computer
and turns your audit productions, meaning your podcasts, your album, your singles,
whatever it is, into a website.
And not just any website, but a website that is instructable,
that runs very fast, that is easy to host.
It doesn't cost a lot of money to host, especially that is completely free from maintenance
and that runs pretty much everywhere.
And now in a few minutes, I just want to show you basically the tutorial,
which is the quickest simplest usage example.
And it's also the base process of how you use Faircamp always.
So after three minutes or so, you'll be perfectly able to use Faircamp yourself if you want.
The only thing that they need to prepare to use Faircamp is one folder,
and that we call the catalog directory.
And it's just the folder where you put in other folders.
And those folders are the release folders.
A release could be your podcast, it could be your album, your single, whatever.
Basically, just the directory, the contains audio files, and potentially also a cover image.
And one more thing, you can also nest this arbitrarily, these are just for your organization.
So Faircamp doesn't mind that, it also doesn't do anything with it.
You can ask that, but it doesn't have to.
And at this point, if you set up everything that you need to run Faircamp,
so you can download it, it's available for all major platforms.
And after you've installed it, you can basically in the terminal, run Faircamp,
point it to where your catalog directory is located.
And here we also add previews that opens the website afterwards in the browser.
And as soon as you start that, it starts scanning through your catalog directory.
It reads the text from your audio files.
So it's important to also tag these files well, if you would like to these things to show up in the website.
And it also transcodes your source audio files into the suitable streaming format.
And also resizes the cover images for web display.
And as soon as that's done, it opens the browser right away.
You can see that we have here the covers of the albums.
We can click on them, get to the release pages.
We can also let's on the top right.
Use the browse feature to search the entire catalog interactively.
We can of course play back, stream the tracks in the release context.
You can also open specific tracks and play them back on the track page.
And this is basically the base package that you get, just by putting this folder in as
already this audio files in folder and running free account.
And from there on, you can still do a lot more.
And this is a system called manifest.
So these are simple text files.
And here we have them at three different levels.
So you can see at the bottom there's a catalog manifest, which is a file
of control settings for the entire website that will be generated.
We have release manifest for each release directory.
Those controlled settings for the release.
And again, here on the top you see that one of those tracks is now wrapped in a directory
alongside a track manifest.
So this is the same thing for tracks.
And in a track manifest for instance, we can put a synopsis option.
This is just a short description of that track.
And when we saved that, we built the site using the command that we saw earlier.
We get the track page with the synopsis and added next to the listen button.
Likewise, you could use the more fields, which is just a catch all.
They can put in lyrics or the people that worked on your album or your favorite
poem or whatever it is.
And there's also an option which says more label.
And that helps you to classify what kind of content went in there.
And when you generate the site afterwards, what you get is a lyrics at the bottom
here of the track page.
And up there next to the listen button, there's now a button that says lyrics.
And on mobile, that takes you scrolling down when you don't see it yet.
And likewise, also on the release page, you have now in the context of the track,
a lyrics button, which is important to let people can discover this content
also from the release page.
And on the release level, this is also possible.
So here we are in a release manifest and we use release downloads option to enable
downloads in two formats here.
Again, you save that, which regenerate the page.
And then fair camp adds a download button to the release page.
And people can then choose between these two formats.
And when they click that, they can basically get a sip archive with the audio files
and with the cover image.
And potentially also bonus files like PDF or something like this,
can also go in there.
And one last visual example of this, fair camp has a fairly elaborate
theme system.
You can see the entire website.
You can see specific releases and also specific tracks.
And to add a little in that process, there's a theme in which you can enable.
And this goes as an overlay above your live page.
You can use those sliders to play in real time with different colors,
with a dark light color scheme background image, background opacity, and so on and so forth.
And when you're happy with the settings, you have down there,
the part that goes into the manifest, you just copy that, put it in the manifest,
generate the site, and then it's baked in there.
And the list goes on, so there's a lot of stuff that is covered by fair camp.
It's really not a toy.
And to have a short look behind the curtain, the stuff that is generated,
the stuff that we just saw, that is all plain HTML, plain CSS, and vanilla JavaScript.
There are no third-party dependencies involved whatsoever,
so no React, no tailwind, or nothing.
Without that is that the footprint is very tiny.
This page is run very well also on really old smartphones, on really slow internet connections.
And they also work with our JavaScript.
So if you have JavaScript, the things are going to work better,
it's a bit more convenient, but everything that is functioning needed,
especially playing back tracks, works without JavaScript as well.
And as a last point, the whole thing is also highly accessible.
I had an alnet grant, and together with a hand-university with two passes of auditing,
and really put in lots and lots and lots of hours to make this work well on screen readers,
and on assistive technology in general.
And for a very brief history, the whole thing started in 2021,
which is when I first announced it.
Fast forward, December 2024, was when Fair camp 1.0 was released.
As I mentioned, that would happen through a grant from an alnet.
This is a much worse part.
We really have it greatly.
And now fast forward again, we're already looking in the future.
September 2026.
So this year is the plan to release date for Fair camp 2.0.
I've been working on this for like three or four weeks now, very intensively.
And this work is founded through a grant from netty.
Netty is an Austrian, open source funding program.
Thank you so much as well to them.
It's also what allows them to be here and present to you.
The thing that is definitely coming in 2.0 is a desktop application with a graphical user interface.
And the important thing to note here is that what we just saw, the command line interface,
that is going to stay.
So you can either use that workflow, or you can use the desktop application.
And you can also use both at the same time.
It really builds on the same data model, just this full structure that is on the background.
And it's fully compatible.
And there's also a bunch of other stuff that is very likely coming,
very likely because it's still working on it, and figuring out what will really work and whatnot.
But the general theme is that the architecture is subtly,
but profoundly improved as the foundational level.
So that some use cases that are just not all possible right now will be possible afterwards.
And important here, also last point, numerous other additions as they come up,
because I'm just starting with this work.
And a small side note, sometimes people discover Fair camp online,
and they tell me they write me a message.
It's really cool, but do you know, is there anything like that for video?
And the good news is there is.
So two or three years ago, I started as well, to work on something like this for video.
The name of that is the Hyper8 video system.
Here's a link to it.
It will also be on the last slide.
But this is all I want to say about this here, because time is short.
Okay, and with this, I want to close the chapter of Fair Camp specifically,
and want to give you an idea of where I think Fair Camp sits in the bigger picture.
And I start with the only controversial thing I'm going to say here today, or I think so,
which is that I think streaming is a real problem, to artists, to producers.
It just takes away so much agency, so much power, so much ownership,
and gives it in the hands of very few, a lot of money from it,
and just also creates perverse incentives for producers.
So this is really something that I think as likely we have to overcome in the next months and years.
And to put this in a more refined picture, so here are some detailed aspects that I think will play a role in all of this.
And if you're wondering where Fair Camp is in all of this, it is the point right at the center where it says,
please make websites again. So important, if you have the own website, you regain so much of the agency,
of the ownership, of the control over your own works.
And it really gives you back, even if maybe it doesn't change a financial situation,
which is usually really catastrophic if you're on streaming platforms,
if at least gives you back dignity and agency.
And this is something super important in this stage.
And to show, thank you.
And I want to now also present a few people, because I'm really just a tiny fragment of this whole community movement,
and I want to showcase a few people who are doing really cool work,
and I, which I invite you also to check out.
So I put here on this slide, Milo and Jamco up, these are two cooperatives, which offer a platform that is open source,
and will also soon be self-hostible.
And it allows artists to put their music up for streaming, for download to purchase,
and also, in the case, Milo to do crowdfunding.
And Bandwagon, maybe you, some of you saw Band's talk yesterday,
he's also here at Boston.
This is, I hope, Band doesn't throw something at me for this.
It's a bit like Macedon for artists, if you will.
So it's very much focused on the Fediverse, but other than that,
it also has a lot of the ideas from Milo and Jamco up.
Then there's the Indibit Television, a project that just very recently launched,
and you can imagine it basically as MTV, but it's run by the cool folks on the Fediverse.
Definitely something to check out.
They have a 24-7 stream program of music videos and other cool stuff.
Likewise, also Indibit Radio.
It's a bit the precursor to that.
It's an online radio that has strong ties to the Fediverse as well.
Also ties in with Bandwagon.
Then there's, for instance, Gravitons.
It's a community that experiments a lot with live streaming formats.
They have a very lively active creative program, which I invited to check out.
And as one last example, something from a specific artist,
that's Stefan, aka Schalen Stiller,
and he just released his latest album,
which is called Strategies Against Algorithms.
And the twist here is that you cannot buy it online,
and in a way you cannot buy it at all.
But the model is that there is a reciprocal exchange of art for art.
And this is how you can obtain the album.
You get it as a nicely engraved USB stick.
And my point is not so much that we should now all stop selling our stuff online,
and just send around USB sticks.
But that all of the frustration with the status quo,
we can also find new avenues to deal with this problems.
And find very personal and poetic ways to deal with this situation,
and build something new.
And then there would have been a lot of things,
which I would have loved to go into more detail on,
but time is super short.
So I'll leave it with this slide,
and the promise that on the next slide,
there will be a link to the slides of the talk.
Then you can afterwards check these out in detail and in quite.
I also want to say thank you a lot to a lot of these people on the list,
and also in one way or another helped fair camp to get where it is.
So with that, say thank you so much to them.
Thank you so much to you for your attention.
And if you still have time for question,
happy to take them.
Otherwise, I'm still around until evening.
So.
Thank you.
And basically presentation, so we'll now for some questions.
Thank you, Hight.
I've took short questions.
First one is that I didn't understand if these software just helps
to let's say browse the media,
or it helps also creating, let's say,
the home page.
So those examples, for instance, the two cops,
cooperatives, and they had kind of a home page.
So again, does it have also for those pages,
or just for the media browsing?
And the second question is, if it has some kind of statistics,
so that you can see how many that will look.
Did you receive and from unique IPs and so on?
Thanks.
Okay.
I can definitely answer the second question,
so there's the possibility to inject custom scripts.
So with that, you can integrate any kind of analytics that you want.
On a question, first of the first question,
I have to admit I didn't quite get it,
but Milo and Jam are different projects.
Yeah.
Could you go back to this one?
Yeah.
This one?
Those pages.
Yeah.
These are the pages from those two projects.
They're not related to the fact that if that is a question.
Anyway, can you can create this kind of home page,
or with those video software?
I was saying that's talk later,
because that's very interesting.
That's a topic.
Happy to elaborate on.
Two questions, if I'm allowed.
I saw one of your slides that you support having a soft pay curtain.
What does that mean, exactly?
Yeah.
And also, since you built the music side and the video side,
do you envision merging them and having like a music video part of this as well?
Okay.
The second question,
merging,
okay.
The second question is basically,
if I want to merge the video and the audio project
does the second question.
I don't really intend to,
because my feeling is that it makes a lot of sense
to really work on the main specific problems in a very good way.
And if you try to fit too many things into one project,
it creates problems down the line.
I mean, I'm not saying that it's the wrong way.
That's just different approaches.
And this is the what the approach I like to take to really focus,
as much as possible on one project, if you will.
Sorry, can you repeat the first question?
Yeah.
Just a key word.
The soft pay curtain.
So soft pay curtain is basically a trade-off,
because fair cam fundamentally generates static side.
So there's no dynamic code there.
And that makes it somewhere between impossible to very hard
to integrate actual payment providers and a hard,
hard and forced pay process.
And what fair cam offers there is the soft pay curtain,
which is kind of a performative payment process
that basically when you,
I mean, I don't have to button per se here,
but there would be a buy button here,
basically purchase button.
And then you go through a flow that is very much like
bank cam, if you know that.
So there you have basically I ask you to pay,
I don't know, $14 for this release,
or $14 or more.
And then you can provide links to where people
can actually purchase purchase release.
So that could be a striped account,
or a paper account, or, I don't know,
Patreon, and tap for whatever.
And then basically people pay, go go on a link, pay,
and then they come back, or basically stay on a page also.
And down there, just the checkbox,
this is, I actually paid.
Now get me to the downloads.
And of course, it's not, it's like a performative.
It's a bit of a choke also.
But it also plays a bit on the idea,
and this is also when an infarction comes from,
that a lot of people actually want to support the artists.
And it's not even necessary to go to great lengths
to prevent people from stealing your work,
because those people that will really support you,
they will pay you happily anyway.
And so this is the idea that, of course,
doesn't always apply, but that's the idea
of how it's self-pickering.
Hey, thank you so much for Faircamp.
I'm wondering if you thought about
or have any mechanisms for preventing AI
scraping of content from these websites?
Okay, so Faircamp is fairly simple thing.
So in that sense, it doesn't have any of that,
so you can just roll your own.
I don't know, put a new piece or something in between, I guess.
What it does have, which goes into that direction,
is that all media assets, everything that makes the most sense
to scrape, that is the most expensive, or the most annoying
if people do it.
So if people, for instance,
hot link to your audio files on another platform or your downloads,
all these URLs have a deterministic cash function
in the construction.
So you can basically rotate the base seat for that,
and change all your else on the entire side,
which is, of course, a bit of a cat and mouse game,
but it just gives you some agency to say,
okay, well, this is too much, I like this.
I want to annoy them back a bit.
Cool, thank you so much.
Thank you.
Have you, I didn't see anything in there,
but have you got any product features in terms of sharing?
So what I'm thinking is an important thing is sharing music,
and so having a good website embeddings, for example,
if I were to share one of these tracks,
and I put it on another website, would it show up nicely?
Okay, so are you asking about embeds?
What's that?
And embedding?
Yeah.
There's an embed feature, you can enable it,
and you can just copy the HTML code,
and put it on your own website.
Yeah, great.
Okay, thanks.
I think we have them from one very last question,
if we want, and then we can close it here.
Okay, nice to see you again.
I guess one thing about music is discoverability,
and like trying to discover new music.
Do you have any thoughts about how fair camp could play into it?
New music.
Okay, the simplest question for last.
Yeah, it's a much debated topic, I would say.
Like there's a few strands, for instance, fair camp has an RSS feed.
So there's been some discussion, can we put more stuff into the RSS feed,
so that platforms or registry is possibly run by the community,
can better obtain that data, create that data,
to make many fair campsites discoverable.
And I think this is something that in the long run
will be, we'll see what works in what doesn't.
My concern is a bit that maybe talking things onto RSS
is maybe not the most elegant and future proof solutions.
So I think it's a bit of a discussion also,
so I'm also in contact with bandwagon, with mirrored gem.
And we're talking about these things like what could be a way
to, and often the terms that you use is federating,
but maybe not necessarily in the sense of activity pop,
but really finding just whatever technical means are really,
like a good baseline that people can exchange data,
and whether this should be push or pull models.
So there's a lot of discussion, basically,
and not clear answer yet.
Also, it also ties in with consent.
Do we even want to be scrapped, do you want to be discovered?
So lots of questions.
Unfortunately, no clear answers yet, but we're working on it.
Thanks, another big round of applause for sending in here.
And this concludes our webinar room today.
I hope you enjoyed it.
Should we try and do it again next year?
Yes.
Okay, now that's what I wanted to hear.
So I hope you enjoyed it, I certainly did.
So see you next year, hopefully.