No doubt the hipocrisy of relaxing copyright enforcement for AI while doing this will go unnoticed.

It’s not on your list but I’ve had a Mailfence email for the last couple of years and they’ve been solid.

You could also use YUNOhost to host your own on a VPS. I had no experience before setting mine up and it was fine. Unlimited email accounts and aliases out of the box, plus you can host other stuff besides, like a website, file server or even a fediverse instance.

If your distro provides everything you need then I would avoid flatpak. Getting apps to speak to each other is a pain, updates use more data, backups and restores take much longer, they don’t perform as well and config files are not necessarily where you expect them to be.

I have Debian Stable on an older laptop and only install apps as flatpaks if they are not available otherwise. I also have a very new laptop with Fedora on it (because it needs a newer kernel) and have had to install more flatpaks just to make things work properly, because they include their dependencies, codecs etc which are missing in Fedora. Appimages seem to do this too and I find them preferable to flatpak because they integrate more predictably with my system. Apps are slower to launch though and have to be manually updated.

Like you, I’d prefer to just have a package manager and a single source of software and plan to go back to Debian when my newer machine is supported by it.

Do you mean the inconsistent cursor size across applications? I have this on a fresh Fedora install and it’s a bad look.

Yes, have updated the post. I would probably be happy with 2 in the case of this application and plugins - do you know how I can launch a gtk application in this way?

Very cool.

Thanks for the link - been down a rabbit hole for the last hour or so! Really interesting. I’ve never really dealt with crypto but direct transactions look awesome. The fact that it uses open protocols is great too.

Have you released anything on it or are you a listener?

Ok! How has your experience with them, and releasing in general, been?

Ok, thanks for the info 👍 I was looking at their site and it said $1 per release - are there different tiers?

I’ll do that too but I would like to get actively involved in a music release pipeline that I think could be really positive. I guess I want to give to the listener as directly as possible.

I don’t think you’re wrong. I think the big corporate music streaming platforms are basically a low key scam. They are effectively pointless (beyond free file hosting), unless you are one of the 0.001% of artists that are heavily promoted on them and are an insult to musicians everywhere. More musicians need to reject the proposition of being one of the bottom stones that holds up their pyramid. I would rather my music was unknown on independent sites than unknown on theirs, where it will only add value to an exploitative business model and help to further entrench it.

I commend your generosity! I would like my music to be as free as possible but to retain some control over who gets to make money from it and how. If another poor artist wanted to use something in a sample or piece of video or performance art I’d be inclined to let them use it for free or cheap but if a powerful and exploitative company wanted to use it I would want to extract a price from them or deny it’s use if I didn’t like what they did.

What are your thoughts on Jamendo from an artists point of view?

Nothing is released yet. I would be happy for people to download my music to listen to without restrictions, which is why I’m looking into making it available as torrents.

Is Soundrop the distributor you use? I’ll have a look.

Will do 👌 I’m not familiar with websites to upload to - the only experience I have so far is searching for files within Qbittorrent, which I believe is using search plugins… How can I find these sites? Thanks

What is your instance running? I can see that it’s federated but I don’t recognise it. Thanks :)

Great, thank you 👍

I understand the concept of sharing ‘peer-to peer’, how a VPN works (and I use one) and I regularly use Qbittorrent to download files. I understand that in this context piracy is contravening an intellectual property license. That’s it! I don’t know how to distribute files using the technology.

I might use Bandcamp but I don’t want my music to be on youtube or spotify.