Funkwhale started as a personal project three years ago, in response to Grooveshark being shut down. As of today, new instances are popping up every week, the project is getting traction and attracting external contributions. What should you expect for the future of the project?
Past
In the beginning, in 2015, there was only me, Agate, working on my free-time on this "thing", in reaction to Grooveshark disappearance. At that time, Funkwhale had no logo, no documentation, no website, the UI was clunky, buggy, and the only deployment was mine. It kinda worked, and it was satisfying to be independent from big streaming platforms, but the amount of effort was really not worth it, especially since the interface was not so good.
However, in 2017 (or was it 2016?), I discovered a great new technology, called VueJS, which I used to rebuild the project front-end, from scratch. Suddenly, everything became both easier and more satisfying from a user and a developer perspective, and I felt confident enough to show the project to some close friends and family. Using their feedback, I could improve the project and progressively add new features.
The first time I mentioned it publicly, it was probably in July 2017. But the real kickoff of the project was with a toot, where I invited people on my own instance for a closed beta, at the end of february 2018.
This attracted a few dozens of strangers, eager to try (and break) the app. Here again, their feedback helped me a lot, and the project owes a lot to their contributions. Overall, I'd say the feedback was really positive, and for me it was one of those moment in life when you are fueled with energy and ideas!
From March to this very day, things accelerated. A lot:
- Sean Tilley wrote a great article on the project, attracting more people
- Other people started to host Funkwhale instances. @Gled, especially, started the first public instance:
https://funkwhale.mastodon.host - External contributions where submitted to the codebase and the documentation by no less than 20 people
- People started to give money to the project on Liberapay and Duniter
- I opened a dedicated Mastodon account for the project: