For the past two years, Radio Free Fedi has held a special place in my heart. The community operation started as a small experiment, but quickly grew into a Fediverse institution. In the time that it was operational, the station served as the place for discovering awesome music throughout the network. Unfortunately, this beloved project has run out of time.

What Happened?

In early December 2024, Radio Free Fedi posted a message to the community stating its intentions to wind down operations. As of January 1st, the streams have gone silent.

For many people, this message was one of heartbreak and utter surprise. The project had been on an upward growth trajectory, and seemed to take on greater and greater responsibilities as a paragon of the wider community. The station had accomplished monumental feats that other similar projects could only dream of. To understand what happened to the project, we need to look back on the project’s history.

A Timeline, Revisited

Since its early inception, Radio Free Fedi experienced a profound amount of growth from musicians and listeners on the Fediverse. There are thousands of instances across the network, and they all suffer from the same common problem: it’s hard to find the good stuff, especially when so many people are scattered out from one another. The good stuff needs to be found, cherry-picked, organized, and dispersed to a wider audience of people. From there, the idea of an Internet Radio project was born.

At the center of this idea lie a simple but powerful ethos: build a service on consent and respect, and make it easy to share great stuff with a potential audience. This radical initiative was built not for individual profit or gatekeeping, but to share awesome music while helping artists and musicians.

The general proposition was RFF made to musicians was simple: we’re running a continuous radio stream, exclusively featuring music only from the people on this network. If you’d like to submit some music, reach out, and we’ll help get you into the system.

From there, Radio Free Fedi would receive new tracks, listen to them, check for issues with audio and data, and prep everything for upload and broadcast. New artists and releases were frequently announced, both on stream and through an official account, and a bot kept track of whichever track was playing at any given time. As the station played banger after banger, many listeners would proceed to look up the musicians on the site, follow them on the network, and even buy their music.

True to its mission statement, Radio Free Fedi strove for artist consent above all else. Every track streamed from their site was given explicit permission, along with full attribution and links to support the artists and listen to more of their music. Tools were put in place, a process was started up, and a method for submitting music became available for the public.

Over time, the station gradually introduced more channels, to appeal to different tastes. Instead of the main channel, listeners could opt to choose more relaxing, downtempo tracks on RFF Comfy. Or, they could try the strange noise projects going on in the RFF Experimental Channel. If perhaps listeners preferred poetry, news, or interviews, RFF Spoken Word was also a choice.

At its peak, Radio Free Fedi supported over 414 different musicians spread across these different channels. The project featured hundreds of hours of original music, unique station jingles, and recurring break interludes featuring everything from poetry and short stories to community voices and bug facts.

“Put it this way,” RFF’s admin tells me, “On the RFF Main channel alone, and if the play rules aligned with the starts, you could technically go 3 and a half days without hearing a repeated track.”

Starting in late December 2023, Radio Free Fedi began to branch out with live video streams featuring music performances, artists demonstrating how they work, and listening parties. By all accounts, these were wildly successful endeavors, and were very popular within the Fediverse’s fledgling music community.

Additionally, RFF went out of the way to prop up infrastructure for musicians in need, setting up hosted instances of Faircamp to aid with music distribution. These efforts helped to bolster and promote a growing and active community while promoting good vibes. In many ways, the station served as a touchstone for our own music exploration, allowing us to build out a series of promotional digital mixtapes to showcase great new music from within the Fediverse.

Growing Pains

Throughout much of 2024, Radio Free Fedi continuously put out messages asking for community support. Rather than simply being monetary requests, RFF hoped to address the heart of an incredibly difficult challenge: bringing on volunteers to help balance the workload. Although RFF’s admin didn’t often directly state it, much of the organizations internal workings, operations, and projects were largely carried out by one person.

“Everything about RFF was an experiment,” he explained to me, “it got out of hand.”

There were several factors that made the project difficult to run. One aspect involved the amount of care and preparation required to review submissions, curate music, tweak file metadata, handle storage and backups, maintain public comms, promote artists through Fediverse social channels, and operate the various pieces of broadcast and streaming infrastructure required for the entire project. RFF’s sole maintainer often pulled 16-hour days simply trying to keep everything going. Often, this was at odds with the various health issues the admin has been struggling with for several years.

There was also a fundamental misunderstanding within the community regarding what resources Radio Free Fedi had at their disposal, and what they did on a day-to-day basis. Due to the high bar of quality provided by the service, many people assumed that RFF was a well-funded, well-staffed organization.

On the flip side, some people failed to understand how much work this effort took to sustain. I recall holding a FediForum session with RFF to talk about supporting artists in the network, where one of the attendees basically told the project lead that “it’s just an Internet radio station, it’s not that hard”.

This attitude would rear its ugly head often, as disputes, disagreements, and disparagements would come in on the timeline and into the RFF inbox. Some people complained about the project taking donations, other people threw fits because they weren’t getting preferential treatment and immediate responses. Things got ugly sometimes.

Towards the end of 2024, the small volunteer community around RFF made one final push to try and document the many different moving parts and processes the service relied on for its operation, in the hopes of taking some work off the admin’s plate. Despite initial progress, everyone involved soon realized how difficult the station actually was to operate. The attempt to establish distinct roles and procedures gradually halted, as the scope of the required work became much more clear. Eventually, a conclusion was made: the amount of labor required to document everything and train everyone was too much to sustain on top of the sole operator’s massive workload.

Looking Ahead

Although RFF is now gone, that doesn’t mean that the community spirit has left the Fediverse. The extensive artist directory lives on at IndieArtist Support, as a way to continue promoting the many artists that made RFF truly special. Additionally, a new radio project has started over at The Indie Beat, although these are still early days for that effort. Finally, it’s possible for Bandwagon accounts to publish their music directly to The Indie Beat’s station.

The important thing to remember is that there’s still a flourishing music community within the Fediverse today. However, we owe a lot to the early efforts of RFF, and can only hope to see further great work from the wider network in the near future.

From the Fediverse, to the Universe

We want to dedicate this concluding paragraph to the many musicians, artists, and listeners who greatly enjoyed RFF, and wanted to offer their public appreciation. If you would like to add something to the wall, please, by all means send us a DM.

“I lost count of the number of songs of mine I submitted and of the number of unbelievable musicians I discovered, but as a listener, what I loved above all, was the eclectism of the programming. It’s such a rare and overlooked and undervalued thing, bringing so many different genres under one roof.”

Sknob

RFF was an absolute delight: a way of connecting with other fedizens just by starting the stream, and experiencing a wealth of wonderful, mostly permissively-licensed, music.

It was pretty much all I listened to while working for the last year and whatever, and I’m genuinely going to miss it.

Neil Brown

I never did submit music, but I did a few station ID pieces and submitted a couple of poetry readings for the short-lived spoken word channel.

That it was run in such an open fashion is what encouraged me to have a go, and I’ve had a start on a few voiceover jobs now thanks to what I recorded for RFF.

Alyn Sparks

I submitted our album to RFF in October ’24. Since then, at least 5 of the songs were played each day across all 3 music channels, incl. two on the Comfy channel. I am really thankful for this warm reception!

During this short period of time, @Neblib wrote a short review of one of our songs, and @makepost (Ukraine) used samples from one of our songs in their music. Thank you/щиро дякую!

Among the artists I discovered on RFF are @daviddellacroce, @stephan, and @snapinfraction

Serge Medoff – Erik Thoma & Freispiel

RFF was, to me, an important community building initiative. Across the Fediverse, there are few things that truly unite all the disparate communities and instances, but music was one of them. It put Fedi musicians first, and I was honored to have my music played side by side with so many other amazing, talented artists. And all of this was done for “free” for listeners (although at great cost to the operator)… we owe them a great deal of gratitude for initiating such an amazing project, even if it only existed for a brief period of time. RFF will be missed.

KNova

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