Radio Free Fedi

About RFF Channels

Our flagship RFF Main channel is a hyper diverse free form format lightly curated to not completely rip the paint off the wall or wear out your welcome. It may well challenge your listening style with hopefully fun results. Likened by many to back in the day community and college radio it is weird and wonderful and a little wild. As part of the experience you might catch a wave of a style or genre and other times you might get delightful sonic collisions or happy accidents.

Our RFF Comfy channel was developed to smooth out the edges for our friends who require a softer experience. Still eclectic in genre and styles and still easy for dropping in and discovering at your leisure, or having in the background. It is the RFF eperience, just without the jagged edges, intensity or harsh frequencies. This hopefully provides a low anxiety and comfy haven so more listeners can join in the party of supporting independent artists! comfy origin story context

Our RFF Specialty channel is a rotating hourly themed block programmed channel offering listener the choice to expect a certain soundor vibe at scheduled times. This allows us to go a bit deeper in style, run time and include many more artists as well as tracks you won't hear on the other channels. A lightly focused "scheduled" expansion on drop-in, discover and then go support artists RFF vibe we hope compliments the community! specialty origin story context

Our RFF Word channel is a community venue for original non-music spoken material. Fiction, documentary, radio drama, micro short form and longer form. Another fun way to highlight creativity and community vibes for sound other than music. If you could use some spoken company or would like to drop-in for even more voices from your neighbourhood, try RFF Word, word.

Want to contribute to radio free fedi?

1. Patron - Would you like to help offest running costs, sponsor various artist support initiatives, sponsor more and deeper original programming and station projects, or koha the lonely maintainer?
2. Community feedback, street team, build teams - HELP! Want to help collating material, data entry, sharing in the feeds, provide some technical assistance to contributing artists to help get their work to the community, or contribute to bigger station initiatives? Interim matrix organising is at #radioFreeFedi:matrix.org
3. Recommendations - Know an awesome independent creative with any fedi presence? Check in with them and see if they know bout radio free fedi and might consider joining the comunity.
4. Station IDs - We want lots of fun station IDs from fedizens. DM RFF for brief, script and format recommendations.
5. "theNews" and "theTrafficReport" - theNews is 100% not news. It is short (~15 seconds to a few minutes) bits of spoken word or readings of microfiction at the top of each hour. If you would like to submit writing or offer your voice to readings for "theNews" or announcements, DM us or you may submit original audio similar to music as noted below:
   • links or download codes to the content
   • consent from reader and writer to stream on radio free fedi
   • preferred public fedi identities for reader and/or writer to be linked
6. Submit spoken material, writing or voice. With our new Word channel in testing phase, we can include longer format non-music work such as discussions, interviews, radio drama, entertainment, informative, "podcast" type things, etc etc. If you have broadcast ready files with no commercial ad reads embedded in them, it is probably as simple as pointing us to them and you can follow the below for submitting quite similar to music. If you have writing you would like to have read, reach out via DM and we can happily link your material up with a friendly community announcer or voice actor! If you'd like to be a voice reader please DM the station.
7. Submit Music - To submit original music for play consideration on radio free fedi here's what we need:
   • The predominant license you release under and a simple word you consent for RFF to stream. See now playing for examples ie: ©, CC-BY-NC-ND, etc. If you have not decided we will simply put used with permission.
   • Bandcamp links if free to d/l, or download code if you have them, secret drops/file sharing that require no login, or otherwise links for downloadable files (320 mp3 preferred) with art and good meta already baked in. Or if no other means, DM for our private drop info.
   • RUN TIME. our loose time limit of 5 minutes for Main and Comfy is to increase comfort, diversity and discovery and be more neighbourly on the stream. Edits/highlights shortened intros/outros are welcome. With our new Specialty channel themed blocks let's keep it reasonable so it isn't a "you" show, but up to ~10 minute pieces are now considered.
   • your preferred artist support link
   • your preferred public fedi identity to be linked with tracks on out now playing and recently played resources, (PLEASE mention if you do not wish to also be included on the RFF artists importable follow list)
   • you must DM this info in the first instance to @radiofreefedi@musician.social.
   We've tried our very best to help and accomodate as many submissions as possible. As the project has grown it's not possible to do as many manual communications and fixes. If the above gives more questions than answers please check out a long form FAQ on submissions and tips or DM and we may have a friendly fellow artist able to help with some light advising.
8. But Mostly Listen! by any means and be sure to check here when something tickles your fancy for artist support and fedi links and show them some LOVE! Tell them you found them on radio free fedi. Buy their works or donate to them! Make contact for amiable collaboration or terms to use their works in your projects. Share and grow durable community and support each other and have fun.

Contact

For issues with how to contribute as in the above list or for artist help with updates/edits/deletions DM: @radiofreefedi@musician.social. As a volunteer community project we may not have the time or the spoons to respond to each and every general query or commentary. Non fedi based requests can email query at radiofreefedi dot net

About radio free fedi

Our friend Gabe from @owncast@fosstodon.org wanted a 24/7 feed of fedi artists, video, audio, anything. Given various attempts by Gabe and myself at both video and podcast formats with sustainability of content and buy-in issues, RFF was an invitation to a community driven pivot.

radio free fedi is consent, agency and artist celebrating community radio from the fediverse. We actively and openly present contributing artists' information with the hopes that you will drop-in, discover, and then LEAVE? That's right, RFF has no interest to be an end-point for hyper focused consumption. We also do not have the resource to provide infinite custom streams and we love the community to not do soulless algorithms. We want to foster organic discovery and discourse. We want to generate support for independent artists on the platforms and methods of their choice, no judgement. Support independent and fedi artists!

Things we do a little different:

• No payola, no automated submissions, every submission is checked best we can to be from a decent fedizen and not likely to harm or harass our fedi friends of all walks
• Every submission is carefully checked for good data and imagery best as possible. We have less time as we've grown to fix these so good submissions help heaps!
• We add an artist support link affiliated to every track so you know where to go to help each other.
• We add consented public fedi link affiliated to every track so you can interact with, promote and share the artists you find.
• We add artists' license and permission for every track to celebrate agency and consent and again to foster good communication for support and collaboration.
• Provide discovery options for independent artists who, like many of us, find promotion a bit challenging or uncomfortable. The classic fedi LOVES indie artists and promotion in this light is never a dirty word.

Artist data is made available on this website for now playing tracks and there is further track history in various formats including a bot for the main channel in case you missed track data while you were washing the dog. If you require alternative formats for ingestion for other means to help the wider world discover and support fedi artists please reach out.

Stop gaps like Bandcamp playlists on third party tracking sites, various hyper open methods with poor discovery and walled garden corporate streaming platforms alike seldom strike a good balance to retain attribution and actually promote, celebrate, interact and ENCOURAGE direct support of artists without costing everyone involved some painful percentage of coin, privacy and agency. We are continually impressed and heartened at the community that has rallied to support each other around a more transparent and organic discovery layer.

Admin, Privacy, More Ethos

We are using open and non-commercial platforms and formats where possible, there are no ads, no third party remote scripts, cookies, trackers, fonts etc unless introduced by your alternative playing app/method. We use a minimal and local javascript for updating real-time stream and artist infos. The public audio stream is collecting basic aggregate counts only.

Licensing:

We support artists by passing on their preferred license since attribution and consent are paramount. All music and words we play retain the license that shows on this page for each piece as per the artists' wishes. All copyright materials we play have been consented by each artist for streaming only on radio free fedi. Please do not re-use the stream, DO however contact individual artists to talk amiable terms if you would like to use their work for your project. Support fedi artists!

Fediquette:

We expect classic standard fediverse etiquette of no nazis or fascists, no harassment or abuse of any kind, no racism, no bigotry, no ableism, trans lives matter, black lives matter. We want to radiate inclusiveness and empathy and also rock some kick ass tunes, sounds and words. Please let us know if we get anything wrong or we are accidentally promoting anything untoward.

Keep the fedi weird and wonderful! Enjoy.

Fedi Artists on radio free fedi