Faircamp: A Radically Sustainable Tool for Music Publishing

Faircamp is a free software tool for artists who want to publish music on their own terms. You point it to a folder of audio files, and it generates a clean, portable, self-contained static website where others can stream or download your work. There is no database, no platform account, and no business sitting between artists and listeners. You host the site wherever you want, and the result is something small, plain, simple, truly low-maintenance, and privacy-respecting.

That also connects Faircamp to what people often call the small web, which includes a constellation of personal sites, independent projects, self-hosted pages, RSS feeds, webrings, and other simple but meaningful spaces outside the corporate logic of growth, engagement, and control.

Simon Repp, the person behind Faircamp, is someone I’ve wanted to interview for a while. Over the last few years, more and more punk bands and benefit projects like DEMO FEST have started building their own music catalogs with Faircamp, and it has become one of the most interesting alternatives to the usual music publishing platforms. Not because it tries to be “the new Bandcamp,” but because it starts from a different angle: What if your music site was simply yours?

I wanted to ask Simon a lot of things, but this interview was also a bit of a challenge. It’s not your typical band interview, where I usually feel so much more prepared and confident about what to ask. Still, I hope this conversation can be a good starting point for readers who are curious about Faircamp, self-hosting, and the future of alternative music online. From there, you can explore the project yourself, read the documentation, try building your own site, or get in touch with Simon and the wider community of Faircamp users.

For readers who haven’t come across Faircamp, can you introduce yourself and explain what it is and why you built it? And how easy or difficult is it for a band to actually set up a “static website”?

In the digital realm, I currently state that I “design and develop systems with a focus on ethics, simplicity, and sustainability”. In terms of my personal history, I’m also a musician and interdisciplinary media designer, although life currently keeps me too busy to pursue these in any meaningful capacity. I work on free software projects that try to bring computing back to a smaller, more humane scale, and for the last two to three years I’ve had the immense privilege to have funding for this work; chiefly through public grants, but also through donations. In my free time, I also do some local community organizing in the context of hacker spaces, libre graphics, and recently as co-organizer of Permacomputing Vienna and part of the servus.at net-culture initiative in Linz.

Faircamp is my attempt to give people a radically sustainable and as accessible as possible tool for autonomous online audio publishing, built to last against all odds. With Faircamp, no billionaire, no business, no single entity is in control of your online presence. Equally important is another perspective: the viability of what we build is also threatened from within. Even the friendliest communities building the most ethical alternatives sometimes stagnate and dissolve, or fall apart due to burnout or social friction. Your own most purely DIY-fashioned autonomous online presence might fall apart too if it builds on the assumption that you will always have time to look after it. Faircamp gives you a means of publishing that requires a little bit of initial effort to get into, but after that, it is probably as close to infallible and self-sustaining as you can get within the current context of technology.

Setting up a Faircamp-based static website is easy for some, less so for others, but my general message to the curious is: Don’t overthink whether this is for you, just give it a try. You don’t need to be a hacker, or a nerd, or a computer scientist to have a static website (that’s what many people consciously or subconsciously project into it, but it’s not the case). In reality, there are step-by-step lists that you go through, and if you do and persist, boom, you have your own static website.

This year, I disassembled, oiled, and reassembled the hidden inner mechanics of my door handles. I couldn’t do this because I am a physical tinkerer, a hobby craftsman, or had any specific prior knowledge for this. I watched a video online that walked me through it, I picked up a screwdriver, and I did it. That’s it. This could be you, with a Faircamp site.

Faircamp isn’t a centralized platform, it builds a website you own and host yourself. Can you explain in plain terms what that actually means, and why DIY bands should think about building their own site rather than just signing up somewhere?

The basics are really simple: Your music probably already lies around in a folder on your disk. You point Faircamp to that folder, grab a coffee while it does its thing, and when it’s finished, you have another folder. This is your website, and you can open it right away, right on your computer. If you hold on to that folder and don’t let it get lost in a computer accident, it’s yours forever. It will also never break, because on a technical level, it can’t. Think about PDF documents here: You can open them, copy them, delete them. But contrary to (e.g.) WordPress blogs and such, PDF documents don’t break! Neither do static websites, and that folder and the files inside are your static website now, unbreakable, forever.

The weird and more adventurous part about your Faircamp site is getting it online: paradoxically, there are so many ways to do it nowadays that it’s hard to settle for a single good answer to how it’s done. Usually, though, you pay (monthly or yearly) for a domain (yourband.xyz) and a cheap web hosting deal (as low as $1-2 per month if you need it to be super economical). I’d compare this to getting an internet connection for your flat or house: Plenty of offers to sift through (reading reviews, asking peers), some jargon to navigate (friends and your search engine can help you with this), but after things are set up, the thing takes care of itself (= someone else does, but if you want to go full DIY later on you can do that too!).

The last missing piece is copying the static website (recall: just a folder with some files inside) from your disk onto the computer (“server”) that’s running at your web provider. After that, the whole world can access it at your chosen yourband.xyz domain. Providers often supply you with all the tools and information you need for that already. Again, the only thing that prevents this from being trivial is that there is no single agreed-upon standard for how it’s done.

This was a somewhat technical answer, but I think it unravels the entire process to reveal the core of it: No part of this is outside your control. Your provider cancels your plan? Move to the next (they’re all the same, replaceable). Malicious actors hack your provider and deface your website? Upload a clean copy of your website folder (it’s literally just a few clicks). You’re getting censored in your country? Host anywhere else in the world (you’re not tied to any specific service or entity).

Even if I, as the developer of Faircamp, disappear overnight, the system holds: Your website rests safely and indestructibly on your server and your computer. And Faircamp’s source code is by now in dozens of web archives, on dozens of individual computers, allowing a great many people, equally or more competent than me, to continue its development when called for.

In our Mirlo interview, they mentioned that even a co-op platform still asks you to trust them not to sell out. Faircamp removes the platform entirely. The principles you list for Faircamp (small, plain, reduced, low-maintenance, independent) read like the opposite of how big tech sells itself, with all its talk of growth, engagement, and scale. Where did this counter-vocabulary come from for you? Is it political? Would you call Faircamp an anti-capitalist project?

I’d approach this from two sides: There is a part of me that embraces a lighthearted, unencumbered mode of existence; this is where Faircamp, as a project, indulges in a pursuit of good crafts(wo)manship, of aesthetics, of the sheer joy of working on something that I (and hopefully others) appreciate having. Some of the principles for Faircamp relate to that.

At the same time, I believe that everything is political, some things more, some things less, and that every part matters. As such, I’m very keen on considering the politics of every part that makes up Faircamp, even if it’s just small additions or decisions in the project. Most of the principles for Faircamp therefore carry that aspect as well.

I could arguably put anti-capitalist on this list as well, but for me, it sounds too grandiose, and too tied to identity somehow. Software makers who are the loudest in advertising noble and lofty goals often don’t align with what they claim to be, and I think that people have generally become wary or even suspicious of this kind of communication. That goes double for the people I specifically want to reach—those who don’t chase the hype, who engage deeply and carefully. In this context, I don’t think it’s even necessary to position the project as such.

Those who follow and read (or read between the lines of) what I regularly write about online see where I’m heading (I hope). Beyond that, I aspire to let actions speak by (to paraphrase Steve Martin) building something that is so good that it can’t be ignored; maybe not even by the capitalists at some point. Let’s see!

Bandcamp’s value was never just the music player and the store. It was also the discovery, the editorial blog, the social layer, the sense of a scene happening in one place. Do you think it’s up to independent writers and webzines to fill that gap? Did you anticipate the DIY punk scene becoming an adopter of Faircamp, and has watching it use what you build influenced how you think about who Faircamp is for?

Faircamp was born out of curiosity and experimentation; in a way, I just started, with no particular expectations at all. Both directly and indirectly, I always experienced DIY and punk communities as one of the strongest champions of local organizing and practice. Some part of my brain almost believes “Punks are doing their own thing, they have no need for Spotify (or prepackaged ethical alternatives)”. But that’s my dream-like, naive subconscious thinking. Analytically speaking, and in hindsight especially, it feels almost logical that a DIY and punk scene would find the premise of Faircamp interesting. I just didn’t really anticipate it.

I’m personally delighted to see the DIY punk scene pick up Faircamp. Not least because my personal history very actively crossed paths with punk music and ethics over many years, but also because I pursued my music making with a strong drive towards DIY back then as well. So in a way, things have come full circle, from togetherness in music making, to a more isolated practice of software making, and back to reconnecting with communities making music, albeit in a different role.

Seeing people appropriate Faircamp for their respective culture (whichever it is, really) is super interesting to me in that it adds to the rich tapestry of how people actually engage with what I built. But more than changing who I think Faircamp is for (for which I somewhat have an idea, in a broad sense), I’m especially keen on seeing how people share and teach each other Faircamp, what kind of networks and means of discovery they build, how that interacts with what I can do for them (or sometimes can’t), and what that means for the future direction.

As for the gap to fill (the social layer, the sense of things happening in one place, etc.): Online communities and cultural infrastructure around music have always existed in many forms, long before the current, highly centralized era of platforms. Things have always been shifting around, and most recently, they unfortunately have shifted into this monocultural, oligopolistic shape.

But the current dominant shape of things can only be held together by immense force and capital investment, because a large part of society hates the status quo, and many more soon will. Once the lid comes off this pressure cooker (and in the current polycrisis it seems this is only a matter of time), all this suppressed energy will be free-flowing again, and maybe we will find ourselves not wondering “Who is going to fill that void?” but rather “How do I choose in all this new abundance?” Now, this is probably too optimistic, but as long as we’re designing and building realistically, including for adversarial outcomes, and I’d claim Faircamp does this pretty well, I think we can grant ourselves a hopeful attitude.

For a music webzine like ours, Bandcamp is practical because it has the best customizable music player to embed in an article. With Faircamp, you can link out, but there’s no equivalent embed yet. Is that something you’re working on for Faircamp 2.0?

Oh nice, that’s an opportunity to turn this interview into a research quest for a second: Faircamp already offers an embeddable player, but I assume most bands didn’t have that feature enabled when you went to their pages! That brings us back to politics: Maybe all Faircamp pages should have embeds enabled by default (this could be a change for the upcoming version 2.0). Then again, there is also something to be said about not opting people into things they’re not aware of, even if it might potentially be in their interest. This is why software development is so much more than just implementing features and fixing bugs. Everything is connected, and things are almost never as simple as they look on the surface.

But to not digress too much: Faircamp’s embeds exist, but are still somewhat limited, which is something I definitely want to address in the future. 2.0 has a very different scope, and I’ll need all the time I currently have to fulfill it, so this is something that will happen, but only sometime after 2.0 is out.

Fairplayer is a new open-source music player that has just been launched by a Catalan collective. It streams from Faircamp and, as of now, from Mirlo too. It essentially allows you to listen to an entire ecosystem of independent, self-hosted music all in one place. How does that change what Faircamp is? Does a constellation of independent sites become a network once there’s a way to listen across them?

Truthfully, it’s super hard to tell for me! My current main “research question” as an observer and participant in these developments is the boundary between tools and protocols: You can use or not use Faircamp, as long as it’s mostly a tool, it’s your call to make. You can also choose to participate in a connected/federated network or ecosystem of streaming, or choose not to. But if your entire audience embraces a network or ecosystem, do you really still have a choice not to participate? This is where I get very attentive regarding Faircamp’s role, because here it gets real political, real fast.

There have been some conversations about enriching the (RSS) feeds Faircamp provides with more metadata. Functionally speaking, there is nothing to object to, but if you look at it from a political perspective, it arguably shifts Faircamp (further) from “Just a tool you can use” to “A tool that pushes certain standards and protocols”. While the whole question is unavoidable altogether, not doing anything is political as well, I’m thinking that it’s probably best to take it slow, to organically develop an understanding of the dynamics involved, and to make a deliberate move when some clarity has been achieved. Right now, I don’t have much of that yet, and it requires a lot of time and resources to research, investigate, observe, discuss, and think these things through.

There’s an argument that everyone should just be on ActivityPub and that the Fediverse is the best alternative to Meta and big tech. Where do you stand on that, and what do you think of simpler protocols like RSS, M3U, podcast feeds, or something like Canimus (a lightweight protocol for sharing collection feeds)?

I have a lot of love for the Fediverse in terms of the many communities it connected me with, the paths it brought me onto in my life, and of course for what it achieved on a societal level over these last years. On the pragmatic side, I’m very much a supporter; it’s possibly our best shot at opposing big tech social media right now.

I also have uneasy feelings about it, though. I sometimes think back to the time when I was very active on Twitter (2009–2011 or so). The adrenaline, tension, petty arguments, being on the device instead of in the present moment, constantly broadcasting fragments of my life as if it were a reality show, all that. It’s easy to see how 2026 Fediverse is very different from 2026 Twitter/X, but it also feels an awful lot like 2009–2011-era Twitter to me, and that troubles me. I very much appreciate people doing diligent and thoughtful work on safety features, better implementations for quote posting, all those things. At the same time, much of the ActivityPub mainstream builds on, to me, questionable foundations: Context collapse, addictive pacing, ever-shortening attention spans, growth and reach metrics (likes, boosts, follower counts), etc.

Now, I don’t want to discourage anyone with this. The structural absence of ads, of manipulative timeline algorithms, of central control, are great achievements. We need to keep asking ourselves what the things are that are really worth pursuing with the Fediverse, and correct our trajectory again and again. I hope we will!

As for my personal inclinations: I really like simpler, slower protocols. I also like the “old”, the experimental, the quirky, the “useless”. Not everything always has to be for everyone too. Big new things, done well, widely agreed upon (at some point), I won’t object to either. There’s a huge spectrum of protocol mainstreams and niches to fill, and I’m curious to see what people will still come up with (or rediscover). No single protocol to rule them all!

Does the future you’d want require Bandcamp to actually lose support and that audience to disperse into the alternatives, or is the goal something more parallel, where the small and decentralized stuff just keeps growing on its own terms regardless of what Bandcamp (or any other centralized platform) does?

I’d love to see Spotify and extractive streaming businesses in general fall apart. With Bandcamp, even though I don’t expect anything good to come from its owners (Songtradr), I’d still be happy to see it continue as-is. To my knowledge, the terms have not changed too much, and it still mostly fulfills its stated purpose: musicians get their music out, listeners get to support them. I absolutely do not recommend banking on this staying as it is, but I don’t see what would be good about Bandcamp falling apart right now.

Parallel to that, I consider it Faircamp’s role to build new foundations, to prepare a safety net for when things go awry and people need a way out. Not only that of Faircamp, though, because I have fantastic allies in this: Cooperatively organized projects like Mirlo and jam.coop, and federated alternatives like Bandwagon and Funkwhale, are also hard at work to make this happen. We all have our work cut out for us, but still people take time off their busy schedules and own projects and lives to reach out to me and each other, to talk and collaborate where possible, and that is extremely heartening!

I sometimes joke that I’m actually the laziest of the bunch because I work on static site generation. Doing this keeps me out of a lot of trouble that comes with dynamic server software, payment integration, and other hugely complex problems, so in a way, it’s even true. Still, I could work full time on Faircamp for the next few years and would probably never run out of problems, so alas, no slacking for me in spite of going the easy road haha. Going further, I want to lean a bit more into our shared problem space though, talking and thinking more about protocols and portability, the hard stuff, or at least a different kind of hard.

Every alternative to Bandcamp also has to deal with the AI question now: generative music flooding catalogs, scraping, training data. There’s also a growing threat of neo-Nazi and far-right musicians using these tools to spread bigotry and hate. How does a self-hosted, decentralized model handle this when there’s no central authority enforcing anything?

Looking at it from my side, one available mechanism is the use of “ethical source licenses”. These are licenses that say, for instance, “This software is not to be used by Nazis” or “This software is not to be used for evil”. The latter is a real-life example and, as lore has it, brought severe headaches to the legal department of at least one big corporation, which I guess says something about these licenses.

The discussion around ethical licenses tends to be polarized, but personally, I believe both sides have very good points… reality is, alas, messy. In Faircamp’s case, the legal enforcement of such a license would need to go after individuals or very small and potentially fuzzy or even unidentifiable groups of people. Would anyone be willing or able to enforce such small cases? I doubt it, and as such, it would likely end up being a toothless statement that mostly comes with a lot of legal license compatibility headaches for me and everyone else.

From a more basic angle: Faircamp generates websites, so technically, whatever legislation is currently taking down or blocking websites that are in clear violation of laws in their respective jurisdictions would apply here as well. That, however, only handles the extreme cases at the national level.

When we think about currently emerging connected/federated systems on top of Faircamp and cooperatively organized platforms, we have yet another layer. Here, I think it’s crucial to think about governance, about moderation, about decision-making, very early on. There’s no right or wrong governance per se, but not having any model of governance, not putting any thought into this, can easily go wrong. I don’t wish for anyone to have to live through that kind of online drama, and I’d rather Faircamp and I didn’t accidentally end up getting drawn into something like that either, so I hope people are already thinking about these things.

“Decentralization” has become a buzzword that means very different things: it could be ActivityPub, blockchain, self-hosting, or something else. Is it even the right term for what you’re doing, or is something like “autonomy” or “small web” closer to what Faircamp is really about?

I’m definitely leaning towards “autonomy” as a term here (“individual agency” is a phrase I often throw around too). Decentralization these days commonly means some form of complex, bidirectional exchange between clients and/or servers. Faircamp uses a dramatically simpler model: Servers (websites) don’t “talk to each other” at all. Clients (visitors) request web pages, feeds, audio files, that’s it. In that sense, each Faircamp site is an island, which has both its advantages and disadvantages.

Something that I occasionally mention in public but haven’t gotten around to exploring yet is the idea of making Faircamp capable of broadcasting/announcing your content. Not the Faircamp websites, but Faircamp, the application that generates the websites. If the only time content needs to be announced to the world is when you add a new album on your site (or similar updates), the announcement may as well come directly from where it originated—your computer!

That way, Faircamp sites get to keep their fundamental properties (unbreakable, secure, maintenance-free, etc.) while the Faircamp application on your computer can support many protocol implementations with much, much smaller complexity, security, and maintenance implications for everyone.

That approach, for me, would also alleviate some concerns I have around Faircamp (websites) integrating more and more interfaces for indiscriminate crawling/scraping, as well as the thereby implicitly rising pressure for people’s music sites to implement all sorts of protocols in order to not be left behind or excluded from newly forming decentralized discovery mechanisms.

This got a bit technical, so I’ll try to bring out the more general vision behind it:

I’d love for artists, bands, and labels to be able to autonomously present themselves online in whichever way they like (including through something as raw and simple as hand-written HTML pages). At the same time, I’d love for them to be able to still participate and appear on networks for community, discovery, etc., completely regardless of how they decide to present themselves online.

Achieving this requires some degree of separation. The way in which you are discovered cannot be completely tied to how and where you present and express yourself online. POSSE (Publish on your Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere) is one vision of this. #BeYourOwnPlatform is advocating for this as well. Spotify is an antithesis to that.

Consider how in the physical world artists can perform at a hundred different venues, from the opera house to the local punk club to a street corner. They can generally find their audience, and their audience can find them, regardless of which context(s) they choose to express themselves in. In this world, culture exists in a multitude of places. Punk bands may end up performing at an opera house. Opera singers may end up performing at a punk club. Some subcultures thrive in complete isolation. This is not considered confusing, disorganized, or inconvenient, but a sign of a healthy, pluralistic society.

In the digital realm, our obsession with convenience and frictionlessness has widely erased such diversity. A vast majority of all artists and listeners have—voluntarily, for the most part—handed themselves over to a handful of privately owned online streaming clubs. “One place to discover, one place to be discovered, one place to listen” is both the fantasy of rich CEOs running these platforms, and what most of society currently votes for with their attention and wallets.

And my point is this: If we’re to build alternatives, I think we should aim at something other than replicating the bland, monocultural vision of streaming platforms as a decentralized, open source implementation.

My personal excitement and ambitions lie especially with everything that exists outside the standardization of music consumption into a single, clean, neat, monetizable standard. The friction and “inconvenience” of dealing with something other than your personalized audio stream on autoplay is where culture happens just as much as within the audio signal itself, and that should be more than an afterthought when we collectively shape new systems.

Faircamp 1.x was partly funded by NLnet, and 2.0 by netidee, which is public money for internet commons. Could a project like this exist without that funding? And what’s your take on new Bandcamp alternatives like Subvert, which are funded by their members but still pretty centralized, and seem to focus more on aesthetics than on accessibility or decentralization?

A project like Faircamp can definitely exist without funding, I started in 2021 and funding only came into the project in 2024. That said, funding has been crucial to take the project to the level it is at within such a short timeframe, so I am very grateful for the support from NLnet, from netidee, and also from quite a few individual donors who help make all of this happen. Thank you so much everyone!

Subvert is a bit of a black box to me right now, as I have too little time to follow it in greater detail. But regardless of their exact intent and apparently different focus, I’m generally happy to have them around. Anything that is better and based on a significantly different model than Spotify and the likes is ultimately better for artists.

I also have a personal “slippery slope of alternatives” theory that relates to this: Consider a spectrum that goes from “1 – Spotify hell” on one end, to “10 – self-coding your entire artistic online presence” (a different kind of hell maybe haha). Now here’s the crucial question: Who is realistically going to jump from 1 to 10 in one fell swoop? I certainly haven’t, in a number of cases. So maybe it’s better to have variably flawed alternatives at different points of the spectrum.

Some people might be strongly attracted to the kind of marketing stunts that Subvert pulled, and something like Faircamp, to them, might seem silly and quaint. But once on Subvert, with the toxic culture of Spotify removed, they may have time to reflect on things and experience a shift of values. Maybe at some point they look for “alternatives from the alternative” because they got intrigued where this could go, and whatever they switch to next might further politicize them, and so on.

I’m usually not even sad when people move on from having their own Faircamp site, because often it means they have fully radicalized and empowered themselves to do their own thing without middlemen like Daniel Ek, but also without middlemen like me. :)

Lastly, I’d like to stress that the theory is not about going from 1 to 10 per se. Getting people away from the extreme end of platform capitalism is the critical part. After that, I hope everyone finds a comfy new home that works for them, wherever on the spectrum that lies. Subvert seems a fine choice to pick, if they keep up with their mission. Not everyone must suffer through JavaScript, CSS, and the likes (only by choice haha).

You’re the one carrying the maintenance of a tool that’s supposed to be low-maintenance for everyone else. How do you think about your own sustainability over the long haul?

For a workshop, I recently needed to come up with a model that describes what I’m doing (with Faircamp and other projects), touching exactly upon this contradiction/friction you’re pointing out. I was quite happy with the tagline I found for it: “Too small to fail”

What that means is that, on the one hand, I build tools that are so small that they can be made to such a quality standard that they will almost never completely fail you as a user. If you keep complexity low enough, you can somehow manage this. That’s one side of it.

The other side is how it applies for me, for the process of making the software itself. “If I can’t minimally maintain something, I don’t add it” is one of my unwritten rules. I still sometimes bite off more than I can chew (2.0 is going slightly into that territory), but on average, it’s working well. All my project sites and almost everything I publish online is statically generated, completely free of maintenance. All the project infrastructure (except those things that can’t be avoided) is offline, away from merciless AI scraping and malicious actors. Day in, day out, I use simple, boring, highly deterministic technology that allows me to pull this off.

As a consequence of all this, I’m definitely not the most openly reachable software craftsperson out there. For instance, I currently ask people not to post feature requests in almost all of my free software projects! The rationale behind this is simply that I need to look after my mental and physical health. Having an unpaid, multiple-hours-per-week communication job on top of a full-time+ design/development job just does not work out for very long. I think these interactions are still super important, but for it all to work, I need to channel them into temporary or more focused periods and formats (which is ongoing experimentation and exploration in itself). I still put a lot of time into support, troubleshooting, bug fixing, etc. (if you reach out to me with critical issues, I usually respond quickly), but in various ways, I’m also doing things very differently from many other projects.

I’d also like to give an insight into my worst-case contingency planning, the thing that fundamentally keeps me confident in the face of precarity: Assuming that all funding runs dry, which is a possibility roughly every six months right now, and I have to take on a regular job working on something else entirely, I’m perfectly able to keep the lights on for Faircamp! Here’s why: Except in the direct aftermath of releases, there have been hardly any notable bugs over long stretches of time, and as long as Faircamp does not cause people trouble, they don’t cause me any either. That’s also a big incentive for me to deliver on quality rather than quantity. And if I can keep the lights on next to a (potentially even full-time) job, so can someone else. People who team up to do it, even more so. Getting hit by a bus would be a big problem for me, but not so much for Faircamp, the way it’s set up.

Faircamp 2.0 is being built through 2026. What direction are you most excited about, and what’s the conversation you wish the people using Faircamp were having with you that they aren’t yet?

Direction-wise, I’m very excited about how 2.0 carefully rearranges the data model to enable many new use cases. Two examples: multiple podcasts on the same site, each with their own feed. Or a site where you can listen to an album or podcast directly on the homepage. From an audience perspective, many of these changes will feel subtle, like things that maybe always were there already. From an authoring perspective, this is going to be a big level-up though!

What is also incredibly satisfying about this is that it feels like these changes could stabilize, more or less exactly as they are, in the long term. I think we’re all tired of software “improving” past the point where it makes sense, so I personally aspire to make software that can be considered mostly done at some point. But it’s also a tough road to get to that point, so having that sensation of things falling into place towards that goal is … really nice!

Conversation around Faircamp is currently a bit more on the quiet side, especially because I’m taking lots of time to focus and wrap up the work on Faircamp 2.0. Somewhere in between the public beta and final release (ETA: September), I’ll also try to get a bit of downtime and rest before fully jumping back into things. In essence, right now, I’m actually quite content with the conversations going on, but after the release, I’m looking forward to opening many new ones.

I’ll use the outro to plug one more thing: Once the public beta and/or release candidates for 2.0 are out, I would be very happy if many authors of existing Faircamp sites tested the automated migration to 2.0 and provided me with feedback on that. Getting this right will be crucial, but I can’t do it without support, so this is a chance to join the conversation and help out big time!

You can download Faircamp from here, read the documentation, find the source code, and follow the latest development news from Simon @freebliss.