Ben Pate

**IT'S TIME TO TAG YOUR ALBUMS**

I'm hard at work on search and discovery, and one vital piece of this is tag metadata.  Please take a minute to add tags to each of your albums.  This will help the search engine to surface your work to the people who want to hear it most.

Good tag data will also help me to see what this real-world data looks like, so that I can organize the pages most effectively.

It's really easy to do this.  Just go click "Edit Album" on each album cover (or the top of the album details page) then click the "Metadata" tab.  The top box is labeled "Tags".  Just enter a few categories or descriptors for this album, such as the genre, mood, or subject matter.  Something like this:

#Metal #Alternative  #Bonkwave

Hey all..  I want to share some big updates under the hood of Bandwagon.fm.

Bandwagon is meant to be a universal connection to as many of your fans and listeners as possible.  And today I think I've crossed one of the last hurdles, and brought us one step closer to that goal.

Without getting too technical, Bandwagon can now communicate with Mastodon servers that use "Secure Mode" (aka "Authorized Fetch").  This is an admin setting in Mastodon that requires others (like Bandwagon) to sign all of their requests before communicating, and it's there to make it harder for the bad guys to scrape content from your Mastodon profiles.

The end result is that you should now be able to follow Bandwagon.fm profiles from any Mastodon server -- no matter what admin settings the mods have chosen.

I've been chasing this down with the help, patience, and grace of several of your fellow artists.  So big thanks to Stefan Bohacek, Ethical Revolution, and Jux for helping to make this happen.

There's no rest for the wicked.  I'm continuing to work on making this a better, more robust, and more resilient platform for great indie music, and will be posting more updates here as soon as I can.

So please tell your friends, families, and pets that they can finally put their music directly on the Fediverse.  I'm looking forward to hearing how it goes for everyone!

Just go to one of your albums, then look on the left-hand side for the "Downloads" section. Click the little "upload" button and you're off to the races.

For now, they're just randomized lists, but this seed is already growing into something much larger and more beautiful.  What do you all think?

What better place to do it than on the Fediverse itself, yeah?  I'll try to keep this space dedicated to Bandwagon (the open source app) and Bandwagon.fm (the flagship hosting service that you all are trying out) and keep my other rants on other channels.

Thanks for taking the leap with me on this.  I love you guys.