What is Bandwagon.fm?

Bandwagon is the open social app for indie musicians and bands, giving you a trustworthy place to put your music online.

It is the alternative to big centralized servers where you don’t always fit in. Anyone can run their own Bandwagon server and share their music on a site they control. This server (Bandwagon.fm) is the flagship domain for the Bandwagon project; the first of many that we hope will join us in the near future.

What Is The Fediverse?

If you’re not familiar with the name “Fediverse” – that’s okay. It is is an open society of web services that is already serving millions of people all around the world. They do this through a common language called ActivityPub that lets news and events flow from one site to the next. So, instead of checking in to five or six different corporate sites, you can find, follow, like, and share across many, many sources – all from your own, singluar Fediverse profile.

Here’s a good Fediverse guide to get you started.

Free Through 2024

We are still testing and refining Bandwagon, and will be hosting all accounts on bandwagon.fm for be free through the end of this year. Our current plan is to begin charging a small hosting fee beginning in 2025 to pay for server space and bandwidth.

Self-Hosting and Open Source

Bandwagon is built on 100% open source software, which means that you are free to install it on your own servers if you want.

We are encouraging bands to sign up here (at least through the end of this year) for several reasons:

  1. It is less work to use our servers than to set up your own
  2. Your experience is valuable feedback that will make Bandwagon better for everyone
  3. It’s free, so save your cash for tacos instead.

We are encouraging developers to install Bandwagon in test environments to see how it works and how they might like to improve on it or integrate with it in the future.

Support Bandwagon!

Bands and Musicians

The best thing you can do for Bandwagon right now is to sign up and try it out. Let us know how it works for you, and what you need it to do better.

Indie Music Labels

Interested in hosting a Bandwagon server for your musicians? We’d love to help you set it up. Reach out to us at [email protected] and let’s make beautiful music together.

Techies

If you have technical skills (software, design, writing) then we would welcome your contributions. Take a look at the Bandwagon Project Board to see if anything stands out.

Bandwagon and Emissary

Bandwagon is built on Emissary, the social web toolkit, which does most of the work under the hood.

Bandwagon’s source code is remarkably small, consisting of HTML templates and JSON configuration files, so it is easy to make changes to Bandwagon itself. The Emissary website can show you how to customize Bandwagon templates. If you want to move some content, or change a form value, this is where you should start. If you know HTML and htmx, you’re good to go.

Emissary is a sophisticated app built with Go and Mongodb. If you want to add capabilities to Bandwagon such as new rules for social activities, you may need to make changes here. The Emissary website has plenty of documentation on how to enhance Emissary but the learning curve is much steeper than changing Bandwagon.