[epic] Library Management - uploading, sharing, deleting, following, browsing…
funkwhale.audio describes Funkwhale as "a social platform to enjoy and share music". Unfortunately even the most features have big flaws. Here I try to draw the big picture about libraries.
Following libraries. When people decide to follow a library, they may want to explore their specific content. Doing so is currently possible, but quite well hidden: they have to click the upload
icon in the left sidebar, then go to the Follow library
section, and click Get started
. The whole process is unfortunate, as it has actually nothing to do with uploading content.
Uploading content requires people to be familiar with concepts that are not explained anywhere. Hence they first would have to find the "upload" icon (which lacks both label and tooltip), be presented with unrelated options ("follow remote libraries"), find out if they want to upload to a channel or a library (this step is probably ok)… Now they arrive on a page that requires to "create a new library" because there is none, while they would have thought there was one as presented in the sidebar.
Organizing content is a tedious process. A Funkwhale user may also decide to share (or not) their own libraries with various groups of people (family, friends, colleagues, etc.). To do so, first they would have to upload the same content multiple times, then Funkwhale would mark the content as "skipped", and thereafter the user would have to purge
their own storage space. Issues #1448 and #1565 both describe what happens.
Browsing your own libraries shows odd things. Once people managed to organize their libraries somehow, they would in the long run need to know easily which content is accessible through each library. Yet, even before talking of sharing, the content shown while browsing your own libraries doesn't even match what's actually in there. See #1565 for details.
Access control is not straightforward either. Library can be shared by link while keeping their "visibility" reported to be private
. So there is no way for someone to know for sure which libraries they actually share with whom.
Deleting files you uploaded is yet another well-hidden feature. So when people ask for help, some other funkwhale users send links to the doc, while other make screenshots to guide people through. See this thread on the Fediverse where the feedback over Funkwhale UX is really negative.
Editing content metadata requires using an external tool, and uploading content again. This urges less than the previous points, but could be nice to spare our users this effort.