Funkwhale has taken off in popularity in recent months, touting a web-based music platform with cloud storage and an open API for clients. Although it already offers ActivityPub support for federating music collections between multiple instances, one criticism has involved a lack of connection between Funkwhale and the rest of the fediverse ecosystem.

One exciting effort from the Funkwhale project to address this is the development of a new fixture to the platform: channels. The feature is still very much in early development, but the underlying pieces allow for creators to build their own media channels for podcasting as well as music, with the initial emphasis being on the former.

Work-in-progress UI for a test podcast channel

The project developers and designers are making great progress on the feature already. Funkwhale has an official test group for podcast creators to try out the UI, and basic federation from a Funkwhale channel to a Mastodon stream is also reported to work.

A proposed UI for subscribing to podcasts, both with traditional RSS and ActivityPub

Although these are still early days, this is an exciting initiative, and could give indie creators more tools to publish directly to the fediverse itself.