Riff.CC, the flagship Lens

What is Riff.CC?

Riff.CC is the original concept of what we were trying to build.

It will become a central destination for all of the quality Creative Commons and libre licenced media ever produced that has enough value and quality to be interesting to someone. It is moderated and will hopefully carefully curate the greatest open source culture resource produced, building on the amazing work of those that came before it.

To users, Riff (the "platform", our lens) will just be what they expect - a streaming site with lots of things to watch and enjoy, and free and advertisement-free with no catch. It will thus be an enigma to most people because the Internet does not allow such a thing to exist safely and sustainably with the current models in use - the way the web works today - and current solutions only partially solve the things needed to make Riff even possible.

Riff is our view of the world - our answer to both the phrases "When you look at the world, what do you see?" and equally important, "When you look at the world, what do you want to see?"

The Riff Project

The Riff Project is wider than Riff.CC (which is run as a pure, uncomplicated and transparent organisation) - efforts like Riff Labs trade off the transparency to make progress in areas that move the needle but require sensitive commercial discussions, which also helps give huge funding to Riff.CC without compromising it.

Riff Labs does work for organisations like the Institute of Free Technology to further the goals of making the internet function fairly, improve privacy, and reduce fragility and unnecessary centralisation; and in the process uses the money earned to sustain both the lives of those working on this project so they have a bit of time and energy to do so (as well as building resources and influence for Riff.CC itself) as well as work on causes that meaningfully improve things that The Riff Project cares about - privacy, autonomy, culture, fairness and open communication and collaboration, and free software.

Riff.CC as the developer of the Pioneer Ecosystem builds tools that were needed to make Riff.CC work, but that may benefit organisations, projects and individuals that Riff Labs work with, to the benefit of all involved and producing a public good + open source software.

In other words, Riff Labs provides funding through working on efforts and goals compatible with Riff.CC's mission, while allowing flexibility. Pioneer is created and fueled by these efforts - which is used to make Riff.CC actually possible, and permanent as a living archive of culture - Riff.CC provides a quality resource and the first truly vibrant Creative Commons consumer streaming platform with total breadth of coverage; and the whole system allows for interesting things to be built even in private spaces that may not be something we thought of.

The Pioneer Ecosystem

We don't use this distinction much yet, but we will - Riff.CC is our view of the world, but because we had goals it must meet (it must not end just because we walk away, but we also must be able to stand behind what's on our site, and many others) - we can't build a traditional streaming site, or we're not solving anything new.

So we're building the Pioneer Ecosystem (which will one day live at https://pioneer.eco) to build a set of neutral tools that reduce waste of energy of effort and distribution, and allow people to collaborate in new ways.

Pioneer is a growing suite of tools that work with, enhance and patch existing structures to make collaboration better, let people collaborate who might not otherwise, and will one day generalise to more than just streaming; we had to build these to make Riff.CC, but intend for them to be incredibly useful.

Lenses

So, the core concept comes from the idea of a Lens - Riff being one of those.

What is a Lens?

Simply put, it's your site, with all the things your site wants to do and the rules and policies (whether on content or moderation, niche and focus or whatever you want) - which may instantly and seamlessly copy and combine other existing Lenses that you think have a good handle on what your site's about - ie: in Riff's case, we will make our Lens follow any site that is reputable and has a good track record of posting legally free media, not infringing on copyright, and not abusing their users or trying to cause harm. This will allow us to import the world's Creative Commons content by working with others instead of having to do it all ourselves, and the nature of Pioneer, and the Defederation Model, will allow this to happen while we retain the ability to defend our site and make sure we only spread things we are legally allowed to, and proud and happy to be responsible for.

How do Lenses work?

Lenses allow an individual Lens to take components and other things from other Lenses, including content. They allow you to combine other people's Lenses (with their permission) to make your own and collaborate.

They give you the ability to upload content, share it with your friends and showcase it on your Lens, and to work on building cool things together.

They are free of cost (anyone can run one) and can "vampire" from any existing Lens in the public system, as long as it's legal for the Lens to do so.

Running a Lens on a proper domain other niceties can be done by simply buying a domain name, not a single dollar has to go to us - and we'll help people run Lenses.

They give you sovereignty and freedom and a personal space for you, your project, company or business.

So they're free in both cost and freedom, and they can do good things? What's the catch?

There's no real catch - OrbitDB as a younger technology will not be as fast as some larger, centralised database projects, which reduces performance a bit - we're confident as more interest piles onto Riff.CC and projects like OrbitDB that those concerns will go away.

Run your own Lens

You can look at https://github.com/riffcc/orbiter for some instructions. Right now, Lens capabilities are being reintroduced to Orbiter, having been removed to ship the production redesign and make it ready to show off.

Meanwhile, you can join #riff-dev:matrix.org if you want to follow along with development or ask about running your own Lens.

Once we're ready we'll be publishing a full guide.