Ben Pate 🤘🏻

Howdy! I'm the nerd who's building #Emissary - an ActivityPub server for building custom social applications on the Fediverse.

My first app on this platform is a music sharing server for indie bands, called #Bandwagon. And now I'm also working on #Atlas, a social mapping server for adding Federated annotations to places in the real world.

If you'd like to talk about any of my projects, feel free to DM me here, or on Signal (@benpate.5280)

⁂

Emissary: https://emissary.dev
Bandwagon.fm: https://bandwagon.fm
Atlas: https://atlasmaps.org
GitHub: https://github.com/benpate

Last Notes

2025-08-17 19:25:26 UTC

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Fantastic idea. Just replied on GitHub. I’ll follow up with questions over email

2025-08-16 17:34:14 UTC

I'm a software developer working on a bunch of #Fediverse things: #Emissary, #Bandwagon, and bandwagon.fm - with several more in the pipeline.
It's a pretty strange mix that doesn't really fit today's Fediverse, but it makes sense when you see the end goal.
I got an opportunity at #Fedicon to explain myself, so here it is:
https://spectra.video/w/eod3ybLu7sHzAEMihej8km
It's not the greatest talk about Fediverse tech, but it's the best I've got so far, and I hope it inspires you to make great things here with me.

2025-06-17 05:17:43 UTC

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Thank you! All added to my list to research.
It does get complicated very quickly, esp when dealing with payments all around the world.
@npub1evt…xdke @npub1fus…tvjp

2025-06-17 01:08:47 UTC

A question for all of you on the #Fediverse (and especially #Musicians, #Writers, and #Artists) who sell your work online:
Do you know how you receive payments right now?
I want to connect the most fedi-friendly platforms into #Bandwagon, #Emissary, and beyond.. so I'd love to hear what works best for you :)

2025-02-19 13:38:12 UTC

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Sorry it wasn't showing correctly. There's no moderation queue, so it wasn't held up there. But I think there was some problem indexing it in the search engine, which I've just updated for you.
I'll dig in to make sure this doesn't happen in the future.
And, please let me know if you need anything else. I'm really interested to see the new event system work well for everyone.
@npub1nuu…gjr3 @npub1htd…fq0v

2025-01-22 23:31:04 UTC

Hey #Musicians, if you're on #Bandwagon, the time has come.
I'm prepping the #SearchEngine and giving you a preview of how it'll work. Just jump over to bandwagon.fm and hit "Discover" to check it out.
I'm really pleased with this first step, but it will still be a just dumb, empty shell until we can get all your music is tagged, and optimize the tags/categories together.
You can read my full post at https://bandwagon.fm/2025-01-22-Search-Engine for all the details.
I can't wait to hear what you think.
https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/113/874/610/447/966/892/original/7db43d9c4ff25340.png

2025-01-02 18:26:09 UTC

Hey #Musicians, between Christmas and New Years, I've been pretty quiet about #Bandwagon.
But I have a bunch of huge news that I'm super excited to finally share with you.
Here's the full news release. I'll put highlights in a reply
https://bandwagon.fm/2025-01-01-January-Update

2024-12-07 20:18:06 UTC

Hey all..
What's the best way to fund a service like #Bandwagon?
I strongly believe that the #Fediverse needs a sustainable funding model to be competitive with BlueSky, Xitter, and Facebook. More than just donations and mutual aid, people should be able to make careers on the Fediverse.
I'm reevaluating how I'll pay for bandwagon.fm in the long term. And I want to make something that's still "free forever"
Do you think there's a place for the #Freemium Fediverse?

2024-11-23 21:12:33 UTC

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I’m super interested in all of these efforts to improve conversations and relies.
This looks like it’s pulled from Streams, yes? Which means it’s not related to the Forums and Threaded Discussions Working Group, is that right?
There are some cool ideas in here. Hopefully we can consolidate all of them to arrive at a single standard to implement.

2024-11-09 16:00:08 UTC

Piece by piece, we're connecting #Bandwagon to every corner of the open web.
Today, we're improving how links to your songs and albums display when someone shares them on Mastodon, Facebook, and others. It's a small thing, but immensely valuable to the social web.
As an example, here's an album I've been listening to on Bandwagon.fm: https://bandwagon.fm/671667a8d7963fa9c589401e

2024-10-18 17:54:48 UTC

Wow! I'm making #Bandwagon -- an open source, community-focused alternative to #Bandcamp that anyone can self-host.
As of this morning, there are 99 #Musicians and #Bands who have set up #Fediverse profiles on https://bandwagon.fm -- and half of those already indexable on search engines.
So I'm humbled by the number of people who are giving it a go. There's obviously lots of people out there looking for something new.
I promise to do my best to give y'all the tools you deserve.

2024-06-25 16:31:46 UTC

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😭😭😭😭😭

2024-06-25 15:39:05 UTC

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There are tons of editors out there, and they all feel like they’re missing something.
I’ve fallen back to using a decent Markdown editor for most of my work - as the least bad solution.
If you end up making a good “writer’s editor” I would love to try it out or help test it for you. Hopefully it works in more environments than just WordPress.