I've been using this for a little over a year and like it a lot but it lacks the music discovery features of commercial platforms (which becomes important when you have terabytes of music) and takes a lot of effort to organize music and create play lists. The music onboarding process typically starts with organizing metadata with Musicbrainz Picard then import the collection into Funkwhale's DB via a cli admin tool. I have funkwhale hosted at home attached to my own music collection. There is an unofficial mobile client called Otter that makes listening to music on Android very pleasent. Admin overhead aside, this program has become a part of my daily life and I greatly appreciate the developers efforts.

I cannot upvote Funkwhale enough. I've had the need for something like this for a long long time now. A decade ago I was lucky to have my own desktop computer (before it was a shared one with my brother, before that I had just my parent's from time to time). Nowadays, between the smarphone, the work laptop, my desktop and my laptop I cannot possibly have all my music available all the time. And I don't like using spotify where I don't feel I own the songs and they get dropped from my lists. I used to be a fan of grooveshark, but that went down. Now I can have my pod and share it with my friends? On my own server? Accessible everywhere? I'm in.

Where can I donate some money?

> I've had the need for something like this for a long long time now.

Note that there are a few projects like this one, for example Subsonic or Mopidy.

(Funkywhale certainly looks nice though!)

Throwing this out here - Airsonic is the current FOSS iteration of the software https://airsonic.github.io/

Subsonic went closed, and the rebrand to LibreSonic had some unrest with the maintainer, so Airsonic is leading the way in the line of *Sonics.