ArtCannon
I built this whole thing for people to create, share, and enjoy art — freely.
Your computer can help keep it that way.
— Playful
Here's what happens.
ArtCannon is a small desktop app. When you run it, your computer downloads music and images from the platform and starts serving them to other people. If your machine is online when someone hits play, they get the content from you instead of from a rented server.
If your machine goes offline, nothing breaks. The listener gets CDN delivery like normal. ArtCannon is a speed boost, not a dependency.
Most platforms get more expensive as they grow. More users = more servers = more cost. ArtCannon inverts that. More fans = more relay operators = more capacity. Growth adds infrastructure instead of consuming it.
~10 MB install. Runs in the background.
Windows, macOS, or Linux. You choose how much disk space to share (up to 50 GB). It uses your idle bandwidth — you won't notice it running.
Every serve gets a thank you.
From me. Personally. Every single time.
I can't guarantee that the listener on the other end appreciates what you're doing. I can't speak for anyone else.
But I built this. And every time your computer serves something to someone, my code says thank you on my behalf. Automatically and provably. Because I mean it.
“Why build a distributed CDN when
Cloudflare already solved this?”
My friend Jim Rutt asked me this the other day. Six months ago he would have been right.
The whole case for paying Cloudflare or Amazon rests on a single assumption: that it's much faster and easier and more reliable to just pay them and integrate their thing rather than rolling your own.
That assumption doesn't hold anymore. I built the entire distributed relay system — the desktop app, the browser integration, the proxy layer, the tunnel provisioning, the cache, the monitoring, all of it — and got the whole site running on it in under three days. I took one of those days off.
Why do this? Because we can. And it means instead of paying a bill to a big company every month, we can all just work together to make the best fucking place to hang out on the internet.
Also, there's badges.
We know you're not doing this for badges. But we can see how much you're contributing, so here's some cool stuff anyway.
Bronze
You showed up
First serve
Silver
You stayed
100+ tracks
Gold
You committed
500+ tracks
Diamond
You're the reason it works
2,000+ tracks
Badges
Oh, and bandwidth counts as patronage.
Every gigabyte you serve is converted into a patronage equivalent — same formula, same art drip, same gift queue benefits as paying patrons. Already a patron? It stacks. A $3/mo patron serving 50 GB/mo is treated as a $90/yr patron. Compute and cash in the same formula.
Two nodes. It works.
Here's what the relay fleet delivered on its first day online.
Listeners don't notice anything different. The only sign is a small ⚡ badge in the player. Every single request served by fan infrastructure, zero by rented servers. That's kind of the point.
Get ArtCannon
Auto-updates included. Once installed, ArtCannon keeps itself current.