Community – MetaBrainz Blog

Happening NOW: AMA with Silona Bonewald, MetaBrainz Foundation Executive Director

Silona Bonewald, our new Executive Director, is NOW hosting an AMA (Ask Me Anything) in this forum thread.

Please respect the code of conduct, as you always do!

You are welcome to post questions in the thread later, and Silona will do her best to answer them when she has the time. We will close the thread after a couple of days – though of course the door remains open to chat with the MetaBrainz team any time in the future!

You can find more information about Silona on our Executive Director announcement post.

Our editors: vzell

This is part of a series where we talk to some of the amazing editors that have cracked one million MusicBrainz edits and qualified for super special (lousy) shirt plan.*

These users have donated substantial amounts of their time to improve open music data, enriching open-source knowledge and culture for billions of people. Let’s find out what makes vzell click. And click and click and click!

Save the date: AMA with Silona Bonewald, MetaBrainz Foundation Executive Director

Silona Bonewald, our new Executive Director, will be hosting an AMA (Ask Me Anything) on our forums at:

5th October 2026
17:00 Central European Summer Time (CEST)
In this forum thread

Please respect the code of conduct, as you always do!

We are aware that this time will not suit everyone’s timezone, so we will open the thread a day or so before the AMA, for early questions. We will also leave the thread open for a couple of days – but don’t wait too long!

You can find more information about Silona on our Executive Director announcement post.

Welcome Silona Bonewald, new MetaBrainz Foundation Executive Director!

We are very pleased to announce that the MetaBrainz Foundation has appointed Silona Bonewald as Executive Director, following the unfortunate passing of our Rob at the beginning of the year.

Silona has served as Executive Director of IEEE SA Open and Vice President of Community Architecture at Hyperledger, part of the Linux Foundation. Earlier in her career she served as Director of InnerSource at PayPal and authored the widely used O’Reilly publication Understanding the InnerSource Checklist.

Silona also founded the League of Technical Voters, a 501(c)(3) organization dedicated to government transparency through open source technology, and has since advised nonprofit and open source organizations including the Cardano community’s IntersectMBO, the Foundation for Public Code, and the Software Freedom Conservancy. She has served on the board of the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s Austin chapter in the past and holds standing relationships across the world wide standards communities, and more… If you would like to keep browsing Silona’s looong list of professional credentials you are welcome to follow her on LinkedIn.

That’s all a long way to say that we are very excited to have Silona on board! The team is looking forward to working with Silona and you (our wonderful community) to carry Rob’s legacy forward.

Please give Silona a warm welcome in the comments!

Silona will also be hosting an AMA on 5 October 2026, at 17:00 UTC, on the forums (we will do another announcement regarding this, closer to the time), where you can post questions and share with Silona some of your dreams for the future of the MetaBrainz Foundation and its projects!

MerchBrainz

We have added a range of great new MetaBrainz designs to our merch store: https://www.redbubble.com/people/metabrainz/shop

These designs by Monkey, previously only available to MetaBrainz summit attendees, have been lightly modified (summit-specific text removed) for everyday wear. Are many people going to know what you’re repping? No. Are the ones that do going to go “DAAAAAAAAAAAAMN IT’S THE BRAINZ YO”? Most definitely!

Rest in Peace drsaunde!

Hello!

It is with a heavy heart that I share this sad news today; we’ve just found out that one of our most prolific editors, David Saunders (AKA drsaunde) has passed away.

We don’t know much about the circumstances of what happened, but a friend of David’s was kind enough to reach out to us to let us know of his passing. The friend said:

“Our dear friend, David Saunders aka drsaunde sadly passed away March 26, 2025 surrounded by friends listening to his favourite music. Dave was a brilliant man with a great sense of humour and obviously an avid fan of music. I knew he wrote for a music site but never learned which one. Quick search for a common username he used landed me on your site.”

To put into context who drsaunde really was, lets look at his impressive statistics:

He made a total of 2,191,225 edits, with only 37 rejected edits, for an astonishing acceptance rate of 99.998%. He was a member of MusicBrainz since 2006-05-06 for a total of 18 years, 10 months and 20 days, which amounts to 317 edits for each day he was a member of MusicBrainz. 🤯🤯🤯

On top of that he was our Areas editor, the person in charge of maintaining our database of cities and regions in the world. Needless to say, drsaunde has left a giant hole in our community and our hearts.

In keeping with his spirit, his friends will hold a celebration of life for drsaunde on May 3rd. We’ve sent some funds to help ensure that celebration really honors his spirit.

Finally, if you would like to take a moment to remember drsaunde, you could head over to ListenBrainz radio and make a playlist from his most listened tracks.

Rest in peace, drsaunde, you will be missed.

Towards Fair Streaming: Introducing the FairMusE project

Hello ListenBrainz community!

As you know, we’ve been working hard on building recommendations and other music discovery tools as part of ListenBrainz. Our frustrations with online streaming providers and their questionable discovery features have long been a source of frustration for us, so we worked hard to build recommendations with as little bias as possible.

Fortunately, we’re not alone in our frustration with the steaming providers – researchers at Aalborg University, Denmark and Lille University, France are currently questioning the fairness of these music recommendations and have asked ListenBrainz and its community to help them with this task.

The researchers are looking for ListenBrainz users to give their permission for their public ListenBrainz data to be used as part of this research. If fair music discovery services are of importance to you, please read on and consider granting the researchers permission to use your data:

Share your listening data with the researchers and help us fight for a fair and transparent music streaming ecosystem!

ChatBrainz: IRC, Matrix & Discord

Have you ever joined the MetaBrainz chat? Team and community members have been getting up to mischief (and, occasionally, work) using IRC since 2003 and earlier – with the logs to prove it. Today, over twenty years later, we say ‘oh hi’ to ChatBrainz.

With the launch of ChatBrainz we have officially moved to Matrix! Matrix has ease of access and some modern conveniences that make access to chat possible for more contributors and users. Not a fan of the change? Not a problem – ChatBrainz also has IRC and Discord bridges, that allow cross-platform chat with the three main Matrix rooms/channels.

Click here to get chatting!

MetaBrainz IRC migration

Due to recent changes in the administration of the freenode IRC network, all MetaBrainz IRC channels have migrated to the Libera.Chat network effective immediately.

The main channel names are all the same, #metabrainz, #musicbrainz, and #bookbrainz, though some special purpose channels were renamed in the move to better align with our project namespace (e.g., #brainzbot is now #metabrainz-bot).

Most of the MetaBrainz team will be around using the nicks you know already (e.g., bitmap, yvanzo, reosarevok, Freso, zas, …) but a few have had some changes: Mr_Monkey is now monkey and _lucifer is now lucifer.

Hopefully this will have minimal impact on users beyond having to update your IRC server in your client. If needed, Libera Chat provides a guide for how to connect to their network, including client specific guides for a number of IRC clients. They’re working on their own web client, but for now, Kiwi IRC can be used if you don’t have a local client running. For those of you relying on Matrix or Tor to connect: Libera.Chat staff is working on both of those and they should hopefully both be up within a week. Stay tuned on their Twitter: https://twitter.com/LiberaChat

As always, you can find information about our IRC channels and guidelines on our IRC documentation page. Wikimedia have also migrated to Libera.Chat and have written this handy guide which might also come in useful for migrating: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/IRC/Migrating_to_Libera_Chat

As a last note (and I am admittedly biased being both former freenode staff and current Libera.Chat staff myself): it is my personal belief, as community manager, that freenode is no longer a safe network to be on for our users. The new freenode staff does not seem trustworthy, making policies to retroactively justify their own breaches of their policies, refusing to give a clear answer on “whether slurs, racism and transphobia are allowed on Freenode”, getting staff on board that were kicked from other networks for privilege abuse, and leaking staff-internal information (channel closure reasons) to non-staffers. I highly recommend disconnecting from the network ASAP and, if possible, overwrite your NickServ registered e-mail and password and possibly dropping your NickServ registration as well if you can and are able and willing to. If you have used your NickServ password for anything else, my recommendation is to consider that password compromised.