If Roon integrated a ‘what are my friends playing’ list with a strong influence on how Roon radio picks its track selections this might actually be of some use.
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Last.fm still exists and scrobbling from within Roon is possible.
It doesn’t offer a view on the full library or allow you to hide you guilty Spice Girl pleasures, but it does allow you to see what they are currently playing and have been playing.
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Would be nice.
I would make an effort paticularly on a Friday to see new releases. I share tastes with a few friends of mine.
When I look at an album, it would good to see which friends of mine already have it added to their collection.
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And there is little correlation between my taste in music and the music I use Roon for. The majority of my music listening is done via Internet radio or the Tidal app when out and about. I mostly use Roon to further explore artists I have discovered. Many don’t get a repeat play in Roon and are soon deleted from my Library.
This is almost certainly false in most cases.
Streaming services provide features catered to discovery and Roon already has many of its own. People do care about what others listen to.
Maybe in the aggregate, but not individuals. It’s the same with all social media, too much information. Why do people think anyone cares about the details of their life and what they ate for lunch?
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I dont think you understand whats being purposed here.
Discord - shows what my friends are doing
Xbox/PlayStation/Steam - shows what games my friends are playing
Spotify - friend activity shows what friends are listening to
Meta quest - shows what my friends are doing
But all these companies could be wrong. Nobody cares after all. Despite it existing all over the place.
Edit - what people are eating is an issue you can take elsewhere. That hasnt been suggested.
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I totally understand. I’m not in favor of adding a social media aspect to Roon so we can see what music other specific people are listening to. Reasonable people can disagree.
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Fair enough.
Though people do care, not all but some. Thats why I pointed out what I did. Your opinion is as valid as mine.
And I dont care about what you are eating either 
Are you wanting to know what your friends are actually listening to in a real-time sense? This is going to make me sound really out of touch, but why? People can already post recommendations on listening threads and then you can check these out.
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It is literally that.
dont think I could rustle up enough mates to make this work anyhow - so its moot
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This is the feature that keeps my kids on Spotify. I have to admit that I wouldn’t mind being able to pursue the playlists of others for new music.
I’m all for it (as I’ll elaborate below), but I wouldn’t want it for myself. Partly because Roon isn’t particularly sticky for me (probably three quarters or more of my music consumption is elsewhere) and partly because I already use https://www.last.fm/user/oldenew. You all are most welcome to peruse my very ordinary music habits.
If this would give Roon a future with people younger than myself (I’m 52) then it’s a no brainer.
There’s already a thread somewhere to add your last FM account name, I did it, a few people follow me and I follow a few others, it’s been very useful but I don’t need to see this within Roon and engage with anyone within the app.
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I do not do ‘social media’, have no intention of doing so and do not want such features built into Roon. However, I can see that many people may like it. Consequetly, it would appear that there are three possible approaches:
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Build it into the Roon Server application - but this may be complicated because of the multiple user and multiple stream capabilities of Roon - and make sure that those that do not want it can disable the feature altogether.
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Built it into the Roon Client applications. This may be simpler from an architectural point of view but again there are complications: Clients are not necessarily running all the time.
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Create a separate app (or Roon Extension) that can optionally be installed to perform any social media related functionality. The Roon API already appears to provide access to all of the information that may be required so it should quite possible to do this with little or no changes to the core Roon Server/Client applications.
Personnally, I would find the additional App/Roon Extension approach to be much preferable. It gives people like me the option to not use it and it separates any added complexity away from the Roon Server application.
As to the need for a social media aspect, when I was a teenager and started to actively listen to music, groups of friends used to gather around in one of their friends houses and play records on a music player of some sort (varying from hifi systems to all-in-one record players to cassette players). Everyone knew what everyone else was listening to - because they all listened together whenever anyone acquired any new music.
I think the rot started to set in with the Walkman. Suddenly, music was (mostly) private. At best you could share what you were listeing to with one other person (I seem to remember some of the lightweight over-ear headphones being seriously mistreated as friends tried to turn them inside out so they could share one earpiece each).
These days, music does not appear to be shared in the same way. You may still get the conversations about music (person to person and on forums like this one and social media) but the shared listening experience is largely gone. This is possibly the driver for the rise of group streaming and music related social media but, in my opinion, it is a poor substitute for 4 or 5 friends gathered together in a room sharing exactly the same experience at the same time and talking about that experience.
Whilst I have a good pair of headphones, and I am happy to admit that the sound quality from them exceeds that of my room HiFi, I still prefer to listen to my HiFi system whenever possible. Listenting on headphones or earphones is a different experience to listening on a good quality speaker system. I think that the latter is being lost to many these days.
You brought back some really cool memories, on Sunday evenings we used to meet at Suzanne’s house, her parents were cool and let us use the second room and provide us with weak beer (Double Diamond) and sandwiches.
Whenever one of us bought a new album we would bring it along and sit there in the light of the lava lamps (2) and the glow from the amp and listen to albums like Diamond Dogs, Machine Head, It’s Only Rock ‘n’ Roll, etc
Such wonderful shared times when music was almost as important as life. Thank you for taking me back there.
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Such a great reply, I’m happy to hear it.
Pre streaming, me and my friends did the same. We would always listen to new music together and share what we found when we couldn’t be.
Good times. Now we have bill’s and responsibilities.
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That might be so, but I prefer to discover Music myself. Sitting on your butt and waiting for some " smart" software to choose what you might like is not discovery. It’s a kind of lazyness.
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I like the personal touch more. Friends of mine being in house or vice versa. Playing some music, sharing our experiences.
I don’t feel much for a digital approach.
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