“Wherever you get your podcasts” is a radical statement - Anil Dash

Submitted ⁨⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩ by ⁨veeesix@lemmy.ca⁩ to ⁨fediverse@lemmy.world⁩

https://www.anildash.com//2024/02/06/wherever-you-get-podcasts/

[…] being able to say, “wherever you get your podcasts” is a radical statement. Because what it represents is the triumph of exactly the kind of technology that’s supposed to be impossible: open, empowering tech that’s not owned by any one company, that can’t be controlled by any one company, and that allows people to have ownership over their work and their relationship with their audience.

What podcasting holds in the promise of its open format is the proof that an open web can still thrive and be relevant, that it can inspire new systems that are similarly open to take root and grow.

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thanks_shakey_snake@lemmy.ca ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
If those Joe Rogan fans could read, they would be very upset right now!

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- Venator@lemmy.nz ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Everything is better when it ends with a fact check.
  
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  - aksdb@lemmy.world ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    Even sex?
    
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- helenslunch@feddit.nl ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Many creators are moving away from exclusivity agreements. I think that’s great.
  
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  - thanks_shakey_snake@lemmy.ca ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    Yeah, it’s much better for everyone except the rent-seeking company… And it isn’t even bad for the rent-seeker, they’re just deprived of the gains they would obtain from harming the ecosystem by fragmenting it.
    
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- dangblingus@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  They’re paying him $250M starting this year. I think it’s about to be exclusive to Spotify again.
  
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- PersonalDevKit@aussie.zone ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  I feel him selling out turned me off ever wanting to watch it. He didn’t need the money, he was already super well off. So he just showed that he didn’t value his listeners, he knew he would lose some but didn’t care.
  
  Compared to my favorite podcast that offers people to email him if they can’t afford the paid stuff because he just wants people to be able to listen.
  
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  - thanks_shakey_snake@lemmy.ca ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    Agree. I mean I dunno if I’d be able to say no to $100 million even if I was already wealthy, so I don’t want to make it too black-and-white… But it definitely did harm, and I think it’s fair to describe it as selling out.
    
    Who’s your favorite podcast? They sound rad.
    
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ObviouslyNotBanana@lemmy.world ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
When people push listening on Spotify even though the podcast is available everywhere else I roll my eyes.

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- sab@kbin.social ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  One of my main motivations for cancelling my Spotify subscription was their insistence on capitalising on podcasts. They have a perfectly fine business model with music, why do they need to ruin podcasts?
  
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  - s0ckpuppet@kbin.social ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    Yeah the locking down podcasts for exclusivity to me is really fucking toxic and totally counter to what podcasts used to stand for. Really pissed me off when Gimlet went Spotify only and Reply All was no longer available elsewhere. Very anti consumer.
    
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  - kugel7c@feddit.de ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    Because they don’t have a perfectly fine business model. They get squeezed hard by both the oligarchs of music publishing UMG, Sony Warner who negotiate the price for the music. And from the other side by the tech giants google and apple who can cross service subsidize their own streaming.There exists essentially no space for them to make any profit in streaming music. So they have to go other places.
    
    The only reason they’ll probably exist for the foreseeable future is because the rights holders are able to use Spotify to have more negotiating power against Google and apple.
    
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  - ObviouslyNotBanana@lemmy.world ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    I didn’t cancel because I think the rest of the service is fantastic, but I haven’t touched the podcasts. Because of the politics.
    
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  - TheBat@lemmy.world ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    I thought of starting Spotify subscription but they keep recommending songs by artists that I have blocked. Fix your shit, Spotify.
    
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  - Archer@lemmy.world ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    I left when they paid Joe Rogan money
    
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- mwproductions@lemmy.world ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Whenever I’m talking with someone about my podcast and they ask, “can I find it on Spotify?” a little part of me dies.
  
  Like, yes it’s available on Spotify, because it’s available everywhere. But I strongly dislike what Spotify tried to do to podcasting, and there are much better apps out there.
  
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  - dangblingus@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    I use spotify daily like most people these days. I’m not married to it, but it is easy to use (most of the time) and has the best selection of everything (for the most part). What app is a better use of my time for music and podcasts?
    
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- helenslunch@feddit.nl ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  I literally stopped listening to Rogan when he moved to Spotify even though I already had an account and used it, because their app was such garbage at the time.
  
  It’s slightly less garbage now.
  
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- Carighan@lemmy.world ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Well plenty creators push product X, Y or Z. Whether that product is in itself also the hoster of the media you’re listening to… I dunno. Just another ad to me, I don’t really care about the details any more at that point. Sadly no sponsorblock for podcasts yet, AFAIK.
  
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  - ObviouslyNotBanana@lemmy.world ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    Hey, I get that. Honestly I do not even think they push Spotify because they’re paid to do it. The ones I’m listening to, that is. They do it because they like the service and that’s fine. It’s just sad to feel like an afterthought. The adverts I’m fine with. I can just skip them.
    
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victorz@lemmy.world ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Could someone explain to me (I’m a developer so use whatever terms you like, maybe), how does the massive amount of podcasts reach the world? Say if I wanted to make a podcast app (I don’t, I love Pocket Casts), where would I sync the massive list’o’casts? Does it work like that? Or do you scrape the entire internet? What is happening?

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- s0ckpuppet@kbin.social ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  It's done via RSS feeds that the podcast creators then submit to aggregators. This website explains the gist of it.
  
  https://rss.com/blog/how-to-create-an-rss-feed-for-a-podcast/
  
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  - victorz@lemmy.world ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    So how do the aggregators sync with each other to get all the podcasts? Or is it up to the podcast to “post” to all the aggregators?
    
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- yogurt@lemm.ee ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  iTunes api, and if apple turns evil there are other list-o-cast apis like fyyd.de.
  
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  - TrickDacy@lemmy.world ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    
    if apple turns evil
    
    Lolol yeah like that could EVER happen! /s
    
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  - woelkchen@lemmy.world ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    
    iTunes api, and if apple turns evil there are other list-o-cast apis like fyyd.de.
    
    Whoever downvoted this has no clue. The Apple Podcast directory is currently unrestricted for any podcatcher to crawl and to get the RSS feeds. That may change at some point but for now it’s actually the best maintained RSS feed directory. The aforementioned fyyd.de is a good but less complete alternative. It relies of community submissions. fyyd.de itself is not an open source service, though.
    
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  - wheeldawg@sh.itjust.works ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    Apple has been evil since day 1. When have they done any single thing that wasn’t evil? The EO is family a terrible, wireless person. I’m so confused what you mean.
    
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- ipkpjersi@lemmy.ml ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  The protocol used for it is a bit of an older protocol, but basically it uses the RSS protocol. It came out in the 90s and hasn’t been updated since 2014, and I haven’t touched any code related to it since before 2019.
  
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  - victorz@lemmy.world ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    Does the protocol have its own name?
    
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- density@kbin.social ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  rss
  
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  - victorz@lemmy.world ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    🤡
    
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NaibofTabr@infosec.pub ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

…exactly the kind of technology that’s supposed to be impossible: open, empowering tech that’s not owned by any one company, that can’t be controlled by any one company…

Who is suggesting that such technology is impossible? The internet is literally exactly this, based on an open standard (Internet Protocol) which is not controlled by any proprietary group.

IP wasn’t the first computer networking standard to be developed, but its open nature made it accessible to any interested manufacturers and that made it the most successful standard.

Anyone suggesting that this “kind of technology” is “supposed to be impossible” is either ignorant or stupid, or both.

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- TORFdot0@lemmy.world ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  If IP was developed today, you’d be paying IBM or a similar corp royalties for every network adapter manufactured. Thats whats supposed to be impossible in today’s late-stage hyper-capitalism web.
  
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  - NaibofTabr@infosec.pub ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    IBM tried that in the 60s and 70s with their business mainframe systems, along with HP and several other manufacturers. Before IP gained prominence every major manufacturer had its own proprietary connection system they tried to sell, and the competition in the market was just as fierce then as it is now. It didn’t work, the open model made all of the proprietary network systems obsolete.
    
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- Carighan@lemmy.world ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  I’m also not sure I can agree with that it’s “a radical statement”. It is… not? Unless I misunderstand what others mean with radical in this context, but linguistically it should the form free of pre- and suffixes and qualifiers, no?
  
  So in this context, “wherever you get your podcasts” is… not very radical. That’d be not actually stating anything in regards to your podcasting platform, as it is in itself a qualifier for something else in that sentence, and hence removed.
  
  It’s also not radical in the political sense of course, but I kinda figured that’s not what is being alluded to here anyways as it’d inherently not make any sense.
  
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- tryptaminev@feddit.de ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  The IP helped the Internet to establish. But once established we see trends to try to limit the very technology into propriety. Think of the Facebook internet access schemes that tried to make everything go through facebook. Think of the attempts to make priviledged and throttled websites based on what the ISP likes…
  
  When Podcasts were new, the open standard was embraced, but now we see attempts to make them exclusive too. Just that they didn’t prevail yet.
  
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  - NaibofTabr@infosec.pub ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    
    Think of the Facebook internet access schemes that tried to make everything go through facebook.
    
    You’re right that they’ve tried to do this and it’s ugly. But they’ve only been able to do it in places where they didn’t have to compete with an existing service, so I would argue that it’s successful only in a vacuum.
    
    There are a lot of very successful businesses based around open source software. Open models are perfectly functional in the present. Their potential for success isn’t some relic of past idealism.
    
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- TrickDacy@lemmy.world ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  
  Who is suggesting that such technology is impossible?
  
  Every business that could stand to make a buck from it being that way. But the author obviously meant in the current economic model we live under.
  
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  - NaibofTabr@infosec.pub ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    
    the current economic model we live under.
    
    The internet isn’t exactly ancient technology. Do you think the ‘current economic model’ is significantly different from the 1970s?
    
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- CosmicTurtle@lemmy.world ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  I think what the author meant was that it’s impossible in the capitalist marketplace.
  
  Joe Rogan is probably a good anti-example. His podcast (as I understand it anyway) is only available on Spotify. But Conan O’Brien, the Office Ladies, and even The West Wing Weekly (which hasn’t been producing in years) is still available, for free, on any podcast platform.
  
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  - NaibofTabr@infosec.pub ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    
    I think what the author meant was that it’s impossible in the capitalist marketplace.
    
    Nonsense, the marketplace was also capitalist when the internet protocol was developed in 1974.
    
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  - Thorny_Insight@lemm.ee ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    JRE apparently no longer is Spotify exclusive either
    
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Pratai@lemmy.ca ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
It’s no more radical than saying… “wherever you get you gasoline.” It’s just a thing to say because theres more than one source, and there being more than one source is not radical.

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- Edmund_Across_The_Room@lemmy.world ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  No?
  
  There’s only a handful of places you can get gasoline? It’s almost entirely controlled by a few companies who control the majority of the pipeline.
  
  You can’t buy directly from the people making the oil.
  
  A better example for the point you’re trying to make is “whenever you get your apples”.
  
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- CileTheSane@lemmy.ca ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  
  It’s just a thing to say because theres more than one source, and there being more than one source is not radical.
  
  The closest thing to podcasts is probably TV. You can’t say “available wherever you stream television” because everything is exclusive to a different service. You can’t even say “available wherever audiobooks are sold” for similar reasons. EPIC is trying to make the same thing true for video games as much as they can as well.
  
  It is worth pointing out that entertainment does not have to be (and should not be) exclusive to a singular middleman.
  
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  - Randomgal@lemmy.ca ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    Nothing radical about that. For 90% of people “Wherever you get your podcasts” means Apple, Spotify or YouTube. It has nothing to do with the win of freedom, it has to do with saving time to the speaker and listener. Same as with gas, as the other guy said.
    
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Holzkohlen@feddit.de ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
AntennaPod (OpenSource) and I subscribe to RSS feeds. How else would you do it? Spotify? That crap can’t even reliably store where I paused last time.

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- Fedizen@lemmy.world ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  As a devoted AntennaPod user, it works damn well.
  
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- aulin@lemmy.world ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Ooh. Nice! I hadn’t heard of AntennaPod before. It seems to have everything that I use in Pocket Casts except for trim silence. I will try it out for a while and see if I miss that. I do use it and it saves a lot of time. Still though, OSS is a big draw.
  
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  - JoshuaFalken@lemmy.world ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    After reading your comment, I checked my Pocket Casts stats page and it looks like between the skipping, variable speed (1.5-2x), and trimmed silence (mad max), I save nearly 20% of listening time with the majority of that being the silence trimming.
    
    Might be an outlier, but with daily podcast listening, trimming is important enough to keep me on Pocket Casts, even though AntennaPod is attractive given it’s open source nature.
    
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  - aulin@lemmy.world ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    Correcting myself here. AntennaPod does have silence trimming, but it’s neither a player button nor in settings, but in a …-menu at the top of the player, which made it a bit hard to find (Same can be said about some settings in Pocket Casts.) and there’s no graduation, so it’s mad max only, from how it sounds.
    
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- h3rm17@sh.itjust.works ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Yeah, but the RSS feeds is the where er. Lots of podcasts only have ivoox, apple podcasts or spotify, and getri g their RSS, specially for older episodes, is absolute shit
  
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  - aulin@lemmy.world ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    I would think podcasts without RSS is a tiny minority, and I wouldn’t take them seriously. And I’ve never even heard of ivoox.
    
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- aulin@lemmy.world ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Consuming podcadts through Spotify is a wild concept.
  
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dangblingus@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
I always though it was a jab at Spotify being all-powerful. Anytime you hear a commercial for a podcast, they always mention Apple Podcasts first, then maybe Stitcher gets a name-drop, but they NEVER say to listen to the podcast on spotify.

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- veeesix@lemmy.ca ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Stitcher actually got shut down last August after the SiriusXM acquisition.
  
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- negativeyoda@lemmy.world ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  They’re not really mentioning stitcher any more
  
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  - dangblingus@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    You can tell how frequently I listen to podcasts lol used to a lot but I guess I’ve scaled back a little in the last year
    
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dipshit@lemmy.world ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
upvote this wherever you get your federated content.

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helenslunch@feddit.nl ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Podcasts are a sort of last bastion of internet freedom. Anyone can publish anywhere and be visible on all platforms.

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- s0ckpuppet@kbin.social ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Newsletters kinda are too. You use a service to send them, but the list itself remains yours and can be moved around. No algorithm bullshit in your way. They're making a comeback lately it seems.
  
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TengoDosVacas@lemmy.world ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
It’s only radical if it is not preceeded by “Apple podcasts, Spotify,…”

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ikidd@lemmy.world ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
I have no idea where I get my podcasts; I hit Add Podcast in AntennaPod, it goes somewhere and I get a podcast subscription somehow. Can’t explain that.

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electric@lemmy.world ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Easy to do when it’s just audio files with no user interaction though. Neat that it’s continued existence in this manner at least, even if the big companies have steered toward trying to be the podcast platform.

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- stsquad@lemmy.ml ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  All the centralisation in podcasting is the content delivery network (where ads are placed for the commercial ones). Where the feed is hosted it’s fairly irrelevant.
  
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  - QuarterSwede@lemmy.world ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    The reason companies want to control the podcast networks is because of targeted ads. They want to inject the ad at the time of downloading to personalize the ad to the person it thinks is listening. That’s the best kind of advertising in their eyes. They can’t do that process without owning the network or at least having some stake in it.
    
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z3rOR0ne@lemmy.ml ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
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- HobbitFoot@thelemmy.club ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  The problem with Nebula is that it is a paywall, something that is considered to be the most evil by some on Lemmy.
  
  At the end of the day, content is paid for by getting everyone to pay, asking some to pay, advertising, or the creator is willing to do it for free as a hobby.
  
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  - rbos@lemmy.ca ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    Nebula is a creator run coop, I believe. I’m happy to pay for that, and do.
    
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machinin@lemmy.world ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Did anyone listen to Adam Curry’s Daily Source Code podcast? I remember him being very excited about the possibility of escaping the gatekeepers of traditional media. Is i remember correctly, he was a major and important proponent of the open nature of podcasts.

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fne8w2ah@lemmy.world ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Podcast Addict and Podcast Republic ftw!

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- AVincentInSpace@pawb.social ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  not so fun fact: both of these apps actually just search iTunes
  
  this whole article feels disingenuous to me. platforms where you can search for things by name without specifying who published it, cannot exist unless one (or a small handful) of organizations does all of the publishing. not unless search engines communicate with each other – and since apple is one of the major players I can promise you they do not.
  
  let’s face it. 99.9% of podcasters use a monthly paid service that hosts their media files and submits them to the small handful of podcast search engines that exist, maybe even gives them a boost in the algorithm or whatever. heck, most first party podcast player apps nowadays don’t let you plug in an arbitrary RSS feed – they make you use the search engine. if the podcast you want isn’t there, tough shit. I’m honestly baffled how anyone can talk about the world of public podcasts being open and radical when they’re like one industry cooperation away from supporting DRM
  
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BreakDecks@lemmy.ml ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
If only we didn’t have gigantic centralized podcast hosts like Libsyn that also platform Neo-Nazis…

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cypherpunks@lemmy.ml ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Anil Dash is posting on threads?! lmao 🤡

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