This page lists part of the collection. The page links below work without JavaScript. With JavaScript, a filter searches everything and pages the matches.
Dave's instinct is to discount cross-platform mobile toolkits, not because of anything they did, but because write-once-run-anywhere tools have so often been a flash in the pan. Flutter looks like it has staying power.
we've seen so many of these things that have come and been cross platform, you know, mobile, right once run anywhere things and they always are like a flash in the pan. But flutter seems to really be sticking around.
Talking with guest Mike van Heyde about seed data from Apple, Dave warns that Apple Podcasts data is centralized in one giant company and doesn't represent everyone. Every app has its own flavor of trending shows: Overcast skews to the Relay FM/Mac crowd, and 2.0 apps skew to their own users.
as big as Apple podcast is, it's also not necessarily representative, the representative of the whole
On transcript and add-on services, Dave wishes for a linkage protocol: instead of every pair of companies building API integrations, the end user connects one service to another themselves.
where I can, where eyes, the end user can say, Okay, I've got this service. And I've also got this other service. I'm making a link between them myself.
Reacting to how wild-west ad measurement is, Dave says he doesn't hold the IAB in contempt; he sees it as irrelevant to Podcasting 2.0 because advertising isn't their game. His one irritation is the IAB charging people to put a veneer of legitimacy on the numbers.
The way I see the IB is not necessarily with contempt, it's just with irrelevancy,
Dave wants to occasionally have actual podcasters, not developers, on the show, because the non-technical point of view on how to handle all this stuff is valuable.
it's really helpful to hear the non technical podcasters point of view, when it comes to how to handle all this stuff.
On why Fountain's Lightning comments look so active compared with other comment systems, Dave thinks it's mostly because Fountain pays users to listen and comment.
I think it's purely because fountain gives monetary incentive for that to be the case.
Dave says what excites him about OP3 is seeing numbers outside the hosting dashboard. He warns everyone should know that on a long enough timescale, IP addresses stop being reliable information. Apple Private Relay, Tailscale exit nodes and Tor are the early signs.
On a long enough time scale IP, IP addresses, as a source of information of reliable information about things that are going on is probably going to go away.
Dave admits OP3 might turn out not to produce much value six months on; everyone thinks their own project is a big deal. Trying crazy, paradigm-breaking things and seeing whether they have value is the point of the Podcasting 2.0 'mad scientist laboratory'.
we may find this six months from now, that op three wasn't, didn't produce a lot of value. You know, maybe it wasn't that big of a deal. I tend to think that that's not going to be the case. But you know, we always think that about the stuff that we that we're involved in excited about.
Dave says bringing the open source mindset into podcasting creates friction, because the podcast industrial complex isn't used to radical transparency around money and statistics. Still, a set of people (Podnews, Transistor and others) jumped on OP3 quickly.
People within the podcast industrial complex, are not used to there being radical transparency around money in statistics.
Talking about OP3, Dave says he doesn't want Podcast Index or Podcasting 2.0 in the stats business, and doesn't think anyone really wants that. He also trusts the hosting companies' own download numbers.
I don't want the index, or podcasting 2.0 or anything like that in the stats business.
Speaking with voice actor Kyle Hebert, who escaped to podcasting for relief from Hollywood, Dave says the podcast industrial complex wants to be a hits-based Hollywood business. Credits taxonomies and Podchaser-as-IMDB are signs of it.
the podcast industrial complex, is trying to become Hollywood they really want to be Hollywood enough in I feel like, you know, like, like Adam says a hits base business.
On live chat for podcasts, Dave says the pieces already exist in places. The challenge is packaging the stack so others can adopt it without breaking their back, without forcing everyone to throw out what they use (like telling shows to ditch IRC for XMPP). Users want to plug a new thing into their existing setup.
The challenge is to package the stack in a way that it's portable, where other people can do it without it breaking their back, like technology wise and effort wise, right.
Dave picks up a point about building to a capability (write a spec and assume products will follow) versus building toward a product people love. Podcasting 2.0 may have gotten lucky with pent-up demand, but for live chat he thinks it would become a real problem.
he's right, that there is a danger of building towards a capability, you say, Okay, we want to be able to do this thing. Now, let's build a spec.
Discussing the Podcast Movement / Daily Wire tweet controversy, Dave says social media companies spent five years establishing themselves as editors of their content. Once you're in an editorial role, letting through content that causes real monetary damage to a brand opens you to liability.
the social media companies, Twitter and everybody have set themselves up with an editorial role. They've done that over the past five years, where they are now firmly established as editors of the content that is contained on their platform.
When small Lightning payments to a seven-way split kept failing, Dave suggested cutting splits. He wasn't proposing a permanent fix; he was thinking like a troubleshooter: remove pieces until you isolate the problem.
I really was just thinking of it more like a from a troubleshooting standpoint, where you pare things down.
Brainstorming how hosting companies could offer live streams, Dave suggests launching an Icecast server in a container on demand, giving it a DNS name for the life of the broadcast, then destroying it when the show ends.
if your hosting company you spin up, you spin up a and n A icecast server in a Docker container or something whenever you need it, dynamically assign it a DNS, DNS name.
Boosts are fun, but Dave thinks streaming payments per minute are where the rubber meets the road for audiobooks and music. Podcasts have a fast weekly feedback loop; music needs a listener budget that flows per minute played.
I think the streaming per minute thing is really where the rubber meets the road for some of these other things like maybe audiobooks or music.
Encouraging someone to build a podcast music app, Dave notes that Podcasting 2.0 has spawned a lot of open source code (Podverse, Anytime Podcast Player on Flutter, which Breez built on) that can be repurposed instead of starting from scratch.
Is part of the beauty of part of podcasting. 2.0 is a project is that it has spawned so much open source code.
Dave names the two economic laws behind value for value. The value of a thing is set by the person acquiring it, not by you. And the more of something you have, the less each extra unit is worth. Both are about behavior, not math.
the value of a thing is always determined not by you, but by the individual that's acquiring it. And marginal utility, the more of a thing you have, the less value you place on each additional unit of that thing.
Responding to a podcast consultant trying to model value for value with formulas, Dave invokes the Austrian school. Mises studied human action (praxeology), not models. The question is what behavior a given offer or set of conditions is most likely to produce, not listeners times CPM.
the Austrian principle is the economics is not a math problem. It's a behavior problem.
Using documentary financing as an example: tax changes brought money in and Netflix became the big cash buyer. When that player pulls back, the money gets selective and scarce. A new dominant player distorts the market and leaves a hole when it leaves.
So it's it's one of those things where you come in you got the you've got this new player that comes in and just distorts the market.
Dave explains that LNURL puts a web server in front of your Lightning node to generate invoices on request. Every payment then needs a web request before it settles, which doubles the load on the node. That's fine for occasional boostagrams but can't work for streaming per-minute payments.
So that means every time you pay somebody through ln your RP, there's a web server and a web request involved before the payment settlement happens. So now you've just increased the workload on the node by double,
Dave says it took him a long time to understand value for value as a whole rather than one aspect. Creators who feel undervalued without a set price miss that they never controlled the price anyway.
it's about it's about giving your content away, and then asking your audience to give you back the value. It's about not putting it behind a paywall.
In his Podcast Movement talk, Dave paired each 2.0 feature with a screenshot of it in a real app. The feedback he got most: people who don't use the apps understood a concept like the person tag only once they saw it on screen.
I've gotten a bunch of feedback of people saying, they really appreciated seeing those screenshots, because they're not, they're not using the apps.
Relaying a conversation with designer Kevin and others at Podcast Movement, Dave agrees that the current 2.0 apps are technologically sound. What holds them back is design and UI, which is subtle and actually harder than the technology.
It's not the technology, that's the problem. Because the technology of the app is sound, it's the design, it's the UI, in in, that's actually much harder in the technology,
Dave says a feature request is one thing, but listening to a user explain exactly why they love an app is a valuable case study. You may not copy that identity, but you can understand the thinking and adapt it to create the same feeling for your own audience.
It's another thing to hear a sort of, sort of case study where you can listen to a user who loves an app describe exactly why they love the app,
When setting up a public idea-submission process (PIMP), Dave sets a guardrail: no new tags. The namespace is 18 tags and a few protocols in, while some apps still support only one tag, so they're getting out over their skis.
we don't want new tags. We want, okay, existing. We want the existing we've got to we're getting way in for in front of our skis here because you're 18 tags into this thing and a few protocols. And and we still have, you know, apps that only support one tag.
Hosting companies want to know what listeners want, but their feedback nearly always comes through podcasters. A listener on Apple Podcasts doesn't look up the host and petition them for a feature, so listener input is valuable and rare.
Because what the one thing that hosting companies really want to know, is what listeners want. They they really want to know that because they don't. I mean, they get some feedback. But the feedback is, the feedback really doesn't come from the listener, the feedback always comes from the the podcaster.
Dave argues rules shouldn't change just because a company is big and commercial. His example: for years Amazon didn't collect state sales tax while local stores had to, a huge unfair advantage that propped up a big corporation. He saw the same thing when mom-and-pop shops were shut during the pandemic.
just because you're big and commercial angle to that I think the plant The playing field has to be fair, across the board.
Everyone thinks OPML is just for importing and exporting RSS subscriptions, and Dave says that misunderstanding is what killed it. It's a full outlining markup language: a node can reference another OPML file, whose outline gets pulled in as children when you expand it. Dave and Adam used shared outlines like this to communicate for about five years.
everybody thinks that OPML is just for importing and exporting RSS feeds. And that's not at all.
Dave lays out exactly how Podcast Index's trending endpoint works to dispel the black box. A daily batch job counts how often known app API keys request a podcast's episode list, then sorts. Trending just means interest.
So the trending endpoint in API to decide to dispel the black box is, is very simple. We just take it's very crude. We take the known API keys from apps from actual apps, not just randos, right?
Explaining why the iTunes block tag couldn't do platform-specific blocking, Dave says you can't live in the reality you wish existed. Apps will honor a tag exactly the way it's written, which is why Podcasting 2.0 needed a new block tag.
Now the the wording of the spec matters. Read the you can't live in the reality over here because Apple will never honor that will never honor that any other way.
While preparing his tag-by-tag Podcast Movement slides, Dave realized what would make great marketing: a site with one page per tag. Each page has a graphic, a clear plain-English explanation, links to developer resources, example code and screenshots.
you could have a site that did that, in which it has some graphics, a clear plain English explanation, links to the developer resources for how to build it, some example code, sure, and then, and then some screenshots and like that would be one page, one page for each tag.
Responding to complaints about tiny value-for-value payments, Dave uses a lemonade stand analogy. Lots of people will never stop at your stand. Whether it's lemonade or a podcast, the reason someone doesn't pay is the same: they don't value it highly enough, and you can't change that.
the reason they're not paying you whether it's lemonade or a podcast is the same and either in either case, is they don't value you enough to pay you. They don't value your product high enough to pay you and you can't change that.
Picking up Adam's point from the previous week, Dave agrees that hosting companies have all been in the same mindset of building dynamic ad insertion ('dynamic content', since not all of it is ads), which tied up the brainpower that could have gone to new features.
There's been a big dynamic content push. Yeah. And I think a lot of the hosting company brain power has been tied up in trying to get that up an
Praising John's tool, Alex's No Agenda Tube, Andy Layman's WordPress plugin and Brian of London's Podping work, Dave says everyone has ideas. What matters is building something someone can actually use.
it's one thing to have an idea we can all we all have ideas but that that doesn't mean yea have your idea but he put some meat on those bones like actually make something that somebody can use
After his Umbrel upgrade came up with no chain and he couldn't recover from his seed words, Dave says he bears Umbrel no ill will because the job is complicated. Still, shipping a deterministic Bitcoin wallet that can't recover from seed is a showstopper.
you should not ship a Bitcoin wallet with the deterministic bitcoin wallet without that does not have the ability to recover from seed words. That is a showstopper.
Another sysadmin lesson: it's tempting to think that buying the hardware or extra software from the company that made the product will give the best experience, because they know best. Dave says that is 100% not correct.
this is another lesson from sysadmin. World is that that is an intoxicating idea that you always that you will always get pulled back into.
Leading into how a forced Umbrel upgrade went badly, Dave says 27 years as a sysadmin taught him not to change things without important reasons. Don't flash new firmware unless there's a security flaw that affects you or a feature you can't live without.
I have acquired a, a proclivity to not change things, unless there are important reasons to do so.