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Cross-app comments jumped forward once John Spurlock and others got their hands dirty and published research. You can picture a protocol in the abstract, but writing code takes the nuts-and-bolts details. Real-world ActivityPub implementations like Mastodon and Pleroma don't all behave the same.
when you actually get to write code, you really need more than just a vision, or an or a conceptual framework, you need actual nuts and bolts details of the way the protocol functions.
Questioning paywalls, Dave points to a publisher that gives away its podcast and charges for small bonus episodes. To him that's backwards: it signals that the show everybody listens to isn't worth paying for.
it signals to the world that our actual podcast that everybody listens to isn't very valuable. Am I wrong?
Dave believes the podcast namespace should eventually be the single, complete namespace, with equivalents for the iTunes tags. The iTunes namespace belongs to Apple, not to podcasting. The iTunes block tag, widely misused as a general block, is his example of something that belongs in the open namespace, done better and more granular.
because iTunes belongs to a company, it doesn't belong to podcasting.
Every few months someone asks whether the index should be marketed separately from the namespace, value for value and free speech. Dave says they can't be separated, because Podcasting 2.0 is just a solid form of what podcasting already is. Feeds are portable between hosts and you can self-host. The index only added an API and a downloadable database on top.
Podcasting is, by itself, decentralized and censorship resistant.
Dave's main point about cancel culture: once cancelling someone is an option, people stop trying to understand what that person is saying. With Goldberg, the conversation could have been about how her life experience shapes how she thinks and talks, rather than 'you're evil, be deplatformed'.
when there's an option to cancel somebody, it makes you stop actually listening to us trying to understand what they're saying.
Asked how to promote a podcast, Dave says that if you're set on spending money to build an audience, buy ads inside podcast apps or on other podcasts. That's where people who already listen to podcasts are.
if you're going to spend some money to like promote your show. I try to build an audience, if you're determined to do it that way. Like you should go to where people are that are already listening to podcasts.
Comparing the Rogan and Whoopi Goldberg controversies, Dave says the cancel mechanism starts with reading someone's words uncharitably. Putting them in a box of negativity creates the schism. Read charitably, Goldberg's statement shows she equates race with skin color, which comes from her life experience.
This all begins with it with with taking somebody taking somebody's words, uncharitably as if they are something bad, negative.
During the Joe Rogan controversy, Dave avoided other people's takes, even switching off an interview when the host asked about Rogan. He wanted to work out his own thoughts first.
I don't I don't want anybody else's opinion on what I tried to stay away from that. I'll wait and so I can formulate my own thoughts.
At first Bitcoin looks like internet funny money with endless negatives. Dave says eventually your brain flips: it's not about the possible problems but about feasible solutions. For monetizing small podcasts, nobody has found another realistic option. Even Todd Cochran bought an Umbrel.
It's not about the potential problems. It's about feasible solutions.
Advertising only works seriously from about 10,000 downloads an episode, leaving roughly 95% of podcasts out in the cold. Dave says that letting listeners pay directly, in-app and without friction, can sustain a show with only a couple hundred listeners. That makes it a superior model.
If you allow them a way to pay you directly in a in app no friction free. It's a superior model.
Not in the audio. Dave says 'you can't sustain an audience ... on 200 listeners' immediately before; from context he means you CAN if listeners can pay directly.
A Helipad bug came from a boostagram sending a valid JSON value of a type the deserializer didn't expect, a float where an integer belonged. Completely broken JSON would simply have been ignored. To test the fix, Dave scripted boostagrams with every crazy malformed JSON he could think of.
if he had sent JSON that was just completely broken, didn't even validate. It would have been fine. Yeah, it would have just ignored it. But the fact that he sent a valid type, and it was one type that I was not expecting, that's broken.
Explaining the live item spec, Dave says alternate enclosure can carry many codecs and transport protocols. But the spec suggests starting with a plain MP3 stream, or MP4 for video, to maximize compatibility across platforms, plus a fallback content link for apps that can't play the stream at all.
you really kind of want to start with supporting the basics of just an mp3 stream and an mp4 stream if it's video to try to like maximize compatibility across platforms.
Dave is amazed that KaiOS fits a whole browser onto feature-phone hardware, but says the choice makes sense. You get CSS layout and standard browser features for free, and instant developer support, because any front-end developer can understand it even if the docs aren't great.
you also get instant developer support because any front end developer could really kind of understand it, even if the documentation is not that great.
Most people, at least in the US, imagine a podcast app as a smartphone app, not something on a KaiOS feature phone. Dave says imagining that constrained device changes your perspective. Awareness of bandwidth limits, for example, shows why something like alternate enclosure is needed.
if you do, it sort of changes your perspective on things sort of like being aware of bandwidth limitations. Yeah. Makes you see a need for something like alternate enclosure.
Citing the Austrian school, Dave says inflation isn't just rising prices. When it outpaces savings and wages, everyone has to save in riskier ways to keep up, so grandmothers end up watching the stock market. When every fund returns about the same, that isn't product quality, it's inflation. It also drives every industry's obsession with growth.
you have to save, but you can't just simply save you have to save in ever increasingly risky ways.
Agreeing that the RSS polling system wastes a lot of money, Dave contrasts Marco Arment, who spent years refining Overcast's feed-checking because every dollar counts, with companies like Apple. They have so much money that their answer is to add more servers instead of optimizing.
their answer to that is not is not optimize the algorithm their answer is throw 12 more servers
Dave tombstoned 296,000 feeds from the index: two episodes or fewer, under three minutes of content, no update in a year, no iTunes ID. He says this wasn't editorializing. Technically any RSS feed with audio is a podcast, but philosophically a podcast has to have some recognizable communication in it. The cleanup judged that minimum, not what the shows were about.
you're not purging on what it's about your purging on whether or not it meets a minimum level of listening ability.
Once the live item was finalized, people wanted it to just link out to YouTube or Facebook streams. Dave argues from first principles: a live item is the live equivalent of an item, so it must be self-contained and deliver content to the app. Linking elsewhere is a different job that needs its own semantically appropriate tag. And Apple will never adopt a tag whose content is just a link launching Facebook.
we're asking live item to do a new job. We're asking it to deliver links to content in other apps. and services. Now that that needs a different tag
Answering pushback on the live item, Dave says the Podcasting 2.0 community builds open, decentralized systems on RSS. It isn't a trade association for podcasters like the IAB, trying to make products behave a particular way.
we're not a trade group or trade association for podcasters. We're not trying to make we're not the IAB
Podcasting 2.0 bet on Lightning, with a constant fear that the industry would go another way. As industrial implementations like Cash App appear, Dave says it doesn't take many dominoes falling before adoption snowballs.
it doesn't take very many dominoes to fall before. It just becomes like a snowball rolling down the hill.
Todd Cochran said growth is what every podcaster cares about most, and Adam asked what that even means. Dave agrees: if you have the income to pay your bills, things are good and you're not tanking, growth numbers matter only for advertising. Hitch yourself to that horse and you'll be up all night worrying about growth.
as long as you have the income you need to pay to pay your bills, and the things are good, and you're going in the right direction. You're not tanking. Like, why does it matter? How many, it only matters in the context of advertising?
Dave floats an idea he'd been sitting on for months. A site, essentially a Podcaster Wallet for open source projects, where any valuable project could list its Lightning node and pubkey and anyone could scan a QR code to donate directly.
there's like an index like a donation index for open source projects that should exist.
Music, documentary and other feeds will exist in the index regardless. Dave says what's needed is a top-notch app developer with the vision to show what it should look like for, say, a music listener. Like marketing, it's about presentation.
somebody has to come along and have the vision to say, Okay, here's the way that it would look to, to a music listener and music.
For the new medium tag, Dave suggests the index pre-tag what's already known, e.g. everything from LibriVox is an audiobook, as was done by pre-generating GUIDs. When a feed declares its own value, the feed is the source of truth and overrides the default.
if the feed adds itself, you know, it's the source of truth and you just override it.
A documentary investor friend told Dave every film faces the same choice. Sell to Netflix or Amazon for a one-time upfront payment, or keep ownership and royalties, taking the risk of making more or nothing. Dave calls it a devil's bargain creators keep facing.
it's sort of like a guaranteed thing on the on the Netflix Amazon prompts versus you taking a risk, and give you know, and doing it yourself and make it potentially making more money but potentially not making any money.
Praising a clear article on value for value, Dave says you need someone who can speak to the simple core of a thing. He doesn't like saying 'simplify', as if people are too dumb to understand. It really is fairly simple, and the skill is finding those parts and making them the focus.
you need somebody who can get to the simple parts and pull those out and make those the main focus
Forward-looking projects like Podping have an immediate benefit, like faster episode notifications, that only some people find compelling. The long-term vision is live notifications and host-move notifications. Inventors see the whole picture, and it's hard to get others onto that page. Dave's answer is to just build the things.
you see it in full, and it's really hard to get everybody else onto that page. So to me that just, but what I see that has to happen in situations like that, is we just have to build the things.
Open standards work draws XKCD jokes and 'you could have used Atom, Media RSS or Dublin Core'. Dave's reply: nobody knows who controls those namespaces or how to extend them. The podcast namespace is an open, modern group on GitHub where anyone can petition for a change and get replies. It's a living spec with people attached.
It's a living, breathing spec, it with with people attached to it.
Dave sees the naturally successful hosting companies, the ones not chasing an exit, doubling down on their core customer: independent podcasters, who make up about half the market and may not care about monetizing. They make podcasting enjoyable for them and never mention programmatic ads.
they are successful because they're doubling down on what podcasting core core customer is.
A Silicon Valley pet peeve of Dave's: startups pitch 'let us do this so you can focus on your core business'. Yet Dropbox ended up running its own servers, Apple brought production in-house, and Spotify buys up everything in podcasting. Big successful companies go vertical, and it's small businesses that get duped into outsourcing.
companies outsource way too much stuff to third to third parties under this guise of well, you know, we'll pay these guys to do it, because then we can focus more on orbit or core business. Yeah, but no, no huge successful company actually works that way.
Donations pay for the Podcast Index to give developers its data free. The hard part isn't the aggregation software but server management, backups and sysadmin work across about 20 servers. The whole point from the start was that apps like Podcast Guru wouldn't have to do that and could spend their time developing.
that was really what we started to do at the beginning was what the whole point was, was to make it to where podcast guru didn't have to run 20 servers.
Once apps handle programmable money, developers can't stop thinking up new ideas: giveaways, splits that change with app state and more. Dave says that's what makes him geek out. Podcasting hasn't had a crazy feature train like this in a while, after years of everything boiling down to selling more ads.
that's the sort of kind of crazy feature train that podcasting hasn't had in a while. Yeah, everything is just boiled down to like, okay, let's sell more ads.
Dave tells almost every app developer the same thing: a $10.99-a-year subscription is too limiting, so offer higher tiers. People are surprisingly willing to pay more if you let them. Kickstarter campaigns make the same mistake by leaving out $500 or $1,000 levels, though some backers have the money and don't think in those terms.
it's a big deal to artificially limit the amount of money that that your true fans can give you. And I think that that's never in your interest.
Praising Podcast Guru's iOS app, Dave notes how hard it is to fit all the features into a UI without it looking like a kitchen sink of garbage. Apps usually end up hiding things behind other things or using tiny widgets with hard-to-hit touch targets.
it's really hard to do from a UI perspective is to get All the features into the UI, in a way that doesn't look like this kitchen sink of garbage everywhere.
Asked about apps that haven't adopted 2.0 features, Dave isn't bothered. Transcripts, chapters and soundbites are no longer optional extras; they're on every app's roadmap. Whether an app takes a year or three months, they'll all do it. Once one app ships great distributed comments, every other app will have to follow.
These things are not just sort of optional things that some apps can do and some apps can't. It's on every these things are on every apps radar and a Every apps roadmap, it's just a matter of where they are in the priority list.
Storage and bandwidth are now so cheap that anyone could publish to object storage behind a CDN for the same cost. Dave says a hosting company's value is its publishing tools and features. Hosts must keep adding them, serve their core of independent podcasters, and eventually build features that protect them from walled gardens.
you're not you're not a bandwidth company, you're a tool provider.
Disagreeing that YouTube will be spun off from Google, Dave says you never separate yourself from a mountain of money. Google can throw a billion dollars at podcasting and lose it as a rounding error, less than a day's revenue. Spotify walks a thin line and doesn't have that luxury.
you should never divorce yourself from the mountain of money. Because when you have this sort of guarantee mountain of cash,
The index's 'chash' content hash is built only from static feed info like owner email, not dynamic fields like descriptions. It let Dave instantly mark 5,900 duplicate French radio feeds dead. Naive title matching misleads: hundreds of LibriVox feeds are called 'Introduction' and many podcasts are titled 'podcast', but they aren't the same show.
it's an attempt to come up with a content hash for the feed based on information that is not likely to be very dynamic. It's very static info.
Apps are slow on ActivityPub comments. Dave says that's not the spec's fault: the protocol is intimidating at first, like Lightning, and developers wait for someone else to go first. Streaming payments only took off once LNPay offered a simple API. What's needed now is example code, even a mock app showing the simplest way to support it.
So I think what really has to happen right now is there needs to be some example, code developed.
Considering whether musicians could use streaming value for value for their own music, Dave notes the limit: an artist like Taylor Swift would first have to own her own content before she could decide to do that.
she's, she's gonna have to own her own content before she herself could make the decision to do something like that with it.