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Dave built Helipad to look for an LND URL environment variable, then fall back to localhost and standard Umbrel paths for the macaroon and TLS cert, so it should run on a RaspiBlitz out of the box. Software that works for you but forces hard requirements is just annoying.
you find you find a piece of software a lot of times that work for you. And it's not flexible, it has these hard D sort of hard requirements.
Dave credits Alecks Gates with an early, valuable insight: live chat and comments aren't the same. Live chat content gets lost, while comments attached to an episode live on forever, so people can come back and respond to something in that episode.
if you had a show where they had comments attached to each episode, then those comments sort of live forever on that episode.
Dave always wanted a bookmarklet that saves a copy of any article he's reading to a database on his own server. That gives him a searchable paper trail of what he read and where, and keeps the article if the link disappears. It became an article-archiver feature alongside a river-of-news reader and microblog, the root of his project with Adam.
if that link ever goes away, you still have a copy of the article, you've archived it.
Non-developers routinely miss that building two pathways is always complex. Each time a feature becomes a choice between this way or that way, everything gets exponentially harder, and across WordPress and a hosted platform, two paths become four.
whenever whenever you change something from a feature to an option, where they can do it, we know where you can say, okay, you can do it this way or this way. I mean, everything just gets exponentially harder.
Distributed WordPress-based hosts like Castos look smaller than they are. Dave would like podcast apps to show the hosting company somewhere in the UI. It teaches people how podcasting's back end works and gives would-be podcasters brand awareness of their hosting options.
one thing that I think would be really cool, is to have the podcast apps surface, who the host is a little bit more who the hosting company is,
Speaking to app developers, Dave says new podcast apps aren't shoddy beta software. Any complex package, app or hosting platform has to reach a maturity level by learning everything that's wrong and breaks. Newcomers go through what established apps learned five years earlier.
it's not that it's beta software, it's that there's always there's a certain maturity level that you have to reach with any package with any piece of software that you have to have, you have to learn all the stuff that is wrong, it breaks.
Dave predicts cross-app comments will be huge. Younger people may not remember when every website had comments. Communities formed around sections like Dave Winer's Scripting News and local news sites, with rivalries, camaraderie and insiders correcting stories. He expects the same tribes to form around podcasts.
you're gonna see tribal, you know, sort of camaraderie come together around certain podcasts in the comment section. It's gonna be a big deal.
Quoting another of the rules for standards-makers, Dave explains his shift toward building software: specs only make sense with software. Podping is useless as a standard without it. On podcastindex.social, developers write software and create specs as they go. For comments, running software will show what the final spec should be, so everyone can code against something proven on day one.
you need software, you need software to make the standards and the specs make sense.
Dave adjusts what he presents to each audience. A one-hour Bitcoin women's workshop gets only value for value and how to set it up. A hosting company hears about new app experiences like chapters and transcripts, not V4V. Family at Thanksgiving gets the high-level version. He praises Sam Sethi for the same skill in interviews.
I do tailor them my sort of what I target to the to the audience
Recommending the Umbrel app framework to tinkerers like the Synology crowd, Dave notes that this kind of thing is always driven by technical people. As long as people who know what they're doing evangelize it, it spreads.
I think all the this stuff gets driven from techy people. That's where all this stuff gets born at.
Podcasting 2.0 reached a phase where plenty had been built and adoption was no longer a technical problem. What's left is hard social and political work: calls and Zoom meetings with busy hosting companies, boiling the tags down, explaining which to prioritize, evangelizing at Podcast Movement, and putting in handshake time.
this is the point where we've created a lot of things. And what is going to get the adoption is not is not really a technical issue anymore.
Asked why he pushed the live item before the cross-app comments more people wanted, Dave admits his quirk. He hates leaving a cool idea as words on paper and wants each one brought to a minimum level of usable concept first. He agrees comments benefit more people and shifts focus to them.
my own quirk is that I like to bring things up to a certain level of, of usability or, or I conceptual, whatever, conceptuality. If that's a word, rather than just having them be just words on a piece of paper.
Dave's way of working: put something rough together first so he can get a sense of the pieces and how they fit. Polish like input sanitization stays low priority until there's something you actually want people to use.
I typically will, I just need to get something sort of put together, it just so that I can begin to have a sense in my head of what of where the, what the pieces are and how it's going to fit.
Discussing a dataset on podcast hosting share, Dave admits his bias: he doesn't want it to be accurate. His bigger worry is that no data like this tells the whole picture of a fragmented open RSS ecosystem, and however many qualifiers you add, some people will treat it as the full story.
No matter how many qualifiers you put on it, some people are going to look at it and say, okay, that's the whole story.
ActivityPub has a strange learning curve: reading the spec it seems easy, real-world behavior looks baffling, but once you write code and watch how it responds it's as easy as you first thought, just weird.
as soon as you actually put some code in there, and see how it responds, you're like, oh, it is as easy as I thought it was. It's just just weird.
The Podcast Index became a paying LNPay customer with a dedicated instance. Tim had run LNPay out of kindness and enthusiasm, but holding 50 million sats makes it a business whether you want that or not. Paying him lets podcast apps depend on LNPay long-term instead of hoping it will still be around.
if you're holding, you know, 50 million SATs, you really it becomes a business whether you want it to be or not.
Explaining why he builds the Podcaster Wallet UI himself, Dave contrasts declarative frameworks like React, where you describe the screen and the framework makes it, with imperative code that specifies every parameter. Declarative is great up to a point. A control freak like him may prefer coding every piece, though in the end he doesn't much care.
it depends a lot on how much of a control freak you are, which I sort of AM.
Avoiding calling Atom a 'better format', Dave says its real advantage over RSS 2.0 is being opinionated about required basics, which makes feeds sane to consume. In RSS every item element is optional except title or description. A feed could have 3,000 items with identical titles and no GUID or link, which an aggregator can't track.
Adam is more opinionated about the basics in a way that gives you a spec that is easier to consume in a in a sane way.
Dave calls Gigi's line 'when money is broken, everything becomes money' profound. Houses, cars and tech have become bubbles priced as monetary stores of value, because the money itself is broken. A fifth of all US dollars in circulation were created in 2020 alone.
All our assets are now being priced in terms of, of their monetary value, because the money itself has been broken.
Talking with Voltage about encrypting everything on hosted Lightning nodes, Dave points out the tradeoff. Users love it, but each thing a provider encrypts or hides from itself makes the service harder to support.
every time you encrypt something or make it invisible to yourself, it makes it harder to support
Defending Twitter's Strike-based Lightning tips, Dave says custody isn't the problem as long as you can quickly move funds to your own wallet or node. Twitter needs Strike's liquidity because failed payments would be a disaster.
the custodial is not a problem as long as you can get your stuff out quick.
Twitter adding Lightning tips via Strike, though it owns Cash App, puts 'Lightning' and 'Strike' into the public lexicon. For people who've never heard the words, Dave says that alone is huge, and it suggests someone at Twitter is acting on ideology, not just profit.
it puts it puts things into the lexicon and that's a big deal by itself
Many cryptocurrencies have utility, from NFTs to blockchains generally, but Dave says Bitcoin is the only one that feels like money. That's where its utility lies, and seeing it as money rather than an investment changes how you think about it.
Bitcoin is the only one of them that acts like a money.
Even if the worst claims of Bitcoin's energy critics were true, Dave says that wouldn't mean it should be stopped. We spend energy improving food, clothes, vaccines, air conditioning and housing. A money that doesn't harm people through inflation and politically motivated banking is equally worth it.
if you can spend resources on a better money, better money is one of those things that's worth spending energy on
Praising his guest's focus on emissions, Dave points out that energy consumption alone says little about environmental impact. A lake absorbs huge amounts of solar and geothermal energy with negligible emissions, so emissions output is the meaningful measure.
the energy consumption doesn't really doesn't really tell you anything about his impact on the environment, it's really emissions output,
The Brookings paper proposed that small players look to Apple and Spotify for moderation and called for 'policy solutions'. Dave says that pushes decisions up to big companies that are under antitrust scrutiny and pressured by the White House. They aren't really independent private actors, and every such debate ends with the people who have the guns.
they're private companies that are also getting calls from the White House on a consistent basis from the executive branch of the government.
Citing a vaccine mandate that ignored his natural immunity and his health situation, Dave says government sees people as numbers on a spreadsheet. It can't act with surgical precision; it bludgeons things into conformity. That's why it shouldn't regulate speech or run society technocratically: it creates harm where there was none.
government is not a scalpel. That does search surgical precision. Government is a club that bludgeons things to get it to conform to its will.
The Brookings paper claimed podcast intimacy makes audiences believe untruths. Dave calls that bogus and offers his marriage as proof. He's a libertarian, his wife is very liberal, and they disagree at least once a day despite the most intimate relationship there is. He says it has tempered his rhetoric and made him listen more.
you cannot be in a more intimate relationship than a marriage. But we disagree with each other, at least once a day on something.
Pushing back is critical, which is why you don't censor. Even when you think someone is wrong, mean-spirited or incorrect, their ability to push back is sacred.
even when people push back and you think they're wrong, their ability to push back is sacred.
Responding to a Brookings paper on podcast 'misinformation', Dave says podcasts escaped moderation debates because people understand they're conversations, and conversations carry opinions. Lunchrooms, churches and sidewalks hold far more potentially false information than podcasting. The idea of eradicating it is absurd, and if it doesn't feel absurd it borders on scary.
Because people are full of potentially false information. It's the way people work.
Dave says the Lightning and Bitcoin community fits the ethos he and Adam had from the start: think of an idea, ship it, and don't worry if it breaks. Someone set up a Lightning-message leaderboard overnight, and Dave suggested making a one-episode dummy podcast so people could boost to it.
think of an idea. Throw it out there and just if it breaks fine if it works great.
For shows already making good money that worry about confusing listeners with Bitcoin, Dave suggests quietly adding a value block anyway, so people in the movement find it. Think of existing monetization as your paycheck and streaming value for value as a retirement fund. Multiple income streams are best, and you shouldn't put all your eggs in Bitcoin either.
It's kind of like your existing monetization. And maybe that's your paycheck. And streaming value for value is your retirement fund.
Podlove-style chapters in the feed were dropped after two hosting companies objected to feed size. Across 100,000 feeds, even one extra kilobyte per feed adds up in distribution bandwidth. Podcasting 2.0 moved chapters to an external file instead.
if you have 100,000 feeds, you know, even one extra kilobyte per per feed can add up right up to distribution bandwidth.
Debating people who say value for value needs critical mass and everyone on board first, Dave calls that the toxic refrain podcasting always hears. The game has changed: a group of people now hungry for change. Once that hunger exists, the movement takes on a life of its own and makes things happen that couldn't before, when nobody was advocating for them.
once that becomes there's a hunger for that, then that thing becomes a life of its own. It takes on a life of its own and it can it can, it can make things happen. that couldn't happen before when there was nobody there to advocate for it.
At Podcast Movement, meeting Podchaser, Buzzsprout, Blubrry, Libsyn and others in person, Dave found that a short face-to-face conversation gets more done than months of remote back and forth. Five minutes in person, flipping your phone around to show someone something, beats cold emails.
you can accomplish more in 10 minutes of face time than you can in three months of back and forth on a GitHub repo.
Most open source projects begin with existing software that almost does what you want, except for one feature that drives you nuts. You remake it to add that feature. Along the way you think of 25 more things it could do, and then you have a project.
you have an existing piece of software, whether it's open source or not. That does like almost what you want. But there's like one feature that just keeps driving you nuts.
Pocket Casts said it would take value for value seriously once there was more adoption, and hosts said the same thing. Dave calls this a classic chicken-and-egg stalemate: as long as each side waits for the other, nothing changes. Meanwhile almost everyone agrees the big Apple and Spotify apps are poor listening experiences for newcomers.
this is how this is a stalemate. This is a, this is a classic chicken and egg problem. Each one is waiting for the other. And that's an is as long as that doesn't change, nothing will happen.
After the story of an obscure Freedom Controller URL shortener bug, Dave says it proves that every sufficiently complex system has something that works without anyone knowing exactly why. He links this to the evolutionary argument against naturalism: survival doesn't require true beliefs, only beliefs that happen to produce surviving behavior.
every sufficiently complex system has an element to it, that that works. But you can't, but you won't know exactly why it works, right?
After a Jack Dorsey clip on Twitter embracing Bitcoin, Dave asks listeners whose eyes glaze over to engage now, because this future is coming. Big companies wait until things are slick and polished. Podcasting 2.0 ships half-baked things and takes the arrows, so people understand what's under the surface when the polished versions arrive.
the benefit of, of the way that we've done it sort of getting out here and taking the arrows, is it it, it lets people understand what's actually going on under the surface when those real things hit.