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People poured out of Twitter into Mastodon, from a closed ecosystem into an open federated one. Dave says the same can happen from YouTube and Twitch to podcasting if the vision is built correctly, reaching users underrepresented in traditional podcast apps.
you know, of people away from Twitter into Mastodon away from a closed ecosystem into an open federated system. The same thing can also happen from closed ecosystems like YouTube and Twitch over to podcasting. If we build the vision correctly,
Dave offers to build a simple bridge to surface live shows and comments because visibility is the biggest stumbling block: anything that puts new features in front of people helps, even putting them on the website.
because I think it's, it sounds fairly simple to do. And it would give it visibility, which I just think that's the biggest, that's the that is the stumbling block. That's the suffering point right now is, is the visibility.
If commenting from a podcast app means logging into the Mastodon (or other ActivityPub) account you already use, the app doesn't have to run an ActivityPub system or moderate anything. Dave says the instance owner's existing moderation is in charge.
then the owner of that instance, the existing moderation that happens on the instance is in charge, the app doesn't have to take responsibility for the moderation of anything.
No Agenda promoting a live-capable app visibly blipped its usage. Dave says a host can move listener behavior, so you can teach listeners to enjoy the live experience. Not everyone will love it, but Tom from Buzzsprout saw a 'pod ping went live' post and just tuned in.
listener behavior. And so the same thing like I think you can teach the listener to also enjoy the live experience it I mean,
Not in the audio. Guest episode (James Cridland, 0.35 threshold). The surrounding run includes first-person references (Tom from Buzzsprout texting 'me'), consistent with Dave.
People often show up saying 'this should be done with Nostr' and then never do anything. Amid protocol fatigue (Matrix, ActivityPub, Nostr, XMPP), Dave credits Oscar Merry for building a fully functional lightning-comments system: he put his time where his mouth is.
But really, a lot of times, people Oh, with the end of this should be nostre. And then just to never do anything.
Paywall versus V4V will be an A/B test, Dave says. For big shows he expects similar numbers of payers but very different creator income, because a fixed price artificially caps what fans can give. He subscribes to Peter Attia's podcast, which is V4V-adjacent, and says he couldn't pay more than the $19 asked even if he wanted to.
The V for V will result in much more, the high end Ceiling is much higher. Because you're not let you're on artificially limiting. I could not pay Peter Atea more money he just said $19.
Dave thinks cross-app comments suffer from a lack of narcissism, and he doesn't mean that as criticism. The primary motivation for boosting is hearing yourself on the show, or, as he clarifies, provoking a discussion point you care about. Comments that never reach the hosts' ears lack that pull.
The I think this is suffering from a lack of narcissism. And this is not a criticism, criticism. Exactly. 100%. The same way? The the motive, the primary motivation for boosting is that you get to hear yourself in the show.
One thing Dave has clearly learned is that meetings make you feel great for about five minutes. Then you realize nobody will do what they promised; it sounds like momentum, and six months later there's nothing.
And one thing I've clearly learned is that meetings make you feel great for about five minutes and then you realize that nobody's ever going to do what they promised you they're
AI, brand safety and content moderation all come back to data collection: running algorithms over a data set. Dave says that isn't how intelligence works. Pointing to John Carmack's optimism about general intelligence, he argues physics only gets you so far, and if you don't understand the metaphysics you hit a wall no matter how smart you are. Dave builds much of his own metaphysics on Leibniz.
This is the one this is why metaphysics Trumps physics every single time. The physics gets you so far, and then it just stops and you're stuck.
Telling the story of Jeff Tucker and the Mises Institute, Dave says the think tank was offered millions in funding on condition that it move to DC, and said no because moving would mean losing its principles and forgetting who it was. You may not agree with everything Tucker thinks, but he's a person of principle.
We're staying we're staying with as soon as we move to DC, we're going to lose all of our principles. We're going to we're going to forget who we are that sorry, they turned down millions of dollars basically a free ride a gravy train on based on principle
Not in the audio. Dave hedges the story ('if I remember the story correctly'); the details about the Koch funding offer and the early-1990s timing are his recollection, not verified.
Dave's 'meta prediction' for the year: the ad-based content business will become boring and drive people away. That will increase pressure for cool features that bring people back, which will further Podcasting 2.0 and make content better.
The the ad based content business will become boring, which will drive people away from boring content and therefore increase the pressure to come out with cool features to bring people back to content which will further podcasting 2.0
Whenever a government exerts too much control over an economy, a thriving black market appears and becomes the real market, because the official one stops functioning. Dave says that's why official government metrics can't tell you an economy's health.
There's a anytime there's a there's too much government control, and too much government interference in an economy. There always is a thriving black market.
Dave tracks independent-hosting stats to gauge podcasting's health. He doesn't want one behemoth company sucking podcasting into itself and dictating terms. If half of new-episode feeds were throwaway Anchor shows, that would signal something majorly wrong and make it hard to convince struggling hosts to implement new namespace features.
we don't want one behemoth company a hosting company to essentially capture the entire you know, suck all of the podcasting into itself and so they can they then begin to dictate term
Asked why cross-app comments aren't taking off, Dave says we may need to accept that most people don't want anything social in their podcast app. That doesn't mean the social interact tag shouldn't exist; it's never a bad idea to have a good protocol for a thing.
Isn't it's never a bad idea to have a good protocol for a thing. Right. But it could be that most people don't want anything social in their podcast app.
When life gets too busy to listen, Dave still wants to support the shows he loves, so he hacked together a script to keep paying them. What he wants is for the show to still be there when he returns, and that means supporting it.
I want to make sure that I'm at least supporting these shows that I love, because I don't want my lack of luck, what I want is for when I return to that show, for it to still be there. And that means you got to support
Building the Freedom Controller, Dave hit a practical problem: a new account's news river needs a default seed OPML to start from. Every podcast app needs some bootstrap list of shows when you first open it. He proposed letting apps submit anonymized, listener-approved OPML lists to the Index, published as a public getting-started list, joking that all good ideas eventually become 'share your OPML.'
That's what I want, I want a default place to start. Because every podcast app, no matter what it looks like, is going to have some Bootstrap, that it has to have,
Seeing real people listen to something you made is a dopamine hit, and Dave says that's fine. The idea has been pooh-poohed because of social media, but feeling reward and excitement about something happening in your life isn't objectively bad, especially when you've put something into the world and the response comes back.
it's a bad thing in and of itself. It's not objectively bad, to head to feel a sense of reward and excitement for a thing that's happening in your life. I mean, dopamine hit is not all bad.
Dave doesn't think Mastodon will replace Twitter; it's additive. In the fediverse the signal-to-noise ratio is much higher and you have quality conversations. You still go back to Twitter for certain news, but you're relieved to close the tab.
I think it's additive. Yeah, you because you're gonna have the What you realize when you're on Mastodon or you're in the Fed versus the Fed versus when you're in the Fed averse, you realize that your signal to noise ratio is so much higher.
The common pushback against marking ad insertion points is that it enables ad blocking. Dave says ad blocking is going to happen regardless, as browser extensions show with messy heuristics. Do we really want podcasting to become that, like the old pirate-music days, instead of just making it easy?
That's the that's the thing. I mean, ad blocking is going to happen. It always does.
Having your own fediverse presence has become synonymous with running your own Mastodon server, which is overkill for most people. Dave predicts a lighter, personal ActivityPub stack comes next, and says cross-app comments being built on ActivityPub was perfectly timed with the Twitter exodus.
There needs to be a light, a lighter, a lighter stack for activity pub presents. And that is what comes next to me in my mind is the the sort of lightweight activity pubs stack.
Fountain's lightning comments and Alby's contracts are platform-specific features that add value on those platforms. Dave isn't comfortable with them becoming the de facto standard for something like cross-app comments, which must stay purely a protocol (ActivityPub). Internal systems are fine as long as what comes out is neutral, non-paid ActivityPub.
To me these things are platform specific, and they add to the value of the of what's happening on that platform. But I don't I don't want I don't feel comfortable with that.
If a service is paid through a 1% value split instead of $19.99 a month, its income grows automatically as the show grows. If the show grows 20x, so does the support. Dave calls it a beautiful sliding scale: nobody has to come back and ask for more because they sold too cheap at the start.
So if all of a sudden my show grows, as you know, grows by a factor of 20. Well, then my support to you grows by a factor of 20 as well. And that's just like, to me, it's a beautiful, scaling sliding support system
People assume podcast apps refuse to share listener data. Dave says that isn't true (Overcast already shares some in its user agent). What's missing is a decent, private way to share it.
People act like the apps don't want to give any data away. And that's not the case,
Not in the audio. The Overcast/Marco user-agent example is paraphrased from the surrounding speech; transcript reads 'Marco gives this away in the user agent'.
Talking with OP3's John Spurlock, Dave says the stats framework stands on shaky ground because everyone still focuses on downloads. Every file he pulls just to analyze it gets an ad stitched in, and that ad is wasted money. The industry needs to think in listens.
I think we do really have to move towards trying to think of listens instead of downloads,
Dave recalls Marco Arment's point that cheap, sloppy dynamic ad insertion degrades the listening experience, and that listeners blame the podcast apps for it. That second half became the whole story in podcasting.
And that second part of what he said ended up becoming the entire story within podcasting.
Discussing SquadCast's patent, Dave reads it as a broad land grab in a crowded market. If what's patented is essentially an algorithm, the holder can't tell whether a competitor infringes without suing to get discovery.
then squad cast is going to have to sue clean feed in order to get discovery on whether or not their algorithm is the same as squad cast,
Dave is torn about value-splits for playlist curators. Curation deserves reward, but a popular curator could drop a big show into every list and take a cut without doing real work.
But then in the other sense, it feels like That way lies madness, because you could imagine a popular playlist curator, be like throwing in an EPA in reference to a remote item to let's just say no agenda every single week. And they're getting a cut, even though they're not really doing
Not in the audio. Transcript 'EPA' likely means an episode; the 'other sense' contrasts with his preceding point that curation should be rewarded with value.
Talking about remote-item playlists and live-only feeds, Dave points out that RSS 2.0 lets a channel have any number of items, including zero. An empty feed is legal; how to handle it is the client's parsing decision. Read the spec before assuming something is broken.
So this so it's valid XML it's valid RSS. And so that means it's it's okay.
On editing interviews, Dave says that cutting and reordering answers from different topics makes it still the person's voice, but not what they actually said.
When you when you rearrange the pieces like that. It's still the part it's the person, but it's not actually what they said.
Dave's mental model for Podping: it reflects events in the feed. If the feed didn't change, there shouldn't be a ping. A metadata change like swapping a host is a legitimate event.
So the the pod ping, pod ping is supposed to be an alert system that says, hey, an event just happened in the feed, go check the feed.
The podcast namespace repo had 133 open issues, some untouched for two years with no clear resolution. Dave agrees that newcomers who see that number assume nothing is getting done.
when new people come to the namespace repo, and they see 133 open issues, it looks like we're not doing anything. It looks like progress is not being made,
Talking about Pocket Casts open-sourcing its apps, Dave says putting code on a public repo changes your mindset. Comments, suggestions and pull requests come back, and you stop feeling like you're building alone.
It really isn't isn't exciting to throw something up on a public repo and see the comments come back, see people making suggestions, pull requests, those things are those things are real help and it makes you feel like it's not just you going in alone
When people call newer apps immature for lacking features that established players have, Dave pushes back. Using his own Freedom Controller as an example: not having an inbox view doesn't mean it's behind. It means that isn't what the product is for.
that net doesn't mean that it's behind, it just means that that's not what we do. I mean, that's not what I want the product to be.
While moving Podping to Cap'n Proto, Dave explains the payoff: once a working schema is in place, adding new things later is just a schema change and a recompile.
once you have the captain proto schema written then and it's established and functional, then when we add new things in the future is just going to be as simple as a schema change. You just add the thing recompile boom done.
Dave admits he gets bogged down in Bitcoin debates. Stepping back to what podcasting needs right now, the key thing is being able to move value without limits. Which currency finally wins will sort itself out.
The the eventual currency in the way that it lands doesn't matter as much as the ability for it to be transported, without, without limits? Right, the transportation to me, is the critical thing as this moment in time. The other part will, I think, will resolve itself.
Dave says he'd agree with almost everything a Bitcoin maximalist says over a beer. He won't take the label because he can't predict the future. Bitcoin as a transport layer is already a fact of life; Bitcoin as everyday hard money by 2050 is murkier.
But that when it's like, Are you are you a Maxi? The reason I would say no to that is because I don't know the future.
Dave disagrees that stats are worthless unless every app participates. Statistics let you extrapolate from a smaller set, and podcast data is never going to be 100% accurate anyway.
statistics will allow you to get an idea of a small take, you know, take a smaller set and get an idea of what the bigger set means. I mean, it's not. No, it's not 100%. But nothing in podcast data is ever going to be 100%.
To end endless naming debates, Dave proposes a rule for the namespace: suggestions are welcome, but the person who brought the proposal has the final say on its name. Then everyone moves on to bigger things.
I think that that should be the standard is that the person who creates the who brings the proposal, they get the ultimate say, on what is named.
Dave tells Adam that even without reading code, he understands what it's trying to do. In business, someone who can act as the liaison between management and developers (or writers) is worth a lot, because those really are two different worlds.
there really is it's like two different worlds, you need a liaison or somebody to help plug those two things in. And it's not easy.
Thanking PowerPress for adding Podping, Dave explains it's a discovery tool for everyone watching the chain. The hardest feeds to find are independently hosted ones, like WordPress feeds not in iTunes, which otherwise only turn up by chance in a crawl.
But the fees that are really hard to find, like really hard to find our feeds that are independently hosted on things like WordPress, and they're not in iTunes, right?