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attacus
@attacus@aus.social  ·  activity timestamp 3 years ago

“You can find us anywhere you get your podcasts.”

I *adore* this phrase, because it has been like two whole-ass decades and not one single venture capital darling has managed to unseat plain RSS as the distribution method for podcasts. Not one. (And they have really tried!)

Podcasts are just out there, like air. You don’t go to one place to get them; you get them from everywhere and anywhere. You can choose how you want to engage with them and manage them and it is legitimately heartwarming that nothing has ever gotten in the way of that being a fundamental fact.

This is the best of what the web is. It will never have a stock ticker or even a marketing scheme. Most people don’t even know it is there. But it endures (past the many, many attempts by squillionaire corporates to kill it) because of its absolute unshakable utility.

My suggestion: any time you hear “anywhere you get your podcasts”, send a little thanks to RSS for keeping the real web alive.

#RSS #Podcasts #ProtocolsNotProducts

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attacus
@attacus@aus.social replied  ·  activity timestamp 3 years ago

Given that this post has been read by way more people than I was expecting, and some folks are learning about the role of RSS in podcasting for the first time, here’s a bit more context:

Like many long-running projects, there are a lot of people who deserve the credit for RSS being what it is, including the amazing Aaron Swartz.

Most relevantly for podcasting, at the turn of the millennium Dave Winer released an update to RSS that added support for multimedia to be included in feeds, and gave the example of using it for audio. This is the technical mechanism that led to the rise of podcasting and is still what fuels it today.

RSS is how your podcast-listening app of choice (yes, even Spotify, Stitcher, and Apple Music) knows that the podcast exists and when new episodes are published, no matter where they are hosted. It is what enables syndication and listener choice. (If it isn’t syndicated, it technically isn’t a podcast! That said, technical definitions aren’t social definitions, and many things fall under the colloquial umbrella, so use “podcast” however you like. Audio is such a great medium regardless of what is under the hood.)

#RSS #podcasts

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attacus
@attacus@aus.social replied  ·  activity timestamp 3 years ago

RSS does so much other stuff, too: news outlets and blogs often have RSS feeds (and so does your Mastodon account).

Facebook and Twitter used to support it, but have done their best to kill that support in favour of forcing people to visit their sites directly for content. Many people still lament the deprecation of Google Reader because it was such a good and popular place for curating feeds of syndicated content, and its ending was a big blow for public awareness of RSS as tech corps shifted to monetised platforms.

But RSS is still what fuels podcasting! It has survived so much, especially the post-GFC pivot to centralised platforms, and the fact that it is still driving podcasting at a fundamental level is a miracle and a joy.

In the current era of rapid change and renewed excitement for a human-centred, community-powered web, I hope to see it celebrated, supported, and embraced again in more contexts. Don’t be afraid to believe it can still happen.

#RSS #podcasts

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