FeedCity

I wasn't clear enough yesterday. We're losing the word "podcast" very quickly. It's come to mean video interviews on YouTube mostly. Our only hope is upgrading the open platform in a way that stimulates the imagination of creators, and there's no time to waste. If you make a podcast client, it's time to start collaborating with competitors and people who create RSS-based podcasts to take advantage of the open platforms with no silo walls, otherwise having a podcast will mean getting distribution deals from Google, Apple, Spotify and Amazon. And they, as we know, are nuzzling up to the government leaders, who will want to impose severe limits. This isn't a casual request, it's urgent.

I've been working on a reboot of Bingeworthy over the last few days.

[Ricardo Mendes] Ricardo argues that Twitter's sale to Elon Musk was one major factor that led to the rise of extremism worldwide, and that it should never have been allowed: The sale of Twitter to Musk should never have been allowed to proceed without serio...

Today's song: I guess the lord must be in New York City.

Mozart’s Coffee is already reserving spots for their Christmas lights, so next week’s IndieWeb Meetup will be at Radio Coffee & Beer instead. Wednesday, 7pm. 🎄

Heres's where I'll post ideas to help podcasting stay open.

Spent the morning rocking out with Salter Cane.

Working through several little server optimizations while the family sleeps. 😴

Austin’s IndieWeb Meetup returns next week: Wednesday, Dec 4th, 7pm at Mozart’s Coffee. Everyone’s welcome to stop by for a coffee and chat about the open web. What are you working on, and what can we do to move the social web forward?

Tim Chambers blogs some more thoughts on where the social web platforms are right now:

Threads and Bluesky’s massive success of late and Mastodon’s modest success does not make Mastodon and other fediverse/activitypub offerings losers. In this case it isn’t zero-sum. Fully open, patent free, non-commercial offerings like Mastodon, etc, have different needs and lifecycles and futures not tied to VC’s or shareholders.

Think about primarying Democratic candidates not from the right or left, but from courage, intellect, and power in communication. People who say what they think and know if the press excoriates you, you can survive it, and the users will love you for it.

I’m not opposed to age-gating at all, I think it’s appropriate in many situations and useful, and democratic societies can decide their own rules there. But it should be handled and authenticated as low-level as possible, at the operating system layer. See also: Australia’s Senate bans social media for kids under 16. But there are … Continue reading Age-gating →

I don’t believe anyone should own or run Twitter, Mastodon, or Bluesky. It wants to be a public good at a protocol level, not a company. Solving for the problem of it being a company however, Jay Graber is the singular solution I trust.

This week Mark Zuckerberg met at Mar-a-Lago with a convicted criminal who is out on bail. I stopped posting to Instagram in 2017, but I keep giving Meta second chances. No more. It’s time to burn this shit to the ground and move forward with the open web. Let the past die. Kill it, if you have to.

I want to add an important feature to podcasting that can only work with RSS, it can’t work with Spotify, Google, Audible etc. The idea is subscribing to subscription lists, which the influencers are likely to really love because they can create networks of podcasts. And when they want to edit the list, if this is done right, the users will automatically be updated. The RSS-based podcast industry just hasn’t been moving and if we don’t add features, improve the tech with new features for creators and users, then we deserve what we get. More on the technology to come in subsequent blog posts. But this is the core idea, just to get started.