The absolute audacity of Apple Podcasts

Re:The absolute audacity of Apple Podcasts by harshitaneja on Wednesday January 25, 2023 @02:23PM (#34522912)

I appreciate the sentiment of not wanting to give into vendor lock-in for convenience but why manually download podcasts and go through the whole process when you can use RSS and ask podcasters to keep supporting RSS feeds?

You get good ergonomics while still keeping the process decentralized and without vendor lock-ins?

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Re:The absolute audacity of Apple Podcasts by EvanAnderson on Wednesday January 25, 2023 @02:33PM (#34523033)

I agree-- RSS feeds are wonderful. I just wish more podcasts kept a complete feed. I'm a "completionist" and it turns me off when I have to scrape episode archive pages to get download links for past episodes that have dropped off the RSS feed. That's the biggest barrier for me to start listening to a new podcast.

I own an iPhone but also don't use Apple's built-in functionality unless the feature supports standards-based services can self-host (CalDAV, IMAP, etc).

I pull podcasts into my forked version of tt-rss[0] and use a script to pull down the enclosures onto my local webserver. I play the episodes using Safari (which, admittedly, is a sub-optimal experience) on my iPhone. (In my dreams I'd write an HTML5 front-end to play episodes, mark them to retain after listening, keep bookmarks, etc...)

[0] https://tt-rss.org/

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Re:The absolute audacity of Apple Podcasts by harshitaneja on Wednesday January 25, 2023 @02:59PM (#34523338)

I feel you. Even though I am more okay with the transience of the feeds.

I have a similar setup but running on my cloud VM and using my custom scripts and apps. I have built a CLI client but not gotten around to mobile apps yet. Hope to finish work on a proper self hosted server and a suite of applications for desktop and mobile for the same and open source it.

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