I’ve been warming up to switching to GrapheneOS for months. Last month I bought a Pixel 8 (which is the buggiest effing phone I’ve ever owned, good job Google). I’ve just been waiting to have the bandwidth.
But with Google sunsetting Google Podcasts, I’ve decided to make time next week. Podcasts are a MAJOR part of my daily functioning.
Spotify isn’t really a podcast app. Just a proprietary streaming service. Podcasts by definition are media files delivered by RSS and Spotify isn’t that.
I don’t think RSS and filetype is what I would use to define podcasts…
Consider yourself one of today’s 10.000. :)
What differentiates a podcast from other forms of media like YouTube is that it is delivered via RSS feeds. This lets people subscribe to the podcast using any sort of RSS reader or standards compliant podcast app.
RSS is an open source standard way subscribe to a stream of content. Sort of like a proto version of pub/sub protocol that the fediverse uses.
The reason why podcasts took off in the first place was that any mp3 player (or now days smart phone) could receive the media by subscribing to the open standards RSS feed. There was no proprietary lock in.
Mega corps obviously are not a fan of that so they try to lock people into their services regardless of this open standard. When Spotify did that exclusivity deal with Joe Rogen it was very controversial because it took the most popular podcast of the time and turned it into a proprietary media stream that you can only listen to on Spotify.
https://github.com/Podcast-Standards-Project/PSP-1-Podcast-RSS-Specification
Podcasting is the preparation and distribution of audio files using RSS feeds to the devices of subscribed users.