Nostr Web Client

I just realized how awfully broken is the UX of discovering a new podcast:

- first no one can share links to podcast episodes, or even to full podcast "profiles", only links to proprietary platforms

- then you have to go on your podcast client and search for it on a search box that looks up on a hardcoded centralized registry and hope for the best

- then if you find what you need you have to wait at least 5 seconds, possibly more, for all the XML to be downloaded and parsed and the feed to be shown to you

- but then you can't just download one episode from the feed and listen to it, you have to subscribe to the entire podcast

All because the thing only deals with this big XML file, each episode has no independent existence or a standardized universal reference to it, and it's unvariably tied to a specific server with a specific DNS domain that in 99.9% of the cases is not owned by the person publishing the episodes.

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Discussion

fiatjaf 10mo ago

And I say all of this even though I think RSS is one of the best protocols ever invented on the internet.

DataNostrum 10mo ago

Make RSS great again

corndalorian 10mo ago

I have never once had an issue searching for and finding a podcast I was looking for, lol. Why do devs like to make up user issues that don’t exist?

fiatjaf 10mo ago

Status quo bias affects everybody, but some more than others.

corndalorian 10mo ago

Bikeshedding is a favorite pastime of all devs, but some more than others.

Jeff Swann 10mo ago

I have. It feels like all searches everywhere have pretty much been broken in some form or fashion for many years.

corndalorian 10mo ago

Strange that we’ve had such opposite experiences, lol. Maybe the people creating the podcasts you’re looking for don’t know how to use existing tools for publishing? Seems to work pretty well. If nostr can improve something, then sure why not do it? But all this acting like it’s absolutely completely broken currently is nonsense.

Five 10mo ago

Rugpulls are inevitably coming and nostr could provide better discovery for the episodes as well as highlights of episodes and comments/zaps/likes/transcriptions etc.

E.g. Blossom could help with more robust storage(on multiple servers possibly, indexed with hash of file signed with nostr pubkey), while referring to them with nostr native entities that could enable a host of features you could only dream of so far:

- Viral sharing of sections/highlights

- DVM transcriptions / translations / summaries of whole episodes or parts

- Curated shareable lists of highlights in a topic (from tags)

- View your friends opinions on all of this and post your own while filtering spam using #wot

- ...

What if I could easily send you a mashup of all #v4v related nostr pod content of the past 6 months?

#DVM -s could do the audio or transcription processing, returning tagged sections in a list, pointing to blossom server files or even one file that the dvm created as the final product. Then we would have a discussion about it and perhaps if we are interested, could dive in the whole pod because the part's refer to whole episodes.

... and our exchange and all the great ideas that came up are there even after 10 years.

I would love sth like this.

Schroedinger 10mo ago

On antennapod I can download one episode without subscribing.

Hodl 117 10mo ago

Overcast.fm, as well, and every podcast player I’ve used. I don’t know what he’s talking about on that point.

ChadF and 33 others 10mo ago

every app I've used lets you download/play/save a single episode

Sven 10mo ago

I created my own podcast and still don't get RSS and if I have done something right or wrong. At the moment I just hope for the best, that people can find it on their apps 😅

Dan @ETxBTC 10mo ago

The guys over at Podcast Index are trying to fix podcasting.... surely there is a NOSRT solution.

OgFOMK ArTS 10mo ago

Even the proprietary links like fountain don't go to the app. They go to the webpage and then you have to do the above described knuckle exercise to find things. Yes, it's broken. So are NOSTR links, too. They have to go to a web based data show and then you need to copy and paste into your client of choice.

Our convenience has spoiled us. When we had hyper links we used them for capture.

Now we have retards do screen shots and still don't know how to hyperlink to the source.

So be it.

When decentralized dns? Second good use case for distributed ledger.

aljaz 10mo ago

i think podcast ecosystem actually has a lot of the same issues as nostr with linking stuff. clients roll the own links or events dont get found etc.

the pain is real in both usecases, podcast:// should be an uri instead we have platform capture everywhere

StevenB 10mo ago

All very valid points worth exploring.

1) Is there a way to get around sharing links to a proprietary platform, and would the platform be interested in sharing those links? I suspect even nostr devs would prefer you use their app and are incentivized to share a link to a note that takes you to their app, podcast apps for sure are.

2) How else would search be done? The centralized registry is an issue, and one that is acknowledge and solutions are being thought about on how to remove needing an Index as a single point of failure/control.

3) Yeah, I'm not sure having a monolithic file is the best solution. I think it would be cool that each episode was it's own file, and it's doable, but highly unlikely with 20 years of precedence. Here's a super small feed that has links to three episodes that aren't in the feed itself, so it is possible. https://lnbeats.b-cdn.net/playlists/eeeb0e31-f3da-54f2-909f-4fd640c684cc.xml

4) That's an app design. But here's a link for you, you can listen to this single episode in which they discuss decentralizing the podcast directory, and you can choose the podcast player of your choice if you want. https://episodes.fm/1584274529/episode/UEMyMC0yMTA

5) Being tied to a single, specific DNS domain/server is problematic. It's a single point of failure/censorship. Having duplicate feeds on multiple servers is one way around this, very similar to how notes are stored on several servers.

ChadF and 33 others 10mo ago

First we need people to stop using BS host like Spotify/Anchor. Thats your real issue here but I'm sure everyone is just waitin for a #NostrOnly solution.

If you want to save yourself now, then checkout nostr:npub1pj3a304qsdh99yr5wkug75rfznr284fzy7zalfnuwkctwyye2djsae7des or nostr:npub186ptarjwp53k6tz5fyzj2t0wcu9wtahrdh8lqca0j7065cuxfvksparxqq

Dont know what any of this is? Checkout podtards.com for more info.

royster⚡️ 10mo ago

Yea I tried to find GiGi and nostr:nprofile1qqs04xzt6ldm9qhs0ctw0t58kf4z57umjzmjg6jywu0seadwtqqc75s8fsrrg ‘s new podcast but couldn’t. I also didn’t try super hard

ARVIN 10mo ago

https://fountain.fm/show/1jdehAGo1tgBdKZXIo8K