I’m doing the same…. I use Castopod which is a self hosted option for releasing as RSS/Podcasting 2.0. Also on Bandcamp and Mirlo as pay what you like. Good luck!
Discussion
Thanks for introducing me to Mirlo! It looks like it's what I *wished* Bandcamp was (philosophically, at least).
I'm not keen on a monthly subscription service right now so castopod looks like a good option for me.
Right now I'm trying to get my head around RSS/podcasting 2.0 as a user before I try adding my content. I've allowed myself to become complacent on those large platforms!
Sounds like you're on mych the same path as me... Mirlo was born out of the begions or enshittification at Bandcamp, they had a couple of different owners over the last couple of years and there's been layoffs. There's also Jam.Coop and Bandwagon.fm but I'm less familier with those but they all started around the same time and share similar ethos. I'm no expert with Castopod but happy to help if you have any basic questions. Once it's up and running I've found it really easy but there were a couple of daft things early on that I misunderstood, particularly the Fediverse handle part, basically you create a NEW Fediverse identity (I wasted lots of time wonderting why none of my existing Fedi handles didn't work). Oh and there's also an ajustment I had to make in the Config to allow files larger than 50mb, which was simple once I found the .php config but it wasn't obvious as I'm running on Yunohost here, basically meaning online guides diodn't match my set up. May sound utterly confusing to you... and it was to me but works a dream!
This started because I created a Brighteon channel for my music videos and tried to add it to Linktree. Apparently it's an unsafe url and it triggered a review of all my linktree links. Their trust and safety team emailed that my content breached their community standards. No details of course - and YouTube and IG are fine with the content. I had already decided to stop releasing on Spotify (after some recent events and changes there) and was moving in this direction but without any immediacy.
I'm not familiar with them... I've figured for a while the only place I feel comfortable keeping my work is to self host, obviously that has MAJOR impact on visibility etc. I'm lucky in that most my income is as a studio/live engineer rather than artist/perfomer but I have ultimate control over the files' visabilty (as much as any digital artefact can be) and official usage. I'm not relying on sending it into some blackbox of tech to see if it's gonna pay any bills.
Supporting those platforms, you're an employee but on less than gig economy conditions, everything about 'being viral' is about you publicing the platform for them.. I'd rather go my own way with things and there is a cost to that.
My overiding thought today is we just have to try and build a whole parallel internet, nothing is set up in our favour and everything feels like a battle in the digital world.
Most people stay complacent until its too late. Its human nature. Fight the good fight. Freedom requires proof of work. Become unruggable!
An RSS feed is just a big text file full of metadata in the form of tags. It looks a lot like html. There are specific tags that indicate things like artist name, location of media files, etc. All you gotta do is plug in the appropriate data next to the appropriate tag.
I urge you to look at the template duhlaurien posted in a previous reply. Also this for more high level explainers and guides: https://value4value.info/