Despite its longevity and widespread adoption, the RSS-based system suffers from several inherent architectural weaknesses that create centralization pressures and points of vulnerability. It was great before a thing like nostr existed .. but now it is a drag ..

Centralized Points of Failure: The entire system hinges on the availability of the hosting provider. Both the media files and the RSS feed itself are typically served from a single, centralized source. If that host experiences an outage or goes out of business, the podcast becomes completely inaccessible. There is no native redundancy in the protocol.

Gatekeeper Power: The dominance of Apple Podcasts and Spotify as the primary discovery platforms gives them immense power. They can de-list a podcast for any reason, effectively cutting it off from the largest potential audience. Their terms of service dictate what content is permissible, creating a powerful vector for censorship that bypasses the open nature of the underlying protocol.

Lack of Data Integrity: The tag simply points to a URL. There is no mechanism within the RSS protocol to verify that the file at that URL is the correct, untampered-with file. A malicious actor who compromises the hosting server could replace audio files without listeners knowing.

Inefficient Update Mechanism: The polling-based model is inefficient at scale. It generates significant server traffic from clients repeatedly checking for updates that are rarely present, and it introduces a delay between when an episode is published and when it appears for listeners.