All I see is people claiming RSS is dead, but I never stopped. Moving between various readers and landed on Feedly for iOS a few years ago. Love it.
Imagine that shortly after the turn of the century, Adobe created a proprietary platform for delivering internet content and called it the "web". Viewers must use Adobe Web Reader to use Adobe "web pages", which are DRM-protected PDF files delivered using proprietary protocols. Adobe has done deals with several hundred popular sites to turn off their standards-based websites and deliver Adobe websites exclusively.
This is what Spotify and others are doing, and nobody cares. Apple is effectively the last media giant left holding the flag for standards-based podcasting, but how long do we think that will last?
What I just love is when people use this excuse to justify "borrowing" a clearly defined technical term, using it incorrectly, and then insisting that their incorrect usage of that term is entirely valid because "language and meaning change over time."
(Not saying you're one of those people at all but that is one of the most frequent uses of that phrase that I tend to experience from other people.)
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Podcast#Etymology
There was a minor movement to label them "netcasts", but it didn't really take.
The history was that "podcasting" was an open medium, "open" being the point. A "podcast" was a show (e.g. "Smartless"). "Episodes" were audio or video files combined with metadata that lived in the podcast's RSS. Anybody could play in that ecosystem.
Now "podcasting" means anything/nothing. "Podcasts" are shows. "Podcasts" are episodes. "Podcasts" are things that increasingly need a proprietary app to play.
The distribution model was a client subscribes to the RSS feed on their computer, downloads new episodes (from the publisher's website), and then syncs them when the "iPod" is synced to the computer. Many PMPs but the iPod especially defaulted to syncing your computer library when plugged in (to charge). So the iPod just received no episodes of podcasts when people plugged them in to charge at the end of the day.
When iTunes added explicit podcast support it became even easier to subscribe and sync podcasts. This was and remains a good distribution model but Spotify et al have done their damnedest to co-opt the term to mean content exclusive to their platform.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Podcast#Trademark_applications
Those types have done a lot of the same damage to the word "wiki". It blows my mind that Sourcehut of all places is a willing participant in debasing the term.
> Imagine you're a mathematician, and fellow mathematicians start calling derivatives integrals instead; that's basically how badly the term[] is being misused: it's being used to describe systems that are almost the _exact opposite_ of the concept.
Many of these new-gen collaboration sites that bill themselves as having wikis result in a request for approval (pull request) instead of an actual edit when you attempt to make a change. (And in the Git-backed ones, the process is usually more egregious; see below.) This proposal/review/approval cycle is exactly what a wiki isn't. GitHub no longer imposes this workflow—there's now an option at least to turn your wiki into, you know, an actual wiki—but even today that option remains off by default so all pages are closed to changes unless the owner makes an effort to toggle the right setting[1]. What these are aren't wikis—they're anti-wikis; if you have a "wiki" that only you can edit, then stop calling it a wiki. (Notably, GitHub's setting doesn't control whether it will continue to advertise it as a wiki or not—instead of just, like, the "docs" tab or something.) Most of these are static sites with extra/fewer steps.
SourceHut is even worse than present-day GitHub, because for all its docs in the man.sr.ht namespace, this is the process you have to use to edit one of its anti-wikis: spot the typo, note the title of the page you're currently on, find the corresponding repo URL in the page footer, leave your browser to clone the repo to your machine, open that directory and locate the source file based on the page title you noted earlier, edit it, make a commit, and then (probably**) push your changes to the original repo. This flies in the face of the definition[2], etymology[3], and entire spirit of the word[4][5].
* Maybe you hit a wall because the specific page has been locked. Fine. Raise your concerns through linked resource for discussions. The fact that individual pages can be locked because e.g. they have a history of being the target of abuse does not negate the meaning of "wiki". If every page is locked down (including pages that don't even exist yet, so you can't go create them), then that makes a material difference—it makes it not a wiki.
** It may not actually be the case that trying to push your changes makes them immediately live on SourceHut—it very well may result in a request for approval by the project owner. No idea. I've never gone through the process on Sourcehut because of how much contempt is deserved by projects that have contributed to the campaign of debasing the term "wiki" to it-means-what-we-feel-like and who-are-you-to-say-that's-wrong levels of uselessness.
1. <https://docs.github.com/en/communities/documenting-your-proj...>
2. <https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/wiki#English>
3. <https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/wikiwiki#Hawaiian>
Does Google Takeout support Google Podcasts? That'd be the usual method of exporting everything from a Google product.
Nope. One of the few use cases where I actually looked towards Google Takeout as an escape hatch for my data, instead of a mere novelty ("a ZIP of all my YouTube interactions—that's neat, I guess"), but Google Podcasts is not there. I've filed several complaints about this and several other shortcomings in response to the Google Podcasts app's spammy notifications requesting feedback.
I ended up writing a short set of procedures to follow (an SOP—written like a software manual, really) that walks you through how to select page elements that are shown on screen while logged in, and then drag and drop them from the podcasts.google.com tab into the "export tool". The punchline is that the export tool is just the SOP document itself. It's meant to be read in your browser, and it takes advantage of the fact that the browser also happens to be a universal runtime...
The exporter will descramble the links and output your subscriptions in text/uri-list format.
It could really stand to have an associated 90-second video demonstration that walks through the steps because of how unorthodox the the-documentation-is-the-implementation paradigm that I was experimenting with is.
(I actually still listen to them on an Apple iPod nano....)
I could believe it being true of some of other platforms, trying to have "our-platform-only" content but I haven't seen it and am not finding confirmation. I don't think it's true of Google Podcasts, that they have any of their own content.
I migrated my podcasts to GNOME Podcasts app by selecting the RSS link manually from Google Podcasts app when I switched to a Linux phone.
Facebook. Twitter. Instagram. These would be incredibly useful things to have native RSS feeds for, but instead I have to dig around and either use some tool someone built for the purpose - a tool at the mercy of the walled garden whose wall they're peeking over - or build my own nightmare factory.
It used to; killed off ~2013:
* https://brodiesnotes.blogspot.com/2013/06/twitter-has-killed...
If Facebook had any kind of API I could probably build this, and stop using facebook otherwise. Which is probably why they don't?
> […] The company spent a good portion of its presentation specifically focused on podcasts, which it said had been “largely unchanged” for years before its entry into the market, due to the limitations of RSS.
> Spotify cited how unbundling podcasts from RSS technology has paved the way for Spotify to generate revenue through these popular audio programs — a sentiment that’s not universally beloved by those who support an open podcast ecosystem. Spotify has disrupted that market by bringing some podcasts in-house, where they can only be heard on its service, and competitors have followed. This has fractured the ecosystem and left consumers at a disadvantage as some shows are no longer broadly available.
> “We’ve been able to replace RSS for on-platform distribution, which means that podcasts created on our platform are no longer held back by this outdated technology,” Maya Prohovnik, Spotify’s head of Talk, told investors.
The plan was to embrace, extend, and extinguish the podcasting medium, and the hard part of that is done. "Podcasting" was a standards-based, open medium. Now it's any audio show, and we've lost the unique name for the open medium. As Spotify incentivizes more and more creators to not publish an RSS feed, standards-based podcasting will become a fond memory.
The whole article is pretty much just re-wording Spotify's press release.
There seem to be no sources in it except for Spotify's press release.
So, a very old form of organizational disfunction in journalism: The cheapest and quickest way to write an article is to use someone's press release as the only source, as it doesn't actually require, well, any journalism.
When I recently asked friends for podcast suggestions... several were spotify-only, i don't think the suggestors even realized it, cause they just listened on spotify anyway regardless.
So I think Spotify agrees with you and is working on it...
It wasn't very fun constantly having to switch between my RSS app and my browser, so I just stopped using it.
Some publishers offer full RSS feeds as one of the benefits of their subscriptions. It might be something to explore for your favorite must-read sources.
I occasionally venture onto Reddit or HN to see if I've missed anything big but rarely do.