Could we build a decentralised podcast index?
2024-09-07 17:25:00 +07:00 by Mark Smith
The original podcast index is the one managed by Apple. In the initial days of podcasting, as far as I remember, it was the only one. If you wanted podcasts you openned up iTunes, browsed their podcast index, and subscribed to podcasts from their index. After you subscribed, your iTunes would download your podcast subscriptions automatically.
That’s a bit of a simplistic reduction of the history, I think there were non-Apple indexes, but since Apple was the dominant place people went to for podcasts, the vast majority of people never even knew what a podcast index was, let alone use an alternative. I think that’s mostly still the case.
That changed for me when I started a weekly newsletter that contains links to podcast episodes. You see one of the problems with podcasting is that people can choose where they host their podcasts, and hosting providers implement their services in varying ways. Ironically that’s also one of podcasting’s greatest strengths, since it makes podcasting distributed, and thus hard to shutdown.
The reason it matters is that since many podcasters don’t have their own websites, it means there isn’t a consistent way to get a web link to a show episode page. Some hosting providers, have show pages, others don’t even bother, the ones that do often don’t include a playback tool in the page to listen to the episode in your browser. It’s a bit of a mess. And if you are sharing podcast links in the content you are publishing, that turns into quite an issue.
For the past few years I had been using the podcast index maintained by Google Podcasts. It had by far the cleanest UI, no ads, a really great in page player to listen to the episode, search that worked pretty well most of the time. But recently Google Podcasts was shutdown. I guess it wasn’t a money maker in the same way as it is for Apple since they don’t really have hardware products in the same way as Apple do.
Anyway, since Google shut their index down, I have been using podcastindex.org. It’s pretty good, with links for each episode, search that works well, and based on the blurb on the website, they appear to be in it for the good of the community. Yet I’m still not completely comfortable using their site for linking to podcast episodes. There are a few reasons.
First off there are no individual episode pages. Instead there are multiple episodes on each page. Episode links are possible using a url hash fragment, but it worries me that the show episode url contains an id generated by their database. Maybe it’s not a big deal but for some reason this makes me uneasy.
The other thing, and probably more important is what happens if they go offline. The web being the web, that’s virtually a certainty to happen at some point. And when it does, all those links I shared will 404, and whatever I wrote about the podcasts will become worthless. Isn’t there a better way?
Podcasting has become such a big part of our lives, it’s gotten big enough I feel like we need some authoritative source similar to Wikipedia that will last for the forseable future. Isn’t there some way to use blockchains and something like IPFS to ensure the data is all stored publically in a distributed way?
I'm not an expert in this area, but perhaps some sort of a standard / protocol would be good enough. If we knew all podcast indexes used the same URL structure, which used hashes of a standard episode metadata file, then maybe it wouldn’t matter so much. You could just swap out one podcast index domain name for another, and the links would still work.
Just thinking out loud. I think it’s a really important topic, especially as governments try to attack podcasting which is bound to happen more frequently in the future.