Given Apple's general money-grubbing ways (see: the App Store), this is somewhat surprising. Presumably the podcast directory product happens to be owned by someone in the org who has some idealistic commitment to it being open, and/or the overall podcast industry is too tiny for them to think it's worth the hassle to push monetizing it.

(Now Spotify's the biggest podcast platform, I gather, and I think we should all be glad that they don't have the power to just do unhindered monetization of podcasts because of Apple's counterbalancing them.)

Check out:

https://www.listennotes.com

Listen Notes is an indie run service by a single person.

Not only does it host its own podcast directory, it has advanced search and many other nice capabilities.

The blog also talk about its tech stack.

https://www.listennotes.com/blog/how-i-accidentally-built-a-...

And you can even buy their Podcast Database

https://www.listennotes.com/podcast-datasets/solutions/

The age of it is the why. Steve was far less focused on service revenue. Plus, podcasts sold iPods and iPhones.

It's because Apple was emboldened by the fact that the original June 2007 iPhone exceeded sales expectations of 10 million units without any 3rd-party apps. The App Store didn't exist until July 2008. In June 2007, consumers were getting in line to buy the so-called "Jesus phone" even though there were no 3rd-party apps ecosystem for it. (Look back at the hundreds waiting in line overnight to buy the first iPhone: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_iSE0bBgUsQ)

So, Apple rationally concludes that 3rd-party developers need access to Apple's customer base more than customers need access to outside developers. Back in 2008, the developers en masse could have revolted and said "fuck the Apple iOS SDK, fuck the App Store, and they can fuck off with their stupid rules and 30% fee" -- but they didn't.

Instead, developers grumbled and complained while they were submitting apps to the App Store. Developers -- via their actions -- keep signaling to Apple that Apple has the leverage and not the developers.

That's why you had 2008 articles and threads such as this:

- This Is Why iPhone Developers Put Up With All the Bullshit From Apple (daringfireball.net)

- 46 points by sant0sk1 on Sept 19, 2008 | hide | past | favorite | 23 comments

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=308975

While the iPhone was certainly interesting tech, that's not what made a bunch of devs learn Objective C. It was money.

That Apple has only lowered their fees one, one and a half times in that period is how we end up with all the grumbling we have today. but at the time it was much much better than the status quo.

Disagree there. Maybe to preload apps. But in all my Symbian dealings in Nokia-land, almost every app purchased was direct from producer, and pushed to the device by a sync cable, with zero revenue going to the carrier.

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/stardew-valley/id1406710800 $5

Combined revenue over all platforms: $300m +

This seems apocryphal. Apple famously resisted apps and was dragged kicking in and screaming into supporting native applications.

I find this surprising whenever I hear it. Ditto for spotify. I don't listen to a single podcast via either of these services. Some of the shows I listen to might publish on them too, but I'm subscribed elsewhere.

Most of the shows on spotify seem like the audio equivalent of shovelware anyways.

Most (all?) feeds in there are not hosted by Apple. Many non-Apple podcast apps use this to power search and discovery features.

I do not know what you are talking about here. Apple has a podcast index. Podcasts do not need Apple's podcast index for anything. You can find a feed by going to the podcast's site and clicking on it, or googling the name of the podcast + rss. Or in any number of ways, really. Apple is one of many podcast indexes.

So no part of a podcast is hosted by Apple, unless the podcast is actually an Apple podcast.

Your question is the same as: "Why do you care if $YOUR_SEARCH_ENGINE (google, kaggle, duckduckgo) hosts a list of websites?"

The last search engine to host a list of websites was Yahoo!, and nobody did care.

You could, but I suspect most people search in their podcast app. Which is where apples directory comes in.

The UX on the latter side is clearly superior.

in the past i've subscribed to a dead feed this way i think because the author changed who they syndicate through. i assume Apple's directory is maintained in a way that largely avoids this (simply by it being the canonical directory).

Maybe Apple hosts it because it's a legacy thing that doesn't interfere with Apple-only podcasts.

apple's podcast directory is NOT required to listen to a podcast.

that said, most folks submit their RSS feeds to apple (and google play, etc)

In what way does the ecosystem rely on Apple's infrastructure? Do listeners on Android, or even a third-party apps on iOS, use Apple's podcasts directory for search and discoverability?

The fact that Apple haven't attempted to squeeze podcasting is perhaps an indicator that the ecosystem doesn't really depend on Apple (and they know it).

Depends on which client you use. Google Podcasts has its own directory. However, it's approximately-true that any third party app on iOS / Android that aren't run by a big company (Spotify, Google, Amazon) use Apple's directory for their podcast-search. (Pocket Casts, Castbox, etc on Android all definitely use it.)

Yes, many third party apps use Apple's podcast directory. Probably many on Android.

The other option is https://podcastindex.org/

Or think about Cloudflare. When Cloudflare has an outage, it feels like half the internet goes down. There is no requirement for all these people use to Cloudflare specifically, but a sufficiently large portion of the market has converged on utilizing Cloudflare.

https://overcast.fm/podcasterinfo

I’d definitely be interested in using an independent source for podcast search. (To help reduce the current single point of failure in Apple’s org chart).

The iTunes API is poorly documented but completely public. No reason not to use it.

https://performance-partners.apple.com/search-api

There's basically why. You can manually add RSS feeds to various podcast apps, but Apple just slurps up those same feeds unless not submitted for some reason.

edit: Oh someone in thread po-inted to a secondary directory

[0]: https://podcastaddict.com/

[1]: https://podcastindex.org/

[1] https://podcastindex.org/apps

Caught me somewhat by surprise one day when I walked past a hospital and got an ad in a podcast for that very hospital (GeoIP for my mobile IPv6 is correct at the zip code level).

In fact, Spotify even allows podcasts to deliver their own MP3s (if you meet the requirements for their "Passthrough" program), which gives distributors that don't want to use Spotify's ad platform more control and is probably a condition for them even listing on Spotify.

By default, and presumably also for old Spotify Connect devices that only support Vorbis, they reencode all files and cache them on their own CDN.

By then the RSS feed tech was already well established along with a few podcast software aggregators.

Apple did not invent or even have a choice.

Far be it from me to give Apple credit for altruism or openness, but this narrative isn't quite true. When the iPhone launched, Jobs and the execs at Apple envisioned that web apps would be the way the iPhone functionality could be extended. There was even a relatively straightforward way for web apps to be cached and saved on the Home Screen. The desire for compatability with open standards was even reflected in Jobs' open letter explaining why Flash would not be put in the iPhone.[0]

Public outcry for the native APIs along with prodding from other Apple execs led to the App Store becoming a thing.

[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20100501010616/https://www.apple...

Doesn't pass the sniff test, because

> Public outcry for the native APIs along with prodding from other Apple execs led to the App Store becoming a thing.

Apple's vision of web apps was as second class citizens to Apple apps. The outcry was because those web apps, despite caching and saving and other things could not and would not ever be able to do what an Apple app could.

Sherlocking/f.luxing/Dark Skying (maybe less so, the last) is bad enough as it is, but far worse when those as web apps could never do what an Apple app could (f.lux is a perfect example, there was, and I could never imagine a world where Apple would allow a web app to control color temperature on their phone).

More interestingly, Spotify rose to second by investing a gazillion dollars acquiring both a bevy of software tools (Megaphone, chartable, anchor), entire production studios like Gimlet and shelling out huge sums to take the biggest shows like Joe Rogan and Call Her Daddy private so they were Spotify exclusive and no longer available via RSS. In the past few weeks, Spotify has formally admitted defeat and announced Joe Rogan and Call Her Daddy will go back to the public market.

When Spotify entered the market they paid a lot of money for exclusive content, but for the 99% of podcasters their interaction with the space was the same as Apple, submit your RSS and it serves it from your hosting. However, Spotify also bought two podcast hosting platforms: Anchor and Megaphone which ends up blurring that line a bit. As far as I know the Anchor/Megaphone hosted podcasts are not treated differently by Spotify, but that could change at any time.

The recent change from Google with the retiring of Google Podcasts in favor of Youtube Music is a tremendous step in the opposite direction. Youtube Music does NOT use the RSS based distribution method, with podcasters uploading their files directly to Youtube. Google even offers an RSS import.

From all of the metrics I have seen the above three platforms make up 80%+ or so of the podcast user base. So if they made changes to make things less open podcast creators would be forced to follow. Making it feel like the openness of podcasts is, at least in 2023, more of an illusion or an act of charity than anything else.

So the break is already happening in this world...

I guess I am not shocked that they would do something like that. I'm sure they claim that they do it for user experience or some such nonsense.

That said, they allow distributors to opt into "Passthrough" MP3 delivery to all modern devices (including browsers – just check the network tab in developer tools!), although it's not the default.

If they just served podcasts directly from third parties, third parties would be able at least in theory to push potentially malicious data to the Spotify app (and Spotify users' devices).

As for performance, if the third party has an outage, then it would make Spotify look broken. And who knows if the third party site can serve the traffic well enough for a good experience.

I already hated YT Music with a passion, but this makes me hate it even more.

In general, I agree with the sentiment here as well, I think podcast hosting and distribution will continue to increasingly be centralized. It makes me sad for the future of open protocols and an open web in general, but the factors are more economic than anything technical.

I see hope in the Patreon model. I don't mind paying a monthly subscription for a specific show if I get a locked down RSS link.

Though, podcasters on Patreon are getting high on their own supply, asking for way, waaaay too much. "Just" 5 bucks a month? For one show??? Completely out of touch. Come back when it's ad-free @ 50c, or less.

Roman empire, Pax Americana, Apple Podcast Directory. Birds of a feather :P

Sounds right on the nail head to me.

https://podcastindex.org/ https://blubrry.com/support/podcasting-2-0-introduction/

As fragmented as open source efforts usually are, there's usually some network effect that lowers the risk for someone else to try it. Linux, LibreOffice, Lightttpd etc. With crypto it's winner-take-all.

It’s strictly a generalization of a block chain, since the chain is a tree. Also, instead of remaining anonymous and trying to scam pension funds, its creator named it after himself.

It’s also at least a million times more energy efficient, and has better support for federation (i.e., forks).

I really enjoy Podverse and real time transcripts and live shows and chapters, etc…

There are a lot of different reasons people can be fundamentally against crypto, and those reasons have been talked about in great depth over the last few years. Even if you don't agree with them, the various "anti" positions aren't that difficult to understand.

Lightning is nice but it's an unrelated project. Bitcoin itself is still fundamentally flawed and Lightning is basically syntactic sugar on the same decaying infrastructure. It "solves" the same problems Bitcoin did with a loosely agnostic framework around ... the exact same blockchain. It's the equivalent of getting a second-try on a test you failed just to write the same answer down.

And Lighting is one of the good ones. Other L2 chains range from "marginally exploitative" to "broken" to "outright literal scam" depending on the developer.

https://soundcloud.com/user-773474262-525813292/the-history-...

As in, "Hey I just started a podcast on youtube!" but literally it's just a yt channel.

your podcast app should be able to subscribe to a Youtube channel. Youtube links that feed as a recognizable `` tag, so even if your app doesn't index Youtube you should be able to just paste that 'youtube.com/@MyChannelName` URL into it and it'll figure out the actual feed URL from that.

those RSS feeds have been there for _ages_. i don't see their incentive to change it, unless maybe some competitor decides to scrape it and abuse it in some way which materially harms them.

The only difference to an audiobook is that Podcasts are usually free and often (but not always) in serial format, but these boundaries are blurring more and more.

That said, I do definitely prefer open RSS distribution than something like "Youtube for Audio", and I'm glad there isn't any such thing (yet), but I wouldn't not call a podcast exclusive to Spotify, Apple etc. "not a podcast", just an annoyingly-distributed podcast.

That's always worth a laugh. But I have seen actual podcasts that did this, too. They have a real audio podcast, but also put up a YouTube video of them making the podcast.

Do it live on Twitch. Publish video recording on Youtube. Audio as podcast. Transcript as blog/newsletter. Short snippets on Tiktok. Images with quotes on Instagram...

I ended up just setting up an endpoint that reverse-proxies the RSS feed served by the platform on my own domain.

Anil also mentions migrating from Mastodon, which has a similar problem: migration is a form of redirect, so the platform you’re migrating from has to continue to exist and not block your migration.

FWIW, when migrating from Mastodon instance to another, as long as both instances are online and in agreement during the migration, the ActivityPub protocol will automatically update any followers to use your new instance. The old instance could go down the next day and you wouldn't loose anyone.

However, the posts remain at the old platform - so they disappear if the old instance goes down.

And, of course, any hyperlinks pointing to the old instance will stop working when it goes down.

I did the same thing and eventually felt like it was too complicated to maintain a service just for that, so I switched to Bunny CDN and use a custom domain on Bunny to sit in front of the podcast host's RSS feed (just the RSS, not the actual episodes).

It works pretty well, but sometimes the caching does things I don't expect and new episodes don't appear in my player until I manually flush the cache on Bunny. I suspect I could do it more smoothly if I experimented more with Bunny's settings.

>Winer has been given "credit for the invention of the podcasting model."

>Winer's advocacy of web syndication in general and RSS 2.0 in particular convinced many news organizations to syndicate their news content in that format.

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dave_Winer

But centralisation has a way of creeping in, so I wouldn't be surprised if a platform came about to attract podcast creators with convenient revenue streams, in the same way Substack has for blogs. There's opportunity on the table.

I dropped my Spotify subscription when it started getting exclusive rights on podcasts. A worrying trend.

Or maybe the open podcast world has enough momentum to remain decentralised? What would lead to the practical decentralisation of video? Peertube has not made a dent yet.

To me, these no longer are podcasts, but are now shows hosted on Spotify. It's not different than any other talk show like Stern or some sportsball talking heads that are exclusive to XM/Sirius/ESPN/etc. It's just their shows don't have a "broadcast schedule". Maybe I'm just being too pedantic

While iTunes was required, it was free and there was no subscription or limitation on what you could sync to the device. Apple actually seemed to be generally anti-DRM at the time, launching the music store with DRM as an industry concession, but eventually removing it and even allowing users to download DRM-free copies of songs that were originally purchased with it.

It’s like it came from some bizarro universe where only apple allows side-loading of content, but Spotify and YouTube do not (so they can take a chunk of your revenue, and censor/shut out competitors).

> The name came from a freelance copyrighter who, after seeing the prototype, thought of the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey and the phrase "Open the pod bay door, Hal!"[2]

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Backronym

2: https://www.pcmag.com/news/a-visual-history-of-apple-ipods

Feed burner tried. Spotify tried. I think podcasting is like blogs or email newsletters. There may be value in centralization (dev.to, medium, etc for blogs, MailChimp, substack, etc for newsletters) but there'll always be a space for you to own and run it yourself.

Critically, you can port your subscribers in each of these cases, unlike subscribers to a YouTube channel or a Facebook group. I think thats a correlary of Anil's point. It isn't enough for discovery to be open, you, the creator, need to own the means of distribution.

I read other comments about 'forever redirects' of the RSS feed if you leave a podcast platform and they're a bit worrisome, but I wonder if a year or two of redirect service would be adequate. Probably depends on the growth of your podcast. I think I might have updated a feed URL once or twice in the decade or so I've been a podcast listener. Still safer to set up a reverse proxy under a domain you control.

or at least, so is the theory. but i see that most of the shows i listen to aren't available when i search them in Spotify. so i'm not sure how Spotify users interact with podcasts: do they use multiple podcast apps? does Spotify win only those users who previously weren't listening to podcasts (and so don't lose access to anything they valued when moving to Spotify for podcasts)?

So the complexity of that is what makes it hard to go totally open in my opinion, at least from the creator standpoint.

That and the fact that there is just too much momentum with YouTube's audience volume, if your goal is viewership.

Audio is easy. Throw up an mp3 and you are done. The basic fundamentals of an audio client have remained largely unchanged since the invention of the tape deck. Video is a while different animal.

That being said, moving to an RSS based model for video would be pretty interesting. I just imagine there would be a lot of work on whatever system consumes those RSS files to make the video playable across the wide spectrum of video players.

  * in ear devices
  * vehicle audio systems
  * phone speakers
  * laptops
  * mid-range home stereo systems
  * high end home stereo/studio monitoring

> Contrast this to other media formats online, like YouTube or Tiktok or Twitch, which don't rely on open systems, and are wholly owned by individual tech companies.

This is a strange argument, unless I just misunderstand. Are they intending to point out that there are more podcast services than video services? Is “podcast technology” different from an mp3?

Being able to look up almost any podcast in any podcast app and find its RSS feed and subscribe to it directly without requiring any intermediary is a huge thing in this era of proprietary silos. That's the point he's getting at.

Apple could go rogue tomorrow and start rehosting all podcasts in its directory, which most apps depend on, and I would still have my list in Overcast to go and get RSS feeds direct from the source.

The sad part is this used to be completely normal. I remember browsing the web and most sites would show that little RSS icon in my browser indicating they have a feed available.

But people are happy to let companies like apple run their lives for them and decide what they are allowed to consume, so now we have to act like this perfectly normal and reasonable thing is special.

Yes, Siri. Thank you, Siri. May I watch another podcast, Siri?

there's the weird email newsletter format (say, Matt Levine's column) which completely ignores RSS, but that's probably tangential to the argument. the biggest offenders i see are less $BIGCO and more individual developers who roll their own blog and overlook RSS. but in that latter camp, every off-the-shelf publishing system or static site generator gets RSS support by the time i'm liable to encounter it in the wild, whether the operator knows it's there or not.

It’s not content distribution.

> get RSS feeds direct from the source.

But what is the source? Who is typically hosting these? Audio is easier to distribute than video, but aren’t most podcasts hosted on a handful of large services?

Yeah, this is what I thought. RSS will give a URL to a sound file, which is hosted by someone, somewhere. It doesn’t sound like there’s anything inherent to podcasts -- not even RSS even though it’s so ubiquitous -- which prevents the content distribution to be more centralized.

If a podcast recording is exclusively hosted by Spotify, that is where everyone gets that podcast; even if they got the URL for it elsewhere. It’s a bit like saying I get my articles from HN (disregarding that I don’t use RSS for it).

There are also a handful of essentially CDNs that host the .mp3 files themselves, but these are more or less completely interchangable. They're just infrastructure for hosting files.

The only player in town that seems to really make a dent in the openness is Spotify which have been aggressively buying out podcast teams and taking them off the open web, and that's one of the prime reasons I cancelled my subscriptions.

Then there's smaller losses like the BBC4 which made most of their podcasts have a 1 month delay vis-a-vis their own app. I have no interest in that. In effect, this just served to curb some of my compulsive newsy consumption. If something isn't important enough to still be heard a month later, maybe I didn't need to hear it in the first place.

Anyhow, I very much agree with the article and I'm happy someone made the point so much more eloquently than I've managed in my many debates about the matter.

But thanks for posting this! Occasionally, I can't find a particular podcast on my preferred site.

The vast majority of podcast listeners subscribe a channel on YouTube, Spotify or Apple.

The vast majority of podcasts are served from similar centralized media companies.

Which is why "JRE is moving from YouTube to Spotify for $200 mil" is a thing. If podcasts were decentralized you wouldn't "move" from one content company to another.

Spotify signs new deal with Joe Rogan reportedly worth up to $250m

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2024/feb/02/spotify-j...

Sounds like they got a deal.

Idiotic if you ask me. He’s just like any dimwitted everyman: every single pub in the UK has at least two Joe Rogans. I was sat with my back to one in a coffee shop the other day.

I mean, Android is still the largest platform in terms of users and it doesn't have a dominant podcast app. Spotify for a long time didn't offer podcasts and it still offers only very poor experience for podcasts.

At the end of the day, the podcast is served by one of these hosts, regardless of how it was discovered. It can be observed that they’re centralized when media companies make exclusive deals as Spotify attempted with JRE.

I wouldn’t disagree that podcasters are in control of distribution; that’s not actually exclusive with the distribution being centralized. The point I was making about the exclusivity deals is just that these platforms have started to try -- and likely will continue to try -- to entice some of the more popular productions into such deals, which would necessarily increase centralization if they go through.

It’s a cynical perspective so maybe best kept to myself but I see all the right pieces for a UX bait-and-switch. I suspect the parent commenter (to whom you asked the initial question) sees the same thing. I think it’s seemingly intentionally misleading to call this decentralized; like “that’s what they want you to think” as a paranoid way of putting it. Regardless of any motives, it seems to serve certain interests that this is seen as decentralized, and I don’t think they’re the interests of podcast fans. Food for thought, I guess.

(Spotify is trying to break the openness of podcasting but they mostly haven’t managed to do so, yet.)

If I give you a podcast URL, you can play it in pocketcast, overcast, or even write a few lines of Python to download it and play it in an mp3 player.

That's the point. Feature-wise, they're all nearly identical. With podcasts, you can just choose your client or even create your own with the same catalogue as any of the big players.

With short-form videos, you can't.

All the surviving shows have moved to YouTube. YouTube could provide the same sort of service, but it's not compatible with Google's dependence on ads.

If I follow a YouTuber, I follow that person's channel on a particular, closed, privately-owned platform. If YouTube decides to kick them out, I no longer follow them.

Yesterday I actually learned about an app trying to solve that problem [1] through an absolutely bad-ass video response by one of its creators to a takedown notice from Google [2] (the mic-drop part starts at 3:29)

[1] https://grayjay.app/

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KJ42f-tV_3w

Seems a bit misguided, because unless you’ve been pointing to your own domain the whole time, you still depend on the previous platform to 1) offer this feature at all, 2) keep serving that 301 forever or your old subscribers will be lost. Do podcast apps permanently change the feed URL when they see a 301? Am I missing something?

My feed reader will update the URL if the ending feed has a self URL that points at itself. But I don't think that is very common. In theory a permanent redirect should also be a signal to update the URL.

It’s just companies being nice, because the incentives to not be nice haven’t showed up yet.

In other words, is any 1+ set of media files on RSS a podcast?

I know a lot of people conflate "podcast" with "show." Just publishing a podcast feed of your songs might not be something you consider a show per se, and that's fair, but if it's a podcast feed I can subscribe to in my podcast player, then you are podcasting.

It's akin to saying "wherever you get your music".

Even with physical media there's only so many big labels, and the rest is vanishingly small.

Who offers podcasts and operates them is so different from these in quantity that it makes a qualitative difference to the medium.

Sure, the streaming services lock you in, but that's part of the deal you make -- small sub fee, all you can eat. I'll make that deal.

But Apple, at least, also offers online PURCHASE of DRM-free audio files. I dunno who else still does (Amazon?), but I don't think any of those vendors are still trying to do DRM or lock-in for purchased music. It's just that, by and large, the mass market has moved to the streaming model instead of the purchased-music model.

Google was still selling MP3s not that long ago but they no longer do since they killed Google Play Music. Amazon also sometimes really nudges you to their subscription and you have to do some clicking around to find a way to buy instead.

As soon as podcatchers offer the UX of being able to search for podcasts in the application instead of hunting down and pasting RSS URLs, then it makes sense to say "Wherever you get your podcasts" which means "Just search for our title in your favorite podcast app" which is what 99% of people want to do including myself rather than manage URLs.

It's basically the same as how, in the hey day of RSS, websites would show a bunch of RSS client icons to indicate "Yes, consume our feed in any of these popular RSS apps".

(That said, the centralization of podcasting and the death trend of RSS are worth talking about.)

A donation from Apple is not an open ecosystem.

> We do get most of our podcast data from Apple. We even use the same podcast ID as Apple Podcasts.

-- Podcast Republic

What RSS is doing feels like something that should be done with just a few extra HTML tags, not a completely new format. But the idea of HTML as markup language feels kind of lost these days.

And boy does this bring back the memories of XSLT. I’m kinda glad I forgot about that abomination.

https://evertpot.com/firefox-rss/

https://indieweb.org/sidefile-antipattern

But of course there were ideas to embed the feed data structure directly in HTML as attributes.

In the indieweb/microformats corner there is h-feed which could simply be extended with rel=enclosure links for an embedded podcast feed.

https://indieweb.org/h-feed

And more formal side you could use RFDa/Microdata and the schema.org vocabulary to annotate the HTML with the logical properties of a feed and podcast episodes:

https://schema.org/PodcastEpisode

Of course there aren’t any podcatchers with understand these vocabularies.

...

I’m a little bit torn. I love good minimal markup and have a soft spot for the idea of RDFa. An early 2000s idealist. But the real world is different.

Netscape’s original RSS came out of a clear need: the markup for table layout of the late 90s was shit and not generally parsable. Which is the same thing today: Today’s markup a wastelands of nested divs which are not generally parsable and often generated by tools nobody really has control over. Just today I had to wade through a Wordpress site builder plugin and its crappy visually generated HTML. That’s the majority of the web, sadly.

And if I put a web URL into my telnet client I just get a bunch of raw HTTP! Not everything on the internet is part of the web. There have always been other protocols: IMAP/SMTP for email, IRC for chat, NNTP for newsgroups, XMPP for instant messaging, and RSS for subscriptions.

The idea that everything has to be done over the web is what’s really undermined “the idea of HTML as a markup language”. If HTML is a markup language, why would you use it for all these other use cases, most of which were handled with much better performance on hardware from twenty years ago?

But have browsers ever widely attempted to be anything other than web browsers? A couple of vendors tried including RSS support at one point, but I don't recall it catching on across the industry.

Media (images, audio, video) browsers, maybe. Technically that is not HTML, but still rendered by most browsers. However, as that content can also be embedded in HTML, requiring browser support to be present anyway, it is a bit grey area.

for blogging, RSS is a mechanism to transfer webpages. so shouldn't this apply?

Although you ultimately raise a good point. Most browsers do support PDF. That's the wide attempt to be something other than a web browser that I was forgetting about earlier. So, there you go, there is precedence.

Although there is still that pesky problem of most people not wanting to use RSS. Apple had good in-browser support for RSS there for a while but they found nobody used it. If Apple can't convince Average Joe to use something, it isn't likely anyone can. RSS has remained relevant for podcasts only because it has found a place in server-to-server syndication. Average Joe isn't visiting Harmony Harold's personal website to subscribe to his podcast either.

Didn’t JZW once famously say all software grows until it eventually has an email client?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Sunbird

[1]: https://www.amazon.com/Read-Write-Own-Building-Internet/dp/B...

"Waking up... To keep Glitch projects fast for everyone inactive projects go to sleep and wake up on request."

Ok so this website appears to be hosted by microservice. "to keep ... fast for everyone." Is anyone else bothered by this line that we're conditioned to accept that microservices are always faster? In my experience, even without the cold starts, they are often slower than traditional VPS hosted apps.

Well then there's scalability... But looks like this still got the hug of death.

It's not really about microservices, and it's not implying they are fast. You could have this message about any kind of resource, it only means the service is trying to keep it cheap.

You might have seen an app hosted there: https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=glitch.me

Or heard of its old name, Fog Creek, if you've been around long enough.

https://glitch.com/@glitch/fediverse-of-madness

Some fun stuff in here: https://glitch.com/@community/community-roundup + https://glitch.com/@community/

But I do assume they mean scalability as far as the content service goes.

The term microservice is a bit of a vague general term that just means "we thought about scalability" to me. It doesn't mean anything more than that to me without discussing it in detail.

I think the idea of a server being overloaded at the moment there's something positive like high demand is something deeply ingrained in folks psyche. Accordingly it gets brought up on every sales call (once we're talking to the technical folks) and executives love to say "micro services".