LINUX Unplugged - 440: Saving Podcasting from Centralization

Episode Date: January 10, 2022

A new initiative uses open source to keep podcasting decentralized and add new features. We chatted with Dave Jones behind the Podcast Index. Special Guest: Dave Jones.

So I got this text message from DHL, the delivery service, saying, hey, your thing from China is about to arrive. Are you going to sign for it? And I'm thinking to myself, thing from China? When did I order from China? You ever have this problem? Or maybe I'm just ordering too many things. I think you're ordering too many things. So we open up the box and we pulled out what was basically a hundred little different parts that once you assemble it, you have the Clockwork Pi dev terminal.

This thing's really retro looking. It was super fun to put together too. We did, I will admit, we did look at it for about three minutes once we opened the box and said, what is this thing again? Why does it have a thermal printer? Once we dug into it though, it's actually really great. They set it up so that you can just build the thing yourself, which was a fun experience, really. Yeah, it snaps together.

And I know your son Dylan was super interested because I was able to, in front of him, just take it all apart. And then we built it up again. And it was really fun and modular. So it's basically, I guess it's Pi-based. You're going to fill me in. You've got the details in front of you here. Yeah, Pi 3-based. So this is the Clockwork Pi-based. You're going to fill me in. You got the details in front of you here. Yeah, Pi 3-based. So this is the Clockwork Pi dev term.

And it's got a full keyboard on it, which is impressive. It also has lots of USB inputs, got three USB-As, USB-C power, and also can run on batteries, lithium batteries. Yeah, it doesn't come with the lithium batteries, but they're just a standard size that you can order from Amazon. And we did just that. It runs Armbian, which was fun. That was my first dive into that. And this expansion port with the thermal printer, I thought would be kind of fun. So we're looking for ideas of what to do with this thing. It also has a mini track ball at the very top of the keyboard. A la BlackBerry. Yeah, exactly. And then on the far right side of the keyboard above the backspace key,

it has a X, Y, B, and A sort of Super Nintendo style gamepad buttons. It has arrow key buttons on the far left side of it. It's pretty fascinating. I'll be honest, a little tough to type on at that size. It's true. It's just right for Dylan's hands. It was fine once I taped those pencils onto my fingers. Right. I just shaved down my nails real good. And ours also makes a hilariously loud buzzing noise. It's really too bad when you have it plugged into the power source, which in this case is a USB-C power source. It

kind of does that electronic hum that everybody hates. And so we were thinking of having it in the studio to control the soundboard for guests and stuff, but it's just so irritating. It's too noisy. It's fine with the battery. Right, once you charge up the batteries, it's totally fine.

So now I'm just thinking there's going to be some way that we could have something that prints out on that thermal printer from time to time, because that's just too much fun. Someone once suggested the, well, it was Dylan, actually, that suggested having the Bitcoin price once an hour just print out on this thing. Oh, no.

Hello, friends, and welcome back to your weekly Linux talk show. My name is Chris. And my name is Wes. Hello. No, my name is Brent. And my name is Wes. Hello. My name is Brent. Oh, hey, Brent. Yeah. Wes is actually out on assignment trying to work out a distribution deal with Spotify because everybody's doing it.

But this week, we thought maybe it was the perfect moment to talk about how open source can help save podcasting. Really, what I mean by that is keep podcasting independent and decentralized so it doesn't end up behind these giant corporate platforms like Spotify. Not that we have any problem with you choosing to listen in Spotify. In fact, we think that's an important aspect. You should have the right to choose any player you want. And that's what we're trying to protect here. And it turns out open source is the key. So we thought at this point, you know, this time of the year, maybe we should talk about this because it's something that's, well, it's going to impact all of you all out there. And then to help us get through the

feedback after we're done with our interview with Dave, we have our buddy from self-hosted. Hello, Alex. Welcome back to Linux Unplugged, sir. I like what you've done with the place. It's nice. Yeah. Cozy. Well, you know, when Brent's here, projects get done. They do. Oh, did we send him the picture of you and Hadiyah with the construction in the bathroom? No, we didn't. Brent's been it. It got blowed over. Keeps the dog in the house. Yeah, the wind was strong that night, Brent. It's handy having a Brent here in multiple ways. So before we get into the show, before I

tell you about what we got coming up, we've got to do a little bit of business here. We've got to say hello to our virtual lug. Time-appropriate greetings, Mumble Room. Hello. Hello, everybody. Thank you for being here on a Sunday. It's nice to see. We've got about 21 people joining us in there today. A lot of people just choosing to hang out in the quiet listening. Probably kind of cool on a Sunday. You's nice to see. We got about 21 people joining us in there today. A lot of people just choosing

to hang out in the quiet listening. Probably kind of cool on a Sunday. You know, you pop in, you get nice high quality Opus codec and low latency and you get to listen to the show. And if you want to say something, you can pop in the On Air channel.

Perfect for doing your Sunday chores. And it could get even more real if you want to join us here at the studio. We have a meetup coming January 30th right here at our humble little abode. I have the meetup page up now. I'm going to use a meetup for this one. So go to meetup.com slash Jupiter Broadcasting

for the event details there. We're going to make it a birthday party for myself, a little hangout and chow. I'm going to encourage people to bring their favorite dish, although you don't have to. Food will also be supplied. We just want to see your smiling faces

because it's a um it's a big number this one sounds like a podcast potluck to me yeah it is kind of a podcast potluck so what i was thinking and i haven't really sorted out all the details i don't know if people are interested in this what i was thinking is people show up like around what did i put in there like 11 11 30 or something like that am now we could do it another way but what i was what i was consternating on is people show up we you know then do the meet and greet get snacks going and then we do a live linux unplugged you know put the speaker out there put the screen up and everybody attends a live linux unplugged and then afterwards we break out all the food and start eating i don't know that seems like kind

of the way to do it so if you're interested in attending a live linux unplugged i mean you'll be out in the other room but but you'll be listening live. And you want to then chow down with us for my big 4-0. Go to meetup.com slash jupiterbroadcasting. And, you know, if you have a small vessel of flight, we do have a local airport about 10 minutes from the studio. It's true. We have to mention that because in the past, listeners have flown in for meetups. That's true.

There's one just here that interrupts us. You know what? I mean, we're just saying. We're just saying. You never know. And then before we get in, if you've been listening recently, before we get into the main topic today, I just want to give you a brief update on our server. Just been doing the migration thing. Although, Brent, this is tricky when Wes isn't around because he may have had the solution, but twice this week, I ended up finding these

pieces of like, you know, rando software that I just wanted to try out. You don't install those on the server, do you? Well, you know, this is where I think maybe I should have set up a Proxmox box, but you know, I thought it's safe, but yeah, I'm going to run it on the server because I want it here on the LAN, but that was not the way to go go because all of these just all assume Docker. And it's like some of them are a shell script that assumes you have Docker. Ultimately, I ended up not doing it on the server because we're using Podman

and I ended up doing it on Linode. I ran into it. It was just kind of funny because we're like, we're going to try doing Podman and we have probably 30 containers that are Docker. And how many have we transitioned successfully so far two it's been bumpy it hasn't been as smooth as i was hoping i think wes would probably be quicker at it but uh you know yeah you and i are just hopeless i think well and you

know me i'm doing five things at once right so i'll actually spend five minutes on the actual task where wes will just wait for us all to go to bed. So we stop messaging him and then he'll just get it done. So that continues. We'll have more updates on that soon. But Brent is also going to put out the word to help us build a server cabinet. You're looking for input. You got a few ideas.

Yeah, I think we've been thinking about this ever since these servers showed up is... We don't want to cook them next summer. Yeah, that was an issue we were worried about on our trip to Denver this year was the heat in that garage. And we even considered keeping the garage open a little bit throughout the trip, which, you know, obviously has some implications.

So cooking up, I think, in the back of our minds has been, what is the solution? And I came up with so far, but I'm looking for some input, building a little server cabinet. You know, it doesn't need to be huge, but it needs to be adequate and needs to hold, I think, a few servers

while we're doing some migrations. Possibly as many as three servers. And I wondered if network equipment could be thrown in there too, just to clean things up a little? Probably should be. You could always go down the IKEA LAC route, the LAC rack.

Oh. So most servers are 19 inches wide and a LAC table is exactly 19 inches wide. Well, I was thinking of using real wood, but I will explore that. I was thinking of using cardboard, so. It's true. He didn't mention cardboard and hot glue.

I'm like, we got a lot of boxes. The thing about the LAC setup is it's super cheap. Like a LAC table is like $15, and lumber prices at the moment, they're almost back to normal. I think it's a great suggestion, and I'm at the phase where I'm looking, just scouring for ideas,

so I would love to check that out. It sounds like the route I should go if I didn't have a Brent, you know? Mayhaps. Yeah. I mean, I built a rack out of two by fours that's been sat in my basement now for the last three or four years working just fine. I mean, that is the beauty of it. Once you build it once, it's done forever.

And a lot of guys actually that do Bitcoin mining build these plywood boxes to put their servers in and then they have like air filters and stuff like that on the intakes and just use passive cooling to pull the air through and cool it sufficiently. I think in the winter, passive cooling would be perfect for this box. The summer, I think there's an opportunity there. And Alex, I think this might tickle a few of your fancies. I think there's an opportunity to maybe connect some kind of cooling mechanism. So maybe a household air conditioner, but to also connect that to something like Home Assistant to control it and have a look at it while, I don't know, Chris, you're traveling and such.

Get a few ESP boards involved and measure those metrics and find out what your parameters are. Sure. And why could we not share this design? I'd like it to be approachable. I have knowledge in building stuff with wood. Alex, you've done some furniture building and stuff like that. We should just do like a springtime project out here or something.

You know, Alex was telling me that he's considering buying a CNC. So this is really where this conversation is going. I would like to, but they're so expensive. You know, I have run into some maker spaces that have CNCs and stuff. So maybe we could look up one of those. But anyways, I'm looking for suggestions. We want it to be climate controlled. I think having it on casters might be kind of neat to move it around.

You know, we could build it into the wall, but maybe. Casters could be nice. You know, so that's an idea. Also, where I was going was thinking about working on this thing. If it's a sealed box, it's going to be a pain to work on. So I'm thinking removable front and back panels. Sure. You're going to need some working room work on. So I'm thinking removable front and back panels. Sure. You're going to need some working room from time to time.

That's it. So even if you're doing a big server migration or adding something to it, you could just roll it out, take the front and back panels off, get some access to all the ports and things. So that's kind of where I was going. I think our trickiest thing is going to be cooling

because we don't have like an outside wall we can drill a hole for venting. We do have the roof. Yeah. go out we could go out the roof there's a there's a crawl area up there we could vent into which has some vents it's possible although it gets very hot up there i think in general you'd be surprised with how little active cooling you would need just a little bit of airflow is probably you know so that the air isn't stagnant and just reheating itself. That's probably all you need. You need a source of fresh air and then a way to exhaust it and probably not even in massive volumes either. That's probably a good point. I

mean, I'm not an expert in doing this kind of stuff. Just getting the hot air out of it. The only problem is, is all of the air in the garage is very hot because the garage roof is exposed to the afternoon sun. So it just really heats up, and the door as well. We could consider a fresh air intake as well that pokes out of the garage. So there are possibilities. But if anyone has some ideas

or has even built something like this, please. Linuxunplugged.com slash contact would be a great way to send in your suggestions. I'm open to receiving photographs and diagrams and sketches and websites and things. Things you've tried. Please. Hard lessons you've learned. Please. Help us keep our servers alive. Or some crazy thing

you want us to try. Yeah. Also, I'll just do a mention for extras.show. Go to extras.show slash subscribe because we have a couple of things coming up in the feed. We just published Why Linux Will Win in 20 Years. That was one of many topics that we feed. We just published why Linux will win in 20 years. That was one of many topics that we covered. We just had a whole list of topics we were talking about.

We threw them into a randomizer and covered them. And, you know, some stuff that we wouldn't normally think of touching on came up. It was good to revisit. Many of those topics came from listeners in our feedback forums and were maybe topics that we didn't quite find a slot for yet in the shows, but we just threw them all in there and hit the random button and it was really fun. Yeah. So check that out. That'll be at extras.show already. And then coming up in a couple of days, it's our Denver road trip memories. The secret about the Denver road trip is during the entire

trip, Brent and I were recording and we got a ton of audio that we've never played on air before. And we're going to start publishing some of that. And the first one goes out just a couple of days after this episode is published. And then a few days after that extra is published, the tech we used for our road trip will be published. And that's a deep dive into everything from the automation systems on the RV to the networking gear that we use, the power tech that we used, and obviously the recording stuff that we used as well. So it's like a whole, whole like rundown of everything. And it goes into the good and bad.

I mean, we had some failures that caused us some issues. So those are always fun to talk about. Yeah. So that'll be published on extras.show in a few days. It's all coming out over there. And just a little spat of extra content for you because we love you. Linode.com slash unplugged.

Go there to get $100 in 60-day credit on a new account and go there to support the show. And go there to try out Stream 9. CentOS Stream 9 is now available on Linode. You could try it out with one of those systems that has NVMe storage. I mean, I don't know why, because honestly, all their systems are screaming fast,

and the price is great. This is a great time to go sign up for Linode. It's the beginning of the year. If you've been listening to the show for a little while and you've been thinking about doing it, why not pull the trigger right here in January? Kick it off with Linode. So go to linode.com slash unplug, get that $100 and really try it out. I mean, Linode's giving

you real money there to work with because they're confident that if they give you an amount that lets you spend some time, you're going to love it. You're going to see why it's better. You'll see the super fast systems, the easy deploy one one-click applications. I mean, they've been doing this for 18 years. So as you use the system, you'll start to appreciate all the small little edge cases that the experience has brought them. And the passion for the technology that underpins all of this, Linux, is what brought them into this. And even 18 years later, you can still see that DNA in the product. And Linode has learned that customer support is critical, so they have invested in the absolute best customer support in the business.

I get notes from listeners all the time. In fact, please keep sending them in. Just go to linuxunplugged.com contact and tell us your story with Linode because it's great to hear it. It really has resonated with our community because it hits on all those key points. Performance, customer support, a Linux culture that runs deep. They support the community. They support events.

They support a lot of Linux content creators, and they support projects and free software that enable all of this. They really get investing in the entire ecosystem. So let's go put everything over the top. Go grab that $100 in credit and support the show. Go to Linode.com slash unplugged. Chris, you had the opportunity to sit down with Dave Jones and he's working over at the podcast index and it sounds like they're doing some pretty interesting stuff over there. Yeah, they're calling it podcasting 2.0 and I like it. I think it's a great name. It really describes what they're trying to do. And I thought, this is a topic that impacts all of us. They're using open source to try to decentralize and keep podcasting independent

for those who want it, to give listeners the choice of app and way of listening, however you want. It's, you know, keep it an RSS feed that you consume. And so we thought this is a great moment to sit down, talk about these challenges, maybe more so right now than ever. Podcasting is in a precarious place right now. There's a lot of really big interests that are trying to influence the market. There's downward pressure on the price of advertising, and there's just a lot of podcasts. Not to mention certain players in the market are beginning to move forward with agendas that are really kind of aimed at locking podcasts up into their silos and monetizing them even further. So my guest today is Dave Jones, and along with

Adam Curry, they launched their Podcasting 2.0 initiative about a year and a half ago. It's a platform that has an index and an umbrella of open source applications and an API. So we kicked off the conversation when I asked Dave what sparked the idea for a decentralized podcast platform in the first place. I guess the abbreviated version of that is that a guy I've been working with for a long time, widely known in podcasting, co-invented podcasting, is Adam Curry. And Adam and I had been friends for probably 10 years or more, working on various projects around RSS and feed aggregation and OPML. And we jointly built a show note system for his podcast, The No Agenda Show, which is huge, got about a million listeners. And so we had kind of been through the trenches in aggregation software and RSS.

But he called me about a year and a half ago and said, maybe a little bit longer back, said, hey, you know, this whole thing with Apple sort of controlling the default search, sort of the yellow pages of podcasting, number one, makes no sense. And number two, it's concerning with all the deplatforming going on and all this kind of thing. And so what you end up with is this what's supposed to be an open, decentralized system of podcasting built on RSS. And that's true. It mostly operates that way. But then when you look at in practice, where do you go to find podcasts and where do all those things live? Everything goes to Apple, which is literally the largest

company in the world. So you have this huge dichotomy here between what podcasting is supposed to be at a technical level and what it actually is in practice. And he's like, you know, we really need to change this and we have the chops to do it. So why don't we get together and create an index to begin with, an open directory of podcasts an index to begin with, an open directory of podcasts, and then tie an API to it to where any app developer can write an app and just hook into it for free. We'll have it be donation-based and not a paid product. And then we'll do a podcast to go along with it. And as we build it, we'll just podcast about what we're doing. And hopefully we'll get a whole bunch of app developers on board that are struggling to pay for all the

infrastructure that it takes to run a backend for a podcast app. We'll make that easier for them. And in the process, we'll build this alternative directory to Apple so that we can take that centralization away. And then in the process, one of the elements of it will be, we'll give the whole database away. So I was like, you know, hey, that sounds like a challenge. Sounds fun to do. Yeah, let's do it. And so that's kind of where it was born about a year and a half ago. You know, it sounds like Apple was definitely a major influencer, but how much more critical has this idea become since Spotify has gotten so invested in podcasting? And I know you're familiar with the fact that YouTube just announced they want to get involved with podcasting.

So the idea of a decentralized podcast index that's essentially just backed by people who are motivated by podcast best interest, right? I mean, it's great that Adam Curry is involved. And I sniffed around on the socials and checked out a couple of the podcasts. And the motivation is obvious. You guys want Podcast Index to be the place that is sort of a trusted, not connected to any particular commercial cornering the market interest. Yeah, that's right. So we kind of have our motto, if you want to say, or mission statement is preserve, protect and extend the open podcasting ecosystem. And that it's not just words like there's sort of meaning behind each one of those.

And what you just mentioned with Spotify and then later Apple coming in and beginning to wall the garden as well with their subscription product and that kind of thing. You've always had this effort to wall the garden around podcasting, but really in the last three to four years, it's gotten to a fever pitch. And you now have the CEO of Anchor coming out and saying, they're going to actively push their users away from RSS. You don't even get an RSS feed when you start an anchor podcast unless you request it. And supposedly the reasoning behind that is RSS is antiquated and it can't give, you know, the new modern features that everybody expects from a platform,

which is completely bogus. But we had this idea to preserve, protect and extend podcasting. We had this idea to preserve, protect and extend podcasting. And that's really aimed at that, you know, where you got to fend off those walled gardens. And to do that, you have to have a directory and an API that everybody can look into that's not dependent on one of those guys. And then you decentralize everything. Don't keep it a single point of failure because then you're just recreating the same problems that that those guys have. And then you build around that a vocal group, and just listening and asking people what features does everybody want in podcasting? Technical features and user-facing features. You know, we've spent the last year just building out a comprehensive namespace for RSS that has all of those features in it. And I can tell you this, there is no silo or walled garden, Spotify, Apple, anybody you want to name that has anything close to the feature list that

OpenRSS has at this point. The podcasting 2.0 tags are all, I mean, they're killer. Let's talk about that. So this is something that as a content creator that publishes everything as a podcast, I have felt like this hasn't really moved much and then we started seeing these siloed platforms introduce their own proprietary features to go along with podcasting but what you guys have done here with this namespace stuff is super appealing like um really taking podcast chapters to the next level for example allowing images really to be displayed in line, not necessarily even with a particular chapter, but with time markers. And I love the idea of a soundbite tag that kind of identifies to the podcast player that the publisher has said, this is like a good little preview

soundbite. If you'd like to listen to a bit from the show, I think that's awesome. I wish we've had that for years, you know, and that's just like two of a bunch of really good ideas that are in there. But it seems to me, you got to get the oh, you know, you've got 13 specs and you're going to create a unifying spec and now you just got 14 specs. And, you know, you just get all this sort of like, not hostility, but just sort of negativity around, oh, you know, here's another standard and they're going to fix everything. And then you had the chicken and egg problem of who's going to support it first, the publisher or the app. And so there's always that kind of thing. But what we found out was that it's really necessary to do some of this stuff, even if it slightly recreates the wheel in some respects. And I'll give you a perfect example, something like the funding tag. the funding tag. Now, you could do this before the podcast namespace funding tag. You could have a link to a PayPal. There's a Atom link called rel equals payment, and you could do that. And there was some support for it in apps. It was, I don't know, 50-50. But you take a thing like

that, and then how do you actually extend it? There's nowhere to go to talk to the developers. If you needed to tweak that, let's say that you're going to try to tweak something like Dublin Core, which is another popular namespace extension for RSS. That committee or working group or whoever had that, that thing's gone now. Same with Media RSS, which was part of Yahoo back a million years ago. A lot of these things that exist in RSS as namespace extensions, they have no more leadership anymore. They have no working groups. They have no place that you can go that if you wanted to modify the spec to meet a modern need,

you can't do it. Or there's nobody in charge of that thing anymore. It's failed. So what this is, is we will recreate the wheel in some respects with some of these tags, but they're modern and there's a group that now exists that's in control of it. You can go and say, hey, I think we need this extension to be tweaked a little bit, or I think we need this extra attribute on this RSS tag. And everybody talks about it, and we all come up with a solution, and it moves forward. And so one of the things that you talked about was the soundbite tag. That didn't come from us. That came from Buzzsprout, the hosting company.

They had this idea for a soundbite tag for a long time. And they popped up into the namespace one day and was like, hey, we've got this soundbite tag. We're already using it, but no apps have supported it yet. And so we were like, yeah, this looks great. Let's formalize it into an actual namespace declaration and make it happen. Same with the transcript tag. We added the transcript tag so you can just take any SRT or WebVTT or JSON-based transcript, and it's just a URL you drop it in your feed item. And you can specify, then the app can go look for the transcript and pull a timecode transcript down and give you closed captioning. So it's those types of things where sometimes we're recreating the wheel,

sometimes we're creating something new, but the real purpose of the whole thing is to have an actual group that exists in perpetuity, that's open source, that's community-led without any being dependent on any corporate backing that will forever be in charge of this spec, and it's purely for the benefit of podcasters. Finally, you know, this is my livelihood, right? I've been doing this for like 14 years. You know, I mean, I've been doing it since, you know, people were burning MP3 files to CD-ROMs to listen to my shows. So I really do appreciate it. And I know that one of the things we've needed to do is sort of fill out podcasts a little bit, give them a little bit richer of an experience.

It's kind of just been the same for a while. And I was really worried that some closed ecosystem was going to be the only way that was going to move forward and consumers would move there because of the features. But you guys are also doing some other stuff beyond just the namespace stuff. Tell me a little bit about Podping, because that seems like as podcasting gets way more successful and you have all these users with mobile apps and whatnot that are checking in on feeds, it sounds like Podping is maybe a solution that scales a little bit better here. Yeah, we've tried to in the second leg of what we're doing with protecting podcasting is decentralizing everything. So it's really important to decentralize every bit of our infrastructure so that we don't just become another single point of failure. We use IPFS extensively. We use ActivityPub everywhere we can.

And one of the things we've been doing is a lot of blockchain work. And as sysadmins, which my day job is as a sysadmin in financial services, is you hear blockchain and you roll your eyes and you're like, oh my God, here we go again. And it's like the solution without a problem. But blockchain does have a very narrow use case, which it can do that really nothing else can do. And that's where Podping comes in. And so this whole Web 3.0 world where these distributed apps are running on blockchain, we found a blockchain through a guy who's part of our group. who's part of our group, and it's called Hive, the Hive blockchain. It produces a new block every three seconds. And what we've done is created an open piece of software. It's written in Rust. And it's basically just a web front end and a blockchain Hive writer on the back end.

And it just takes an authorization token. So if you had like Jupiter Broadcasting wanted to inform the whole world every time you published a new episode or made a significant change to your feed, you could call out to Podping with your auth token and just a simple get request with the feed URL in it. And the Podping system will take that URL, write it to the Hive blockchain, and then everybody in the world can, since it's a public blockchain, can just read it with a simple Python script, and within three seconds, everybody knows, hey, this podcast has just updated, and you don't have to poll. I don't have to sit there and hammer your RSS feed 25 times an hour

to see, have you published yet? Have you published yet? Over and over. This is a decentralized blockchain-based push notification system for podcasting. So, yeah, that's what Podping is. We're pretty jazzed about it because there's been attempts to do stuff like this in the past. The most famous attempt is WebSub, which used to be called PubSubHubbub. And it works, But the problem is, it's a server-based system. So if my server is not listening all the time, I don't get your

webhook calls when you publish a new episode. The other issue with WebSub is it's subscription-based. So if I'm monitoring the podcast index, we have four and a half million podcast feeds in our database. That means I would have to have four and a half million web subscriptions that would be resubscribing every seven to 15 days. You'd spend all day just resubscribing to feeds. So this system is purely push only. There's no subscriptions. It's all just public on the blockchain. So that's one example of some of the supporting technologies that go along with the podcast index and the namespace to sort of be totally just like change everything kind of situations for advertising and podcasting. I have a good sense. I've been reading the tea leaves and there's a lot of downward pressure on the price.

Like the CPM? Yeah. And there's certain groups out there that sort of are establishing themselves as the authority on podcast advertising. They're declaring like the prices are just like bottom basement fast food prices for a podcast advertising. And so content creators, they, you know, podcasters, we get in this situation where it's like, well, then I got to just take on more sponsors and more sponsors. And you get the shows loaded up. And then you go to dynamic ad insertion and all that. Yep.

Pretty soon you start monetizing the back catalog and all that. Yep. Yep. Pretty soon you start monetizing the bat catalog and the ads are hard cut in there. And it's, it's kind of like you end up these podcasters and I've, you know, I've tempted fate with this for a little while. You end up kind of creating content to serve the sponsors, not to serve the audience. And I think that's why I really perked up when I saw that you guys have adopted and are sort of encouraging people to use a value for value model to support podcasters and you're building tools in there for that.

And quickly, like a value for value model is simply if you get value from the podcast or from the content, you give them the value you think it was worth to you, value for value. And it's something that they practice on the No Agenda Show. And it's a concept that I think is, it actually does deserve wider adoption. So what does this mean for the podcast index? How is monetizing with value for value? How does all that come together with

something that's an index for podcasts? The podcasting 2.0 movement is a little all over the map. It's a little hard to sort of pin down, but it's really sort of four parts. It's the podcast index database and the API. It's the podcast namespace. And then it's the infrastructure around it, which is things you mentioned like Podping and Helipad and the podcaster wallet and all this other code. It's all open source.

It's all in our GitHub repository. Then it's our show that we do every Friday called Podcasting 2.0. And for us, as an example, the Podcasting 2.0 show is value for value. And we're purely run on donations. We don't have any advertising. And we were sort of the first test case of this new technology that we wanted to push, which is Bitcoin Lightning streaming payments. So if anybody's not familiar with the Lightning Network on Bitcoin, what it is, is this is a so-called layer two technology. So Bitcoin blockchain is fantastic.

And we all know, you know, why it's, you know, trust no one and distributed and no double spend and all these great things. But the problem is it's slow. Transaction times are extremely slow and the fees are expensive. So these Layer 2 technologies have developed, Lightning being the best example. And so it sits on top of the blockchain and creates a peer-to-peer distributed network of nodes that are willing to lock up some funding in channels between each other. So what you end up with is a mesh network of multi-signature wallets, if that makes sense to anybody listening. You end up with a mesh network of multi-signature

wallets between nodes so that you can relay payments between nodes from end to end. So if I was going to send you, Chris, I was going to send you $20 of Bitcoin, I don't necessarily have to have a direct connection to you. I could have a connection to three other people who have a connection to you, and then that payment can be relayed through the network. It's awesome technology. And it's cheap and fast too, which is key. Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely.

The problem with Lightning was it was invoice-based. So it's like if I was going to pay you, you would have to send me an invoice for $20 and then I would scan the QR code of that invoice or plug in the text invoice number and then it would do the payment. Well, Adam, about a year ago or so, found a technology called KeySend, which is a part of the Lightning protocol, but it just wasn't super widely used. It basically just allows you to send random invoiceless payments to another

node. So if I know your node ID on the network, I can just send you 20 bucks and you can't even stop me. It's not like you can say, I don't want it, you know, you're going to get it. So this was perfect. So what we did was we took the namespace, the podcast namespace, and we put in a new tag called the value tag. And so what I can do is I can take multiple lightning nodes and put those into my RSS feed in this tag structure. And every time somebody listens to my podcast on a Podcasting 2.0 app that supports this technology, it will look at those lightning node IDs and begin to send streaming Bitcoin back to the creator. So I can fill up as a listener, if I'm using a podcast app like Castomatic or Fountain or Podfriend or Podverse or one of

these apps that support it or Breeze, I can take and load up my Bitcoin wallet on my podcast app with, you know, let's just say $20 and I can set an amount like, let's just say 50 Satoshis a minute. And then every time I hit play, it just starts streaming 50 Satoshis a minute back through the lightning network to that podcaster's lightning node. It is super cool because like one of the things that's really amazing to watch as a podcaster, and we see it every week on our show, is when people are listening, you can just look at your Lightning Node wallet and you can just see those sats coming in. They're just two sats, 20 sats, 40 sats. It's just every minute, bing,

bing, bing, you're getting paid. And you know people are listening. There's a few things I love about this, right? I mean, number one, there's no middleman. It's decentralized. There's no PayPal or Patreon or 13% fee or anything like that. And the other thing that I think is intriguing is if you do combine it with a podcast app that has some sort of wallet functionality, what is great about sending, like you're saying, like some Satoshis, which is just a part of a Bitcoin, to a podcaster is that is likely going to be something that over time will appreciate in value. So you're giving a really small donation. Maybe it equals $50 over a year, right? But if that podcaster were to hold on to those Satoshis for five years, it could be worth 100% more than it was at the

time you gave it to them, possibly. Yeah, 100%. If Bitcoin continues to trend in the direction it has trended over the last decade. And so it's actually giving the podcaster not only a form of payment that allows them to bypass advertisers, but it's actually giving them something that may pay dividends down the road that they could reinvest in their business and keep the content creation going. And it's all done just by following some namespace standards and then the Bitcoin standard. I think that's a, it's a brilliant system. And one of the things you guys have done at the podcast index.org website is you've highlighted some of the value for value podcasts there. And it seems

like it's a range. How much activity are you actually seeing? Do you know? Do you get any kind of idea of that? So what we do is we take a 1% fee on anything that uses our API. And that way we can sort of gauge kind of what's going on. But the technology itself, it's all just RSS. It's open source.

So there's people out there doing this that don't involve us at all so we can't really have visibility into that you know but the stuff we do have visibility in which is that if a podcast app uses us as their back end and we put that that fee on there that is something we can sort of kind of calculate and what the best we can come up with is there's about a million sats a day flowing through the podcast lightning landscape. So I feel pretty comfortable with that number. That's also based on what we see. So, you know, you mentioned that

people are sending small payments and the per minute streaming stuff is small, but there's also this option called a boost. And so if you're listening, most of these podcasting 2.0 apps have a boost button. And so you hit the boost and it says, Hey, how many sats do you want to send? And it gives you a place to type in a message. And so since the lightning network can also also have a payload. It can have arbitrary payloads with it. We include a JSON message format in there with it. This is all part of the spec. It's in the open source namespace docs. I can be listening to your show.

I can be listening to Coda Radio, and I can send you a boost, and I can, you know, hey, guys, this show was this this episode was awesome. And you get those sats, those satoshis. And you also see my message, you know, and my name if I choose to show it to you in the sender. It's just like PayPal or Patreon or buy me a coffee. But there's no middlemen. And also, even though the streaming sats per minute are small, we've had boosts on our show. We had one a few weeks ago that was 500,000 sats. That's like 250 bucks.

This is not chump change, really. You know, people can send large amounts of money and it works. We've had a 500,000 sat donation. We've had a 300,000, a 200,000 and a couple of000, a 200,000, and a couple of 100,000s. I mean, it's legit money coming through the system. And like I said, this is all open spec. So you don't even need us or the podcast index or any of this stuff to make all this work. You just stick this stuff in your feed and you're off to the races.

Yeah. And even if it's not, you know, that messing around with Bitcoin, I don't want any Bitcoin. It might not be for everybody, but it doesn't need to be because even with, you know, some adoption now, it'll continue to grow out. The feature set will get better. It'll get easier to use. It'll become more commonplace. And then if we got in a scenario where, you know, it was the best way to fund somebody, all of the plumbing has been done. So I think that's pretty interesting.

I want to talk a little bit about the fundamentals. So there is some money coming in with maybe some of the transactions if they use the API, which I'm assuming goes into how to fund the infrastructure and all of that. So there must be a small business behind this for the tax and all the stuff you have to do

for being a business, right? Yeah, we decided not to be a nonprofit just because a lot of that stuff's kind of gross. Yeah, and a lot of work too. Yeah, yeah, the 501c3 landscape is just a dumpster fire. So we were like, hey, you know, we need something to fund this and we're going to have to have a, you know, a business because we're all hosted at Linode. So we were like, you know, we're going to have to pay bills and all this. We have an LLC between me and Adam and another guy who does our bookkeeping and back end stuff. Mostly, it's really just 20 servers running at Linode and a whole bunch of elbow grease and manpower over the last couple of years, you know, year and a half or so to make it

work. Oh man. Are you managing all those 20 boxes? Is that your job? Yeah. Wow. Is this a full-time thing for you? No, no, this is no, we don't make any money really. We, we make just enough money in income right now to pay the hosting fees and pay our taxes. That's about it. Yeah. That was our goal for the Lightning stuff, for the Bitcoin stuff, was to, the reason that 1% fee is there is so that we can hopefully fund the index in perpetuity without having to ever charge for API access and that kind of thing.

That's really the goal. And as long as that happens, you know, I'm happy because it's about bigger things than, than money. If the API docs are any indication of the actual quality of the API, it is probably worth some money. I mean, these, this is some impressive work, just documenting all of this. This is some serious stuff that developers can use to actually build their app. That is part of the value for value model. You know, the value for value model is not just about money. Adam always, he said, he says it preacher style. He says time, talent, and treasure. And so it really is about that. So the documentation for the API, I wrote all the API, but then the documentation for it

came from a guy named Steven Crater in the podcasting 2.0 Mastodon group. And he just popped up and he's like, Hey, I do this for a living. I'm really good with docs. I'll do it. And so he just jumped on the GitHub, did the documentation repo, put it all into a nice dynamic con format. I never did any of that. He spent hours putting it all together and that's all work that I didn't have to do. And man, that is every bit as valuable as money. Every bit. That's an idea. the open source community can wrap their heads around too, which is what I like so much about. This really feels like the open source community's solution to solving the centralized podcasting problem.

And man, am I just so happy to see you guys doing well. Thank you. I made sure this morning I went through and looked like, okay, all of our shows are published. One I think I hadn't submitted yet because I'm an idiot. So I made sure I got that submitted through and looked like, okay, all of our shows are published. One I think I hadn't submitted yet because I'm an idiot. So I made sure I got that submitted. And I could tell you guys are putting a lot of work into it because we just recently launched a network membership donation option. And there was a link for Linux Unplugged to go to that. Yeah, one thing I was looking at in your shows, and this is a reference to the namespace, is one of our namespace tags is the alternate enclosure tag. And that's a fairly new tag. We do this in phases. So the namespace, we take submissions for tag suggestions,

and then we hash it out for a few, you know, two, three months, and then make some decisions and then finalize a portion of those proposals. And so we go through these phases. In the phase three, namespace was the most recent one that was fully closed. And the alternate enclosure tag is a way to specify multiple enclosures in a single episode in a way that you can reference different delivery technologies and different formats. So if I had a podcast that had an AugVorbus format, a video feed, an MP3 feed, and something else, you could, instead of having four separate RSS feeds for that, you can have one feed. And then for each episode, you just reference each different item. And so from an app's perspective, the app can see, okay, this thing has four separate possible enclosures in it. And,

oh, the user, the listener wants to see the video. Okay. Well, I'll switch video on. Oh, now they want low bandwidth because they're going through a congestion area. Okay. I'll switch over to the, to the AU aug format. And it sort of, it allows it to do intelligent auto changing to the listeners, what their listener wants without having to have literally four separate feeds and publish all those separate feeds and have the listener keep track of them all. That's one example of what, you know, we're doing that applies to even something like you, because I noticed you had a lot of different format feeds. Yeah, a lot of legacy feeds too. So you must also then have to be reaching out to a lot of the podcast platforms because there's a few of them

now, like Fireside, like the one we use, and try to get those different platforms to add support for these namespace features. Are you all on Dan Benjamin's Fireside? Yeah. Yeah, Dan was an early adopter of the namespace and he's got a few of those things in there. He's got, I think, chapters, person. Seasons. He has a good amount of them, yeah. The technology part is only half the battle. You can write all the specs in the world, but then you have to go and evangelize them and let people know and then show them code, give them example code, talk to developers. And I think this is where a lot of open source projects fail, perhaps, is that they're so focused on the tech that they forget to do the evangelism part. And, you know, just build it and they will come is not true.

That's not how this stuff works. You have to build it and then you have to go to conferences and then you have to talk to people and you have to build relationships with podcasting hosts and app developers. It's a lot of work. The tech and the writing code is really probably less than half of what it takes to get a successful project going. Well, I do appreciate you doing some of that legwork because I look at this and I think I can't get apps and platforms to adopt this stuff fast enough. And I know that Apple and Spotify and probably Google and YouTube, they're going to be the last to adopt some of this stuff fast enough. And I know that Apple and Spotify and probably Google and YouTube,

they're going to be, they're going to be the last to adopt some of this stuff, I would think. But, you know, the nice thing about our audience is they're technical. They can go find an app that does support this stuff. Do you have a favorite podcast app right now that supports some of these features? I use them all. I literally do use them all. I've got 10 podcast apps on my phone because every time one of the developers in our group, you know, comes up with a new app or something new, I just, I go, I listen to podcasts in probably four different apps a day. And I like them all for different reasons. They all have different feature sets. And one thing about that whole idea of, and we hear this a lot is, well,, unless Apple and Spotify support it, we're not going to spend any time developing it.

You know, you hear that a lot, but what we have to remind people, and we've been successful with reminding people about this in the podcasting world, is that that is just simply giving your power away willingly. The independent podcast ecosystem collectively is much bigger than those platforms. Even if those platforms represent 50% of the market or 40% of the market, you've got 50 to 60% of the decentralized podcast market over here on the other side. And we can move and innovate much faster than those guys can. I mean, look at the podcast namespace, really. In the last year, we have formalized like 15 new feature tags within RSS. And in that same time frame, Spotify has given us what exactly? More dynamic ads? Yeah, streaming ad insertion.

Like, that's what I'm saying. In order, we went into this thinking, okay, the siloed companies, the walled gardens, they're going to move super fast and they're going to innovate quick. And we have to innovate fast enough to keep track, to keep pace with them, keep feature parity. And what we find out really quickly was that's actually not true. We pass them with the foot down to the floorboard. I mean, they move so slow because everything they do is about shareholder returns and money,

and they cannot innovate as fast as a group of dedicated open source community members can. They're good coders. We can beat them all day long. And we have. And so the typical podcasting 2.0 app, and there's a big list of them. If you go to podcastindex.org slash apps, there's a big list of all of them. A podcasting 2.0 app blows Spotify out of the water with the feature set that it has. And that's all just community built. And most of those apps

are not profitable. They're not apps that are where the developer is making a living doing it. They're apps that are just passion projects. And one of the, Castomatic is a perfect example. It's a really great iOS app. And the developer of that app is a physician in Italy. His day job is as a doctor. And he just works on this thing part-time. And it is a high-quality, feature-rich app. And, I mean, Spotify, last I checked, they don't even have chapters.

I know. That's what I'm saying. I mean, we, we, the, it shows this project more than anything else I've ever been involved in shows the power of a nimble, talented open source community. Yeah. It couldn't be coming along at a better time either. So Dave, thank you for your work. Thank you to the pod father and your whole team over there. I know it's not a big team.

So like sending a lot of good vibes your guys' way because I hope it grows, actually. I hope this becomes a thing and really takes off, and I hope to see more and more apps and platforms support it too. Stay in touch because I'm on board, man. Actually, I want to know how to become a Podcast Index premier network. How do I go all in? So maybe we'll chat more. You get the badge, the Podcasting 2.0 certified badge, man. We go all in? So maybe we'll chat more. Yeah, you get the badge,

the Podcasting 2.0 Certified Badge, man. We've even got one. There you go. Okay. Thanks, Dave. All right. Thanks, Chris. Just a real quick housekeeping

because we're getting long. Brent, we're going long, but that was just, I just really enjoyed that chat with Dave. There's a lot to it. So we'll get, we'll do a little follow-up. But first I wanted to mention

we're doing one last run of the Rando swag bags. They've got the journal option and the non-journal option. We're just going to do it for a little bit longer. So that's at jupitergarage.com. Also, thank you to our members. This is right here, a single sponsor episode. So the members are really what's keeping the show going, keeping the production going, all of that. Our community information, like our matrix, our telegram, our contact information, all of that is at LinuxHomePlug.com. And last but not least, come join us on a Sunday now. The show is moved over to Sundays. We fire up the stream around noon 30 Pacific time over at JBLive.TV.

All right, so I'm opening it up now to the virtual lug as we chat about this. In the show notes today, I'll have some links to the podcast index, including those new podcasting apps that Dave was chatting about. But you know, as I was talking to him, what just kept looping in the back of my mind is like,

this has got to be a way where we can help free software developers monetize some of their work this lightning network solution seems like a great way to solve one of free software's most common problems i mean we just saw it with the log for jay vulnerability a couple of developers working for over a decade never made a dime on something that propped up tons of industry it just and it happened with basically every major vulnerability we heard about last year. It all came down to, oh yeah, a couple of developers and they never made a buck. Like it seems like maybe with something like the lightning network where you could send a Satoshi

can be less than a penny. I mean, there are these things, I have a link in the show notes. If you never heard this term sat or Satoshi and you're like, well, a thousand sats, that sounds like a lot. It's, it's not they're they're uh i think it's something like you can divide a bitcoin a hundred million times down and that's what a satoshi is and so you know you're talking you could send 25 cents but if maybe log4j has 10 000 people send them 25 cents all of a sudden that matters what was really interesting to me in the podcasting iteration of this was that like ticking counter of getting Satoshis in as you're listening. And I think there's really something to that.

I don't know how it translates to open source software projects. We did, I think, touch on this slightly last week. Yeah, yeah. It's something that's been coming up more and more, I think, because of Log4J. It's just been on our minds. Well, I think it's been on our minds for years. Yeah. But we've never really had a true potential solution for it. And what seems unique here is, so the Lightning Network,

the white paper was published in February of 2015, but adoption has been slow until really about this year. In combination, because Jack Dorsey started upping it on Twitter and with his new company, but also because El Salvador did like a pilot, Bitcoin pilot, and the Lightning Network worked so well for them that they've now adopted Bitcoin as a currency in El Salvador. That really put a big focus on the Lightning Network and it's really kind of exploded. And it's all open source code. It's all free software. So you've kind of got this decentralized network

that's been built out that allows for super efficient, quick, stupid cheap payments and the entire stack is free software. And it's all auditable because it's on a public ledger. So you can contribute to a free software project and anyone in the world that has access to the internet can audit that.

This sounds almost like exactly what we've been hoping for for a long time. It's like so many different ideals that I've had festering in my own little brain all coming together. And I got to say, you've been really mentoring me in some of these concepts this last week or two since I've been at the studio. And gosh, am I ever excited about it. I got to say, like, I didn't quite have I didn't quite do a dive into it previously. But I think this is this podcasting index might be a really nice way for many of us to just get our feet wet a little bit and start to get interested in the concepts and dive a little bit more into how even blockchains could solve real problems without the hype right without all of like the it's going to take over the world and be a new web right it's just like well this is a thing that works practically and if you apply it in the right application just like every other technology

we talk about on the show like butter fs like like containers. It's like, yeah, there's absolutely a use case for that in some workloads. The Podping software they talk about, that's using the Hive blockchain, which is essentially just a decentralized JSON message bus. It's like Dbus for the internet, simpler, obviously. And so the idea is, is that the podcast client just checks that Hive blockchain, which is a super low energy, efficient blockchain that solves the idea of how do you create a consumable message bus for the Internet? What really struck me in that conversation or that bit of the conversation was the efficiency of it. So it seems like, OK, we're doing things a certain way with the Internet right now and then like querying servers over and over and over to see if there's a new podcast episode. It seems like if we can make the internet much more efficient, it does tackle some of these things that we've been worried about, like energy usage of the internet as a whole,

or some of these cryptocurrencies, et cetera, et cetera. Yeah. Boy, we can make a whole episode out of the energy usage thing. So what I'll do is I'll put a link to the University of Cambridge's Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index. It's a real-time index that they update of Bitcoin's power usage and gives it to you in perspective of household consumption and industry consumption. And they try to track all of the different metrics, including where the mining is happening and all of that. So you kind of have an idea of what types of power sources are powering that mining. And it's probably not perfect, guys, because like it's a decentralized, anonymized network. It's pretty hard to like get really good numbers, but Cambridge is doing their best.

And I think when we throw around terms like planet incinerating, we should probably try to put it in perspective, you know, put in perspective of things like machine learning. How much electricity does machine learning take? How much electricity does Twitch video game streaming, the entire Twitch network of everybody ramping up their GPUs and streaming it to everybody whose GPUs are decoding it? How much energy use does that take? And does a decentralized, open source, currency built for the internet with no borders so anyone in the world can send money to anyone else in the world that's totally backed by cryptography what is the value of that what is the value of sound money so i have a link in the show notes because i think

when we're talking about energy use of these different blockchain technologies and there are several kinds bitcoin is a proof of work but there are many proof of stake, which use much less or maybe very little energy usage, depending. So all of that's in there. It's worth taking a look at just to have that conversation with people. Because I think, you know, it's an important conversation. And so actually having the data and keeping in mind there's a lot of things in technology we do that use quite a bit of power. Right now we're recording a podcast and the CPUs are burning on all these machines in here. How many computers are just near us right now?

Right. We don't really think about it. Or how much power would it take if you bought a Tesla and you started charging it every night? And how much power does it take if your significant other also has an electric car and you're charging both of those every night? Is that worth it? How much power does it take to use Google Photos? Sure. And in the case of Bitcoin, there's the economics that make mining actually more profitable the cheaper your energy access is. So I think it's all changing too. Like what we consider today as energy use and how it's used could be completely different in five years as the economics of Bitcoin mining drive people to use renewables. That, I think, is a conversation for a different show, but it all can be practical implementations. It doesn't have to be hype.

It doesn't have to be like this huge overthrow the system kind of technology. It's not an all-sum game here because you can see with the podcast index, you're using these things in a very rational, very unique way. And I took from that chat with Dave that I think the free software community needs to rethink some of this stuff. Like the way we reacted to Mozilla, does that make sense? Because what we're really talking about is the alternative is something that's controlled by banks that are not necessarily accessible to everyone who wants to participate in free software. Kind of the status quo. And that's not very exciting, is it? Right. When we're in the West, this is something that's hard to really keep in mind. But in the Western countries, we've you know, we've had a good, stable,

reliable state currency for a long time. But that is not true for everywhere else in the world. And they also don't necessarily get access to our banking system because of the volatility of their country's economy. And so they're really cut off in a lot of major ways. And they want to participate too, right? And they should be able to get paid as well for their work. They deserve that. When we're talking about these things and we're talking about their energy usage and what their practical use could be and how they don't do anything new, I know it sounds funny and I don't love saying it, but we have to consider we may be sitting from a position of privilege if we live in a Western country where we've never really had to worry about these things yet. And I think free software could benefit from this technology.

It's weird because the free software community has sort of feels like it's just kind of become about cloud and Linux and not about all the other free software that's out there. That other people like we are shunning some technology now and declaring other technologies allowed. And we're doing it by Twitter outrage, like what just happened with Mozilla. Mozilla reminded people they accept Bitcoin and Doge and the community freaked out. Original contributors to Mozilla and Gecko lit them on fire for incinerating

the planet. And all of those people are sitting from a position of wealth and privilege, but they don't even see it. And I think when we talk about the energy consumption, we have to consider that for some people, they don't have sound money. And we might not always have sound money. Things can change. Disasters can happen. History can be made. And you can also see the practical content creators getting paid is going to lead to better content. It's going to lead to more accurate content when it's funded by the audience. That serves everyone that produces the show and that listens to the show. It takes it away from like Spotify or Squarespace and it puts it directly between the audience and the creator with no one in between. No PayPal, no Patreon, no 5-10% grift.

And it's all on a free software system from top to bottom. From the software you can receive the currency in to send to the network. And it's available to anyone in the world. Doesn't matter what political party, what country line. If you can get access to the Tor network, if you can get access to a VPN, if you can get IP routing, you can get paid. Then I know we've all heard the stories about the protesters in China who got shut out of the banking system just recently. And then they use the lightning network to raise funds.

And they funded their anti-government protests with Bitcoin after being shut out by the Chinese financial system, even with China's control over the internet. And there's a hundred stories of that every day. And then you see this technology, how it could help something like the podcast landscape, which could even be applied to a video platform. You could take all of the concepts they have with the podcast index and the monetizing and the namespace for the RSS feed. And you could build an amazing peer tube community around that. And because it's open source and it's an open spec and they have amazing documentation and tons of sample code

and open source apps that have already implemented this, it's all there for us to take it. But I think our own prejudice about a technology that we don't understand is preventing us as a community from adopting this. And I said it on the live stream and I'll say it in the show, this is preventing us as a community from adopting this. And I said it on the live stream and I'll say it in the show, this is a result of a failure of leadership by the Free Software Foundation. They should be pioneering a open source free software payment system to fund

free software development. But they're old and they're out of touch and they're too busy licking their own wounds. And there's no other leadership in the community because the Linux Foundation essentially is the centralization of everything else. And they don't have any reason to change this. They like the way the payment system works. They hire the developers they want. They get paid to write the code they need. It's a great system for them. Oh, somebody got left out.

We'll create a brand new foundation. We'll make sure everything's taken care of for them. Problem solved. Problem solved. No other problems out there. We did it. We fixed it, everybody. Didn't we do good? Look at our report. Look at this PDF. Look how good we did. That's the alternative. But because no one is in our community in a position of leadership championing these ideas, typical human prejudice have prevented us from adopting this. And so things like Log4J will just keep happening over

and over and over again. And in part, it's our own fault because free software has become about Linux and the cloud and not everything else out there. And when you shut down new things because, you know, somebody's grifting with an NFT, you're participating in the same kind of thought process and suppression that led to Linux FUD. It's just a new generation of FUD. So I hope things like the Podcast Index get adopted by at least parts of this. Some of it's podcast-specific. I acknowledge that. But wouldn't it be great if some parts got adopted by a project that we all know and love?

And we could help those developers live a comfortable life just doing free software full-time. You caught it there in the interview, Brent. Like, Dave Jones is helping build this entire decentralized podcast index, which is the only alternative to Apple, Spotify, and YouTube, and Google. The only thing out there that's legitimate and large enough and has any adoption and has apps that are supporting it, and he's doing it as a part-time job. And the funds coming in are only paying for their taxes and their 20 linodes and that's it and podcasting is an entire industry now and we're just doing it over we did we do we did it to free software

developers it's happening to the podcast ecosystem it's because these ginormous rich organizations or foundations can distort reality and make everyone expect to get everything for free. And when it's not easy and when it's something new, that's gross. What do you mean they don't accept PayPal? What do you mean they don't? No, I'm not doing that until it's inevitable and it's been rolled out everywhere. And then everybody will just pretend like it was obvious all along and nobody will own the fact that they were essentially blocking the adoption. So that's the end of my rant. But I thought it was a really thought provoking conversation with Dave.

So thank you to Dave and all the work that's happening over the podcast index. You know what we'll do is we'll put a couple of links in the show notes. I tried out Fountain and I just got I just got another one, too. I just downloaded Castomatic, but I haven't tried it yet. But I tried out Fountain, which is available for iOS and for the Android. And it took me like, I don't know, like a half hour to get my signup email.

I don't know what that's about. But once I'm in, it's great, man. I really like this. You can import from Spotify, which is interesting. Oh, that's nice. Yeah, this is Fountain. So if you just want to get off Spotify and try something else, you don't have to give it up. You could try it and it'll import it, but it'll also import from Apple Podcasts on iOS and it'll search the podcast directory. So I toyed around with like the lightning support. I think I have it turned on. I'm I have so much to learn about the lightning network stuff still, but I love the idea and I feel like I want to try to validate it here

somehow once I figure it all out and then I want to become an advocate to monetize free software development with it and I don't mean like

monetize in a bad way I mean make it possible for these developers not to live on the edge of burnout and okay okay I'm sorry I'm going to just

one last point I'm so sorry you guys but Brent can attest this has been eating me alive, hasn't it? Only for about a week. I want to give Colonel a chance to jump in. Colonel, you had a few thoughts on the Lightning Network. This is like an area I'm pretty new on, so I'd love any insights you have.

Right. So it was actually less of the Lightning Network, but almost adapting what they're doing for the podcasts into funding some of these core technologies that are being developed by people in their spare time. So maybe instead of having a paper, you know, while you're listening, maybe it's every time somebody does a poll against that repository, they, you know, can send a few Satoshis or, you know, something like that. So it's, again, it's, you know, value for value, but it's based upon people using that software. There's so many ways you could do this, really. It could be as dumb as a GNOME extension that you put the name of a process in and say, every time I'm running this process and, you know, five Satoshis to a free software developer.

It could be as simple as that. It could be something, you know, like the popularity packages in Debian that look at what you have installed and what you use most often and it could give you an output and then you could have a choice. Maybe it's a little GTK app and you click a few buttons

and, you know, you send it off and of course, it's written in Rust. They're all written in Rust, right? Don't you think?

It almost has to be, I guess. All right, we'll just leave it. we'll leave it at this i i could really go on and on about it just what really gets me is i talked to so many of these developers as part of doing the show and like so many of them are are really on the edge of burnout like they they exist the entire time they're doing this anytime anything gets any kind of traction in this state of perpetual burnout and tied by obligations between family and work and their community and free software.

And it can be a really strong pull. And it, A, is a fragile dynamic. And B, you know, it makes a person old and they can't do it forever. you know it makes a person old and they can't do it forever and when you have to juggle feeding your family and paying your bills and also fulfilling your commitments to the free software community it can be really really difficult and a lot of these developers are just one nasty comment or divorce or marriage or car accident away from abandoning their project. And the ability to solve this in a super efficient way that uses free software through and through with no middleman has existed since 2015.

But bigotry and honestly misinformation and uninformed opinion about potential planet-incinerating power use has led to a block of adoption. And that's why I get so worked up about this because some of the things that we use on a daily basis are just on the precipice of going away because they can't figure out a way to make money

and balance their life. So that's why it matters a lot to me. But I feel optimistic that this stuff lays the groundwork for us to solve the problem. The technology is there, it's sound, it's safe, and it's being used by millions of people on a daily basis, some of which are just using it to buy bread in a market somewhere, and some of which people are using it

to fund content creators or invoicing for a banana. I mean, it's a huge range. And it is happening. It just is going to require a mindset change and adoption and looking past things like ape NFTs that are silly. It's just going to take a little time. But I hope that maybe we're taking the first step with this episode because I think it can make a big difference.

And it's something I'd love to know more about. I'm still learning. So let us know what you think at linuxunplugged.com contact. Don't forget, we do have that LUP plug. We're getting together on Sundays and Tuesdays now at noon Pacific. And don't miss Linux Action News. Now at a new prime time for the news, busting it out towards the end of the week

with all the stuff that happened with Wes Payne and myself. Brent, thanks for sitting in Wes's seat. Oh, yeah. He's got some nice butt grooves in this thing. It's real nice. I know it. He's worked it, you know. He works it.

Every time he sits there, you can just see him. You can tell because he sits there and he bites his lip while he does it. So you know he's working it. That's how you know. Links to a lot of what we talked about today at linuxunplugged.com slash 440. We'd love to have you go through there, peruse it, learn a little something today, including that power usage from Cambridge, and more information like Podcast Index and some great apps.

And you can actually use the podcastindex.org itself as a podcast player. That's interesting. Yeah, they've got a player just built right in. Of course they do. If you want a web player, that's pretty awesome. And we have, I think, I think we have the Lightning Network set up for Linux Unplugged now. It's a bit of an experiment. Test the waters, if you will.

Thanks so much for joining us on this week's episode of the Unplugged program. And we'll see you right back here next Sunday. All right. We need a title. We got to title this thing. We got to title this thing. We got to get it out there and let people know about the good things coming to the world of podcasting. So everybody head on over to jbtitles.com. jbtitles.com.

And get your boat in. Come on now, y'all. Come on in. Did we get any ideas in the chat room for our new toy? I didn't see any scroll by. So for those of you who joined us a little bit into the show, we got a little piece of hardware that came into the studio that we assembled ourselves called the Clockwork Pi. And we talked about in the pre-show, so I figured we'd end with the post-show with it, with a little bit of info. So like Brent said, it has Armbian. The display is running at 480 by 1280. So it's a real wide and narrow display.

Which I think for gameplay, because it has these gameplay buttons, I think might be actually really interesting. Maybe. I don't know. The games I'd be playing, it'll all be a four by three Super Nintendo game. It's got two gigs of RAM in there,

three USB-A ports like you alluded to, a USB-C and a micro HDMI. Not to mention a thermal printer. Well, yeah, of course. But the nice thing about this, I think, is that there's an opportunity for a lot of expansion. I know when I was putting the thing together, there's a whole lot of expansion.

What do you call those? Connectors and things? Modules, sure. Sure. So there's a lot of possibility. I know they have a game-specific add-on to it. The name of it is passing me now, but I think there's a lot of opportunity here.

I think it's just that we've run out of ideas for what to do with it. Oh, Dan, you've got an updated version with more RAM? Oh, we just got this. Tell me about it. Yeah, well, it's about the same device, except it is just a little more powerful. That sounds exactly the kind of thing I like.