The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source - Long live RSS! (Interview)

Episode Date: July 29, 2022

This week we're joined again by Ben Ubois and we're talking about RSS. Yes, RSS...the tech that never seems to die and yet so many of us rely on it daily. Ben is the creator of Feedbin, which is self-described as "a nice place to read on the web." Ben is also the maker of a new app on iOS for people who like podcasts. It's called Airshow and you can download it at airshow.fm. Ben catches us up on the state of Feedbin, we discuss the nine lives of RSS and its foundational utility for the indie web, the possibilities and short-comings of RSS, we get deep in the weeds on the Podcast 2.0 spec and the work being done on ``, and Ben also shares the details on his new app called Airshow.

Hey friends, this is Adam Stachowiak and you are listening to The Changelog, deep conversations with the hackers, the leaders, and the innovators of the software world. On today's show, we're talking with Ben Uboys about RSS, yes, RSS, the tech that never seems to die, and yet so many of us rely on it daily. Ben is the creator of FeedBin, which is self-described as a nice place to read on the web. Jared and I are both users. Ben is also the maker of a new iOS app for people who like podcasts. It's called Airshow, and you can download it at airshow.fm.

We catch up with Ben on the state of FeedBin. We discuss the nine lives of rss and its foundational utility for the indie web the possibilities and the shortcomings of rss we get deep in the weeds on the podcast 2.0 spec and the work being done on podcast chapters and of course we cover ben's new app airshow for a plus plus subscriber stick around we have a bonus 20 minutes after the show for you. If you haven't yet, check out ChangeLaw Plus Plus. That is our membership. Check it out at changelaw.com slash plus plus. Big thanks to our friends and partners at Fastly. Our pods are fast

to download globally because Fastly is fast globally. Check them out at Fastly.com. This episode is brought to you by our friends at Square. Develop on the platform that sellers trust. Support Square sellers by building apps for today's business needs. As a Square app partner, you can reach millions of business owners searching for trusted software solutions as a square solutions partner you can get hired by sellers on the square platform find new clients and build apps that meet their needs square love developers they work hard to enable you to launch fast with their developer tools you get a full sandbox environment an interactive api explorer live event monitoring back-end s for PHP, Ruby, Java,.NET, Python, and Node.

You get secure payment SDKs for iOS, Android, React Native, and Flutter. You get it all. Learn more and get started at changelog.com. Again, changelog.com slash square. Oh, we have Ben Ubois back, the creator of FeedbinBen. February 17th, 2017 was the last time we talked. What's up, man? Yeah, it's been a long time, and I think a lot of things have happened since then. It's good to be back, though.

Thanks for inviting me. It's good to be back though. Thanks for inviting me. It's good to see you. For the first time. For the first time. Yeah. Back then we were Skype audio only. Now we have full video. We get to see each other's faces

and it's kind of weird getting to know somebody in depth for a couple of hours and having like deep conversations about their work, their life, their life, their thoughts. And then I think you and I emailed back and forth once when Feedbin wasn't working like I wanted it to. And it ended up being my mistake. I think I had malformed. I remember that. Malformed XML going on. And I was like, Ben, why is your thing broken? And he's like, actually, your thing is broken. And he was right. But it then like you know years go by and we haven't talked so great to catch up but just a weird phenomena i guess of podcasting era of life i would say that's a podcasting thing because we

talk to people a lot and then we don't talk to them again for potentially a year or more in this case yeah but new long-time listeners will know that we've recently have begun to say for B-backs like Ben, you know, we call them B-backs, people come back to the show. Like Schwarzenegger, I'll be back. This is the first time we've seen you.

You know, so this is a new thing I'd say over the last two years. So new long-time listeners over the last two years will now hear us say this here and there during our show where, hey, Ben, this is the first time

we've actually seen you, but we have talked to you before. Yeah. Well, we can talk about new stuff, you know. We don't have to rehash anything. Well, we're going to talk about RSS, so we can't avoid that, right? I mean, we were talking about RSS last time. RSS is boring. We could gloss over that.

They say that. It doesn't seem that's the case, though. I heard that it's dead, actually. So, like, we should just let it go. It's definitely dead. How many deaths has it died is the question. I mean, you had the one big death, which was when Google Reader broke or shut down. That was, like, RSS's biggest death.

Yeah. But that was, like, when Feedbin started, right? Around the same time frame. So, like, that was, for you, that was kind of like birth. A rebirth, yeah. Well, just to be clear too, the last show we did with Ben, the first and last, like I guess most recent and first,

had RSS resurgence in the title. So is it a re-resurgence? I'm not really sure. Or we're just here to talk about it again. Again. We'll find out. Well, let's talk a little bit about Feedbin. So we had you on the show to talk about Feedbin. Again. We'll find out. Well, let's talk a little bit about Feedbin. So we had you on the show talking about Feedbin last time.

We're talking about RSS. Longtime Feedbin subscribers. I'm a longtime Feedbin user. Still am. So five years. I'm a subscriber, less of a user. I'm like a daily user, which is an in-browser, also API style, paid for service that is an RSS reader. I'm sure you can describe it better than I am. I use it with an app on my phone, which is not built by you. I think I still

use the reader. Yeah, reader with two E's. That's a good one. To connect to Feedbin. And then I use a browser tab, you know, just get a little bookmark, open up Feedbin, read my feeds, and have been doing that happily ever since. Adam also signed up, I think probably around that same time because we convinced him, check out Feedbin. Yeah. But Adam, you don't use it. Well, I pay for it. You pay for it, but you don't use it.

I was going to say, you know, as long as you're still sending a check. Literally since 2017, I've paid 30 bucks a year for it. So. Right. So you're still paying him, but you don't use it. So I guess we can do a little bit of a yin and yang here. We have a daily user and a non-user. And I guess part of this conversation around RSS is like, why do certain people love it, but most people don't use it still to this day? What are the problems with it as a technology?

Where does it thrive? Where is it continuing to thrive or starting to now? And some of this, I mean, we have now Feedbin authors. We have a creator of an RSS reader service slash app. We have users of that app. One person who uses it faithfully. And the other one who's kind of fallen off, which happens

from time to time with software. It's like, well, let's psychoanalyze Adam. Why do you not use Feedbin now that Ben and I have you cornered? Well, I shared some of this with you, Jared, in terms of the pre-call for this. And I think it's because my feeds are overwhelming. It's not even Ben's fault. It's not the application's performance fault. In fact, Feedbin is amazingly fast.

I cannot believe how fast this thing is. Like, it's just so fast. I mean, fast. Is it fast? So it's not even Ben's fault or Feedbin's fault. I think it's just the fact that, you know, RSS is, even though I is it fast so it's not even ben's fault or phoebe's fault i think it's just the fact that you know rss is even though i like it and love it and you know as you know jared our livelihood is dependent upon the fact that an mb3 gets delivered on the internet via an rss feed

right right despite my love for it i still can't find a way to like truly you know reap the benefits i suppose and i would say that's an aggregation issue like what should i follow right because i'm following things that are overwhelming axios you know and crunch based news and i'm just pulling some out there daring fireballs in there forbes innovation so not forbes at large but forms innovation so like what's happening in tech right hacker news some stuff from Indeed's engineering blog. Kotki, I think that's just in there by happenstance. The Mozilla blog.

Kotki, he's done. Is it? See, I didn't even know that. Jeez. Taking a break. He's taking a break. I'm still subscribed as well. I hope he comes back at some point.

He's on hiatus. Right. Indefinite hiatus at this point. We'll see what happens. The GitHub blog, the loop, the new stack. A couple individuals like Marco Armand and Matt Mullenweg and Matt Rickard is in my list. Which we'll talk about as well.

CSS Tricks, we're going to have Chris on here shortly for the legacy of CSS Tricks. Yep. But like, I think the things I pay attention to are not a lot of signal in terms of like it's a lot of noise. Right. It's good publications. I'm not saying these are bad publications by saying they're nice, but it's a lot of information more than I can keep up with.

So I abandoned probably similar to the people who subscribe to podcasts. They get too many in their feed. They like, ah, right. And the same phenomenon happens there as well. I think that's really common. The getting overwhelmed thing. I hear that a lot. And I mean, you're saying it's not even fault. It's not even fault. Yeah. But I don't know. I mean, there could be something in there to like nudge you in a direction or something. Right.

Like I personally don't like that because I want to stay away from like an algorithmic timeline or, you know, suggested content or that sort of thing. But, you know, I do think that's kind of the thing that a lot of the newer services are trying to address, like Facebook or Twitter, by just showing you what they think is going to keep you engaged. Right. But like, I mean, my suggestion, I was just talking to a friend about this the other day, is like, just start with like the really infrequently updated stuff. Like, honestly, you don't need to subscribe to anything that does news as its business because it's going to be instantly overwhelming. Yeah. And that's a perfect thing to just, there's going to be new stuff every day. You can always just go to their homepage and when you feel like it and see what's new.

But the people that post once a week or once a month, that's like a sweet spot for RSS. And now that I think about it, there is a feature that could help you in Feedbin. You could go to your subscriptions page, could sort by post volume, and then just unsubscribe from the top 50%. Cut your list in half, like, just, you know, immediately. Should I tell who's on the Chalk Block? Yeah. I mean, I already know it's Hacker News. Yeah.

Forbes. I don't have Hacker News on my list. Okay. I thought you said it was. Hacker Noon. Sorry, if you heard Hacker Noon. Oh, Hacker Noon. Okay, okay. Hacker Noon. That's different. The Vergeon. Oh, Hacker Noon. The Verge is in there.

Axios is in there. Wired's in there. The new stack. Free Code Camp, come on. Can't let Free Code Camp go away. So let me just first add my amen to what Ben is saying. I also use it in that fashion. I've told you this, Adam. It's kind of a you're holding it wrong problem,

which is common. One that I learned by experience is when I had Hacker News in there, when I had The Verge in there, I would just quickly get overwhelmed by how many times they post. I did what Ben is describing. I kind of did it ad hoc

as I got. I'm like, I'm so sick of these. Then I'd go unsubscribe from. Anything that publishes news or aggregates news is probably not worth putting in there. You want individuals. You want infrequent authors. I subscribe to a bunch of individual engineers. They may not write but once or twice a year.

But I don't have to worry about that because that one time that they publish, there it is. And so maintaining the signal to noise ratio is I think a big part of what makes an RSS reader's experience good or bad and Ben one thing I mean

I do not want algorithmic timelines in Feedbin if you switch to that I'd probably finally stop paying you money Adam would probably quit using it as he probably finally stop paying you money. Adam would probably quit using it as he has and still pay you money, which is nice. But what might be a feature, if you're thinking, I'm curious if you put thought into like, I haven't been a first time user for years, like that first run, like getting started. Cause a lot of the problem is like, you know, who do I subscribe to? What do I see when I first sign up?

I got an empty feed here. What do I do about it? I'm sure you put some thought into those things, but I'm curious if you could have nudges in the UI or in the app that says, oh, you just subscribed to this publication. It publishes 12 times a day. Are you sure you want to do this?

And you can say, yes, I'm sure. And then you just go ahead and let that happen yeah classifies a high frequency free feed essentially like this is a feed that's high frequency kind of like putting in some maybe not best practices but like things that generally are playing to rss strengths and not shooting yourself in the foot just like even just like little messages that says hey have you thought about that kind of a thing? Or is that too much personalization or too much Ben's opinion in the software? Yeah, I mean, that's that is another thing that I just, you know, I just want to be so

hands off and not presumptuous in any way. But it does lead to these kind of situations and probably is not the best thing to do from a business standpoint. You know, I haven't, you know, spent any time growth hacking. So, you know, it's leaving money on the table. But yeah, I mean, as far as getting started, I mean, definitely low volume is great, but also just put in what you're passionate about, you know, not don't subscribe to things aspirationally, you know, like, no, you're not, this isn't in what you're passionate about. You know, don't subscribe to things aspirationally. You know, like, no, you're not. This isn't the year you're finally going to learn Go.

So go ahead and unsubscribe. But just, you know, the stuff you actually do already love. Yeah. I guess since you mentioned business, what is the state of this application to your focus? I wouldn't say important, but like your focus, because we may suggest during the show, you do things that you're just unwilling. And I think this might be the larger problem we're thinking of with RSS, which is, is there enough enterprise incentive? And I don't even want to use the word enterprise, just business incentive for someone, if it's not you, Ben, if it's someone to focus their efforts on iterating this user experience to give RSS a chance.

I think you have put the best foot forward of an indie dev. There's other things out there like Substack and folks who are obviously pushing the creator and email and RSS ball forward. But is this worth enough in terms of a business to put this effort in like what's the state of the business for you the application for you is it is it enough of a livelihood for you to even give more effort to oh absolutely i mean it's it's uh it's my full-time job i think about it every day even if i don't work on it every day okay and uh i'm still super enthusiastic user of the product. I mean, it's unfortunate.

Like there's a lot of great apps that work with Feedbin and I feel like I just can't use any of them because I just, you know, I owe it to the business to just always use my own thing. And, you know, I love it. So you would benefit then from these improvements. So I think about Shark Tank, when they say no to certain deals, And, you know, I love it. So you would benefit then from these improvements. So I think about Shark Tank, when they say no to certain deals,

they say that one would take too much marketing to get to market. Or that would take too much X to really get the scale that a shark might want to do the deal. And I think of it kind of like here, like this idea that Jared just shared, which is like, just share the frequency. There's certain things about the experience of using RSS, whether you're someone like me who is well aware of what it is, how the technology even works. And then one, two, we're podcasters, so we actually leverage the technology as part of our business, you know, deeply.

These are things that can on-ramp folks into the RSS experience. Even discovery or your own index of like, hey, here were the, of all the people that use feed bin in this category, here's the top five links of this week, things that get people into the world of consuming content, which is powered by RSS. So don't really have to care about RSS theoretically, you know, they have to care about how the, you know, subscribing to content is really what they're asking for, which really isss right but is it enough for you to kind of keep evolving i didn't know it was your full-time job still yet i wasn't aware which is awesome because that makes me

really happy because i want you to do well yeah yeah it's been um almost 10 years now it'll be 10 years next march that's great yeah is? Like, would you say your customer base continues to grow or does it just reach a threshold that it can support? It is sustainable and has been that entire time. You know, things happen and, you know, there'll be, like, a lot of new people interested in signing up. You know, there was a thing two years ago where, like, everybody was staying at home all the time

and there was a lot of news. And that was, like, a huge growth period for instance and then you know it's receded somewhat since the beginning of the pandemic highs but yeah still very good place business-wise you know it's never um really made sense to grow it beyond me and the designer I work with. But I think there's opportunity there. Like if I were, if I just wanted to chase the business, that's definitely something that can be done. There's other RSS readers that are definitely going hard in that particular direction of just making like an enterprise play.

And, you know, I admire that from a business perspective but then i despise it from a product perspective what's what's the position of disposition like why do you despise it and what about it do you despise well because it wouldn't be something that I would want to use anymore. It would just be about making the money, I think. And there's definitely a lot of great enterprise tools that I would enjoy working on. But a news service for businesses is not one of them. Well, we mentioned Matt Ricker. That was one of his points was essentially business incentives work against RSS, which may be directly correlated to that. How do you say despise?

Is it disposition? Obviously not, but how do you say torture or despise? His disposition is that he's despised. Is it disposition? Okay, I'm like, gosh, am I jacking my English up here? Yeah, so there you go. I know what you meant, but yeah, I don't think that's the right word now. I don't think it's the right word. It doesn't sound right. But Matt Rickard was on the

show a while back, episode 463, recently penned his thoughts on RSS, which he does. He blogs a lot. So he shared some bullet points and one of them was creator incentives work against RSS and business incentives work against RSS. I think that's kind of what you're saying there. Like if you go too hard in the paint as an enterprise or as a larger business around RSS, it might be a product that you don't think should be out there for the creator economy, the creator world. Is that what you're saying? Cause it doesn't match the user, the how things work.

It's just too enterprise-y basically is how I got what you said. Yeah. Well, I mean, is how I got what you said. Yeah. Well, I mean, the way I interpret Matt's points there, more like what's the incentive for larger businesses to publish RSS? Oh, I see. Like, how do you monetize your feed? Right. And yeah, I think that is an issue.

That's true. If you only consume RSS, you're going to be not hitting their ads. You're not going to be on their pages. You're sort of circumventing all the things they put in place, which is the ad marketplace. Yeah, and people do things. You can have a paid feed, but that's a lot of overhead to manage. You can post excerpts, and then you have to click through to read the full thing. I think that can be a good experience for the right content. But yeah, I mean, business incentives

is something I don't think about at all because I think there's enough interesting content out there from individuals that have more to gain in terms of like creating a personal brand or, you know, that just want to share what they're working on. My pushback on that business incentives not aligning would be, well, these businesses use Twitter. And Twitter is essentially an excerpt of whatever they're putting out there. It's awareness about the content or the idea being shared. So if these businesses are willing to use Twitter,

then they should be willing to use RSS in a similar fashion. That is if RSS has a fluid user interface that's reliable, that's well-known, you know, a scalable place to go, similar to the way Twitter is scalable, a place to go to consume the future news or what's happening today. Yeah. And that, well, that's something else that I think about. And one of my goals with Feedbin is to make it omnivorous. So, you know, if people only want to post on Twitter, that's great because Feedbin can pull in tweets, you know, you can subscribe to your home timeline, individual accounts, save searches, all that stuff. So wherever the content is, I want Feedman to be able to go and get it, put it in one place for you. So when you pull in Twitter, do you pull it in according to whatever their API gives you

back? Or can you pull it in chronologically? I guess, could you give people what they usually would want from Twitter, which is just a reverse chronological list of the tweets from the people they follow. Or you're just like, hey, Twitter, give me the timeline for Jared Santo and whatever they send you that goes in. Yeah, both of those things. The way I use it is just following individual accounts like, you know, ad handles.

I see. So you don't like put your Twitter account into it. You're just like, I'm going to follow this account in Feedbin. I see. Yeah, I personally do not do that because I like it separated out by who's posting, just like a RSS feed. Right. We absolutely can just subscribe to your entire home timeline and then it just shows up as

like one feed. Gotcha. And I think it works really well in this context. Like, I'd always experimented with thinking about how Twitter could work as RSS. And I don't know if you remember, but... They used to. Twitter used to have RSS feeds, but... I do remember. It wasn't a great experience because all you got was the text of the tweet.

And it didn't look good. You know, it has like all the at junk hashtags, all that stuff. And then I was thinking about it. And I think the key to like making a tweet look good is all the metadata. You know, you have to have the profile picture. You have to have when and where it was posted. You have to have, you know, separate out all the at mentions. So they're not like part of the content.

And then there's also some opportunities to really expand a tweet because now you have a whole page available of screen real estate. And a couple of things that came to mind immediately were like, okay, we like full bleed images just like right in the post body so instead of like you know a couple little thumbnails that you have to click to expand they're all just right there or like one of my favorite ways to use twitter was always about people that posted a lot of good links you know getting recommendations from somebody whose taste you like is like one of the best things that you can use twitter for and like one of the things that feedman does with the space available is if there's a link it can like just go and fetch the text to that article and display it alongside the tweet so you can read the whole thing without ever leaving feedback. Right.

That's all cool stuff, I think, as a reader. If we focus back in on the creation side for businesses, for even individual creators, the attraction of Twitter from a creator's perspective is the opportunity to have viral spread, is the opportunity to have viral spread, is the feedback loop, the instant feedback loop of likes and replies. It's the network.

You're not going to get that with RSS feeds. So much so, you're not even going to get subscriber counts. Twitter will tell you how many people are following you. And that's a nice metric, right? It's a simplified metric, maybe not I mean, it's a simplified metric, maybe not the most useful metric, but it's easy to follow and nice to, it feels good when it goes up.

And RSS doesn't have those kinds of things because of the nature of the way it works, so much so that FeedBurner came along years ago. And even, I mean, the reason why everybody used FeedBurner wasn't because they couldn't publish their own feeds it was because feed burner would give you a stinking subscriber count like that's pretty much why people liked feed burner because they could point their rss feed through feed burner and feed burner would give them that subscriber count which they could then use that to attract advertisers to feel good about themselves to compare themselves

to other people whatever we do with our subscriber accounts right that ended up being a kind of a black hole because then feed burner got bought by google and we quit getting worked on i think it still works today but like there was always these what if it just completely stopped doing things your redirects all break and now your feeds are broken but i I bring it up because it's like the tractor bean that is a little bit of analytics, a little bit of knowledge of who's reading my stuff. That's what creators want. I agree with that.

I think there's probably an opportunity here for you though, Ben, because that's not what I'm seeing now. I think growth for you could be, hey creators, let me tell you how many subscribers you have here on feedbin let me tell you what your attention span is here on feedbin and it's not going to be an at large all of your rss feeds but you know as feedbins market share grows you know that number that represents that person's or that creator's feed becomes more and more significant because as Feedbin's market share grows,

then that means more and more people are going to be using it. And if we paid attention to Feedbin in terms of our subscription to our RSS feeds because you were growing, then you would get more of our attention as a creator. And we would begin to desire our audience to consume. Like I'm looking at Jared's Twitter handle in Feedbin now and it's actually really good.

Your content isn't good, Jared. Wow. Feedbin's display, I'm just kidding. He's just saying you're handsome, I think. What's really good is like, you know, he's a recent one. So we have a news edition to the show now comes out on Mondays. And so on the 18th, which was, was that today? That was two days ago on Monday, you tweeted hot the press and you linked to it. And inside of

feed bin is not only your tweet, but the page you linked to. So change all that FM, the page of the news feed. Now, one thing that is missing from that section is the actual audio, but that's probably not your fault. Maybe our fault. However, the point is, is us as creators, knowing how well this works in there and knowing that you're growing and you care about creators as well as consumers, we might put more and more effort to make our experience, our content experience better inside Feedbin, therefore giving you more market, more audience. Yeah. And I think that's a good strategy. I definitely have to think a lot about the privacy implications of that.

Once I start storing articles that get read and how long they get read for. But I consider this just like a RSS reader best practice. Feedbin and many other readers actually do report subscriber counts and the way it's typically done and the way feedbin does it is just in the request header you know there's like a if you look at your server logs you'll see like a x feedbin subscriber count thing with the with the actual number now you gotta parse server logs like it's 1999, but it is there. And there was a company that was trying to do this as a service, like almost as a feed burner competitor, where they would aggregate all of those RSS subscriber headers for you. I don't know if they exist anymore, but there's been attempts that have been made,

like people who want to like attract the bigger fish to it. But, you know, like I said, like, I, I, I don't, I don't know. I don't know that that's, that that's a great thing. You know, like bigger fish are also like bigger publishers with a lot of posts and right. And like we were saying saying earlier that's not always the best fit kind of goes against the the ethos yeah well that's the problem ben because you have personal opinions that somewhat overlap with your part of the opinions and those two don't always have the best overlap in the venn diagram so i can appreciate your opinion but you kind of have to wear two hats

right yeah but the end of the day he's got to sleep well at night so like that hat has to i'm not saying don't sleep well at night by any means i'm not saying that the product can't always just be for you though it can be for you but it can't so for example i'll take us like we're a creator i would say jared and our individuals but we have a brand called ChangeLog. If we wanted to have more of our subscribers use it pull in pages of audio, all this cool stuff because of just how Twitter works. If we promoted that, it would be a net positive for you, despite us being a high-frequency feed. Because I've got to imagine our Twitter plus our podcast feeds and the news feed would be high-frequency. And it kind of goes against the whole point

of earlier is like that's why i bailed so i get that but that's an opt-in if someone subscribes to us for those reasons that's an opt-in and they may get overwhelmed that's the just i guess the nature of subscribing to content same thing with twitter right now i'm kind of overwhelmed with them algorithm me me i just like the algorithm has gotten me deep so i'm like unsubscribing to these things that i never even asked for which is like tags and somebody tweeted this right viral tweets yeah like give me my timeline we thought you would like this viral tweet it's like you were wrong i did not like this viral tweet yeah well that's part of iteration and product too and experimentation but by no means am i saying don't sleep at night you know i don't want you

to take the hat off completely but you you have to wear two hats. One which says, I'm the business owner. How do we grow? And then two, I'm Ben. I want to enjoy the product. How do those two coincide and how can I build a product that supports both of those? And it is a conflict and I think to a fault I come down on the side of going with my opinion on the thing, even if it is probably not the best business idea. Mostly just because of how Feedman got started, just kind of accidentally being in the right place at the right time with Google Reader shutting down, like, two days after the launch. And I just kind of, instead of, like, immediately trying to figure out what the thing to do is to capitalize on that,

I just doubled down on, like, making the thing that I want to use. Like, always, that's, like, my first choice. And it just felt like the right want to use. Like always, that's like my first choice. And it just felt like the right thing to do. And still does. I agree. I mean, we make podcasts that we think people will like, but also it begins with us liking the content. We could probably make podcasts that more people will listen to.

Precisely. Yeah, I mean. But we don't want to. We're not like, what do you want? Let's just give it to you. It's more like, what do you want? And what don't want to we're not like what do you want let's just give it to you it's more like yeah what do you want and what do we want to give you the cross-section how those overlap and somehow there's yeah exactly there's a crossover there yeah that we we've got to enjoy what we produce the way i always thought about it is if i am going to work on somebody else's dream, then I could just go get a job somewhere, you know?

Mm-hmm. So this thing is my dream, and I get to decide what goes into it. This episode is brought to you by Sourcegraph. With the launch of their Code Insights product, teams can now track what really matters in their code base. Code Insights instantly transforms your code base into a queryable database to create visual dashboards in seconds. And I'm here with Joel Kortler, the product manager of Code Insights for Sourcegraph.

Joel, the way teams can use Code Insights seems to pretty much be limitless, but a particular problem every engineering team has is tracking versions of languages or packages. How big of a deal is it actually to track versions for teams? Yeah, it's a big deal for a couple of reasons. The first is, of course, just compatibility. You don't want things to break when you're testing locally or to break on your CI systems or test systems.

You need to have some sort of level of version unification and minimum version support. And all of that needs to be compatible forward. But the other thing we learned was that for a lot of customers, especially, you know, engineering organizations that are pretty established, they have older versions of things or even older versions of like SaaS tools they don't use anymore that they haven't fully removed because they're like not sure if it's still in use or they, you know, lost focus on that. And they're spinning up old virtual machines that they're still paying for. They're using, you know, old SaaS subscriptions they're afraid

to cancel because they're not sure if anyone's actually using it. And so getting off of those versions, not just like saves you the headaches and the risks and the vulnerabilities of being on old versions, but also literally the money of, you know, older systems running more slowly, or the build times or, you know, virtual machines and SaaS tools that you're no longer using. Before you had this ability, we talked to teams, there are basically three ways you could do this, you could slack a million people and ask for just like an update point in time. You could have sort of one human and one spreadsheet where like it's somebody's job every Friday or every two weeks to just like search all the code and find all the versions and write it down in a Google sheet. Or there were a couple of companies

that I came across with in-house systems that were sort of complicated. You had to know, you know, maybe Kotlin, but you didn't know Kotlin. But if you want to use the system, you had to learn Kotlin and you'd have to sort of build the whole world from scratch and run basically a tool like this with a pretty steep learning curve. And now for all three of those, you can replace it with a single line source graph search, which is basically just the name of the thing you're trying to track and the version string in the right format. And then we have templates that will help you get started if you're not sure what that format is. And then it'll automatically track all the different versions for you, both historically.

So even if you start using it today, you can see your historical patterns. And then of course, going forward. Very cool. Thank you, Joel. So right now there is a treasure trove of insights just waiting for you. Living inside your code base right now, teams are tracking migrations, adoption, deprecations.

They're detecting and tracking versions of languages and packages. They're removing or ensuring the removal of security vulnerabilities. They understand their code by team. They can track their code smells and health, and they can visualize configurations and services and so much more with Code Insights. A good next step is to go to about.sourcegraph.com slash code dash insights. See how other teams are using this awesome feature. Again, about dot sourcegraph dot com slash code dash insights. This link is in the show notes. So the beauty of RSS and the open web, which RSS is a part of, is that Feedbin is not RSS, right?

It's not the RSS experience. You just happen to be the one that's on our show right now. And so, of course, we're grilling you on ideas and changes and stuff. But like, there's tons of people that are doing RSS readers. Feedly is much bigger in terms of like, they're more of the enterprise play.

I haven't looked at what they offer as a product in a long time because I've been a happy user of yours. But I know there's like, every time RSS comes back up, people will list, here's what I use. And there's like, you know, a dozen of them. And there's a dozen of them. And there's probably way more that people don't list. Just like whenever you look at the top podcasts, there's always a dozen or so. And then there's a whole bunch of them that people listen to and enjoy.

Yeah, I think there is a long tail, for sure. So I guess my point is, of course, we're not saying you have to do all these things or should do all these things. RSS depends on you, Ben, you boys. Otherwise, it's going to continue as is. I think we enjoy and we try to talk about ways we can make this technology and what we currently have, which is siloed, big tech, algorithm-driven, ad-driven social experiences on the web. And RSS as a technology, we all know, is the underpinnings of lots of things. But as a reader, as a social network, it is not.

It could be a social network. It could be your personally curated, chronologically timelined, beautiful, safe, quote unquote safe social network. It could be all of ours. And it's not quite that. And every time we get mad at all the social networks that be, we say, why can't we just all use RSS? Like we have one.

It's right there. And so then the next step is like, we say, why can't we just all use RSS? Like we have one, it's right there. And so then the next step is like, well, it's lacking some stuff though. Here's what it's missing. And some of what it's missing is what makes it beautiful. But some of what it's missing is what makes it suck, right? Not be sticky. Jared, that's a great way to put it, man.

Everything he just said is what I've been trying to say all along. Seriously. That's why we're a team. Yeah, that's exactly it. What is missing, say it again, Jared. What is missing is its downfall, but what is also missing is its suck. It can be.

It can be. There's certain aspects of it. Like discovering. Discoverability is a big problem. Like I said, you're on Twitter because you want to go viral. Well, when you go viral, somebody puts your content in front of somebody else, and they also enjoy that content, right? And now they've discovered you.

And they're like, wow, this Adam Stack guy has interesting things to say. I'm going to follow him. So much good stuff, yes. But how does that, how can we get some of that stuff with our federated, distributed, non-centralized RSS technology?

We're kind of stuck like it's 1999 i'd say from someone with taste like ben that and that's why i think you might even be well positioned for this because while it may not necessarily be the hat that ben you boys wants to wear the ben you boys who runs the business has good taste and you have good morals which you've built this product on so you might be the best person positioned to do these things because you're not going to compromise and crumble for the dollars you're going to compromise and crumble in the positive ways for the network effects of creators and the consumers because it's a net positive for for everyone really and feed bank gets to be at the center point i like that i like that, one of the things, um,

he mentioned was, uh, about discovery. And I have a question for both of you, which is like, who does do discovery? Well, like you look at companies that have thrown so many bodies and so much money

at the problem. Yeah. And like, if you sign up for a new Twitter account today, it's like, who do they recommend you follow? Like, I don't know the president of the United States and a celebrity? It's like, you're not going to have a great experience by following those people. Facebook, I guess, was successful for a while. I guess they still are. There are billions of people on there. But I don't know. I mean, my parents use it, but that's all the people I know. TikTok, people like that kind of thing. It's a good question. I mean, I think I would say TikTok and YouTube are probably doing discovery best,

even though they're optimized for things that are maybe not the most uplifting or net positive. They do discovery, they do engagement. I think more often than not, a YouTube algorithm is going to hit me on the nose and TikToks more so than Twitter. I don't use Facebook. I'll say Instagram because I do use Instagram.

And it's a Facebook product. That doesn't mean they're actually doing it all that well. I think good discovery comes from your friends. It comes from your already existing social network. And so even with podcasts to this day, I personally learn about podcasts from people who listen to podcasts and talk about them to me. And most people who find us, they say, yeah, my colleague at work sent me a link to the show and I gave it a listen. And so a lot of the discovery, I think that's the best, is it's personally curated by people that know you.

And so that's why I think that social network of other people who are like-minded, like you said, Ben, you like to follow people on Twitter who are good link finders, right? They're going to find good content, and they're going to curate content. They're going to find the stuff that you like better than the current algorithms that be. And so maybe the answer for Feedbin or for the RSS ecosystem isn't necessarily like, who has the best algorithm? Like what algorithm could Ben come up with

to suggest content? But it's more like, how can we better cross the networks that we have, the personal social networks that we currently already have in order for us to share? So Adam and I were talking yesterday. He likes my feed bin

because i just tell him like isn't that you said like i wish i had your some of your subscriptions yeah i wish i can somehow know what your feed is so i can just pick and throw what is in your list because there may be things that you like that i want to check out there's things that you like i don't want to check out the technological move right now is like well you can i'll export my opml and you can import it. But that's not going to be a general purpose kind of social network-y thing. Or maybe there are tools, Ben, that we don't know about

for sharing and promoting, even saying share this with my... I think with Google Reader there was kind of a thing where you could subscribe to other people's shared or starred or something like that. Yeah, absolutely. Well, for the OPML thing,

there's been attempts to do like a OPML hub sort of a thing. I don't, I don't think anything ever caught on. Right. The Google, I think one of the things people really liked about it is the, it did have kind of a mini social network for a time. Like they,

they eventually stripped all that out in favor of, I don't know, does anybody remember Google Plus? Yeah, unfortunately. But that's something that people loved. But I think what made that work is that Google Reader is free and enough people were on it that

you could count on your friends being there. Right. And I don't feel like Feedbin is really in that place where there's not enough users for that to have critical mass. Everybody you know count on your friends being there. And I don't feel like Feedbin is really in that place where there's like... There's not enough users for that to have critical mass. Everybody you know is on there. Maybe a free service could do it. Yeah. That's a chicken and egg on two sides where you...

Jared has to get enough value from using Feedbin to then be my friend and share his experience with me for me to say, i want to try it too so that's the thing like you know you're not going to get growth on that front if you know just if you don't have a way for people to like cross-pollinate with one another in in ways yeah it's an absolute challenge it really is to yeah to sort of like not be a social network but yet give social features yeah that'd be a cool thing to figure out. The starred thing, you can do that.

So there's a starred feed. You know, there's people who publish theirs like on their personal website. Like, you know, just. That's cool. What is this starred feed? What is this? It just creates yet another RSS feed of anything that you star inside a feed bin. So like, you know, star is just like a lightweight bookmarking feature.

So you can refer back to something later. But then, yeah, so then this feed exists at its own private URL. But you can share that with somebody who can then put it into whatever their RSS feeder may be. It doesn't even have to be feed bin. I don't even know how to do that, though. So I see the star feed. How do I even give it to somebody else then copy the link what's a link

just kidding the old universal resource locator so that's pretty cool i think if there was like a way of saying okay check across like um inside of the of the product like i would also like to see other people's stars you know even that simple. Now that could be a privacy situation where like, well, I don't want people knowing my stars. And so maybe you have to decide how your stars are going to work. And so it gets complicated. Yeah. I mean, maybe multiple levels

like a public and private situation. Because even if it wasn't like, okay, so one problem is if it's a free service, it may have 10x, maybe 100x of the users. And so the likelihood of my friends or my colleagues or people that I already have a social graph with being on there would be much higher. And so a paid service like Feedbin, much smaller. Okay, so maybe then the small play, whatever the user base is, is what if I could just see the most starred stuff by everybody?

That might be a place where like, okay where I can go trawling through there. It doesn't have to be people I know, but because it's not that big, maybe it's just like, hey, this article was starred by 75 people. That's Signal to a certain extent. Now you do have privacy implications there, but now you can start to show me things. And I wouldn't say necessarily insert that into my Feedbin feed, but maybe there's another subsection called, you know,

most starred in the feeds list that I could go check when I was interested. Yeah. Well, again, I think there's like a, there's like a scale and diversity problem really, which is like, if you, if you do look at the numbers of like, what's something that has a lot of stars, it's like, it's not really a surprise. It's like, you know, what what's what's the latest thing on like daring fireball or something or another big blog right uh that everybody's already subscribed to anyway so in terms of like you know i think you need there needs to be a way to find like the the less uh obvious stories somehow. Right. You almost need to go out and find curators.

Yeah. And say, hey, I really like your taste in this subculture that I don't own myself. But I think when I look at what you're sharing, it's really high quality stuff. Could you be a feed bin curator? And what does that mean? Oh, I give you a free account maybe or whatever it is. And you just star the stuff that you're going to share. And now you have almost editors.

I mean, that doesn't super scale, but at the size that we're talking about, it could potentially be feasible. It's a lot of work though, Ben. That's a lot of work. Ben, you asked the question, where do you see, I guess, discovery? I think what your question was for us.

Yeah. And I thought about Overcast. Because whenever you go, when you're in Overcast and you want to add a new feed, the first thing you do is search the directory. But before, along with that page of searching the directory, you also get suggestions. And there's suggestions for you. There's most starred. And then there's podcasts that are in categories, society and culture, business, news, history, tech, all that good stuff. So I can go into the

technology section when I go to the process of discovery, which is ultimately adding a new podcast to my queue or feeds, very similar to Feedbin. And in that list, I get all the different tech podcasts that are being suggested by the platform Overcast. Yeah. And in that list, I get all the different tech podcasts that are being suggested by the platform Overcast. Yeah. And how do you like those suggestions? I don't mind it. Well, when I go to the technology section, the change holds in there. So I'm really happy. That's all it takes. That's all it takes to see your own stuff in there. You're like, this is a good recommendation. And if they could also throw in like JS party. That's right. Exactly. It could be better. It could be better. Oh, wait, there it is. I'm just kidding. I'm just kidding. But I do see what I would consider

relevant podcasts that I would either A, listen to or at least recommend if somebody would want to listen to it. I mean, I'll listen to a person. I can say, hey, this show, X, Y, or Z from whomever. Yeah, it's great. It's out there. I don't listen to it, but if you want that content, it's probably a good piece of content that you can check out or pay attention to. So I think that's good for discovery, personally. I mean, there's some sort of overlap there, which is how do you discover through your user base what is Signal, and how do you as a platform partner with those creators and give them exposure? Because what you want is more good content creators out there who get value from platforms like yours so that more people enjoy products that you create. stagnate or decline and it's not like hey ben save your job but more like rss has stood the test of time it's died it's lived it's had a resurgence it's had a re-resurgence again

you know what i mean so i mean it's been everywhere in between and it is the protocol that will never die because it hasn't yet it's been resilient and everything of that is the epicenter of what you're building and so it's just a matter of how to get people to subscribe to content that is outside the over-algorithmed, over-engineered, over-privacy, anti-privacy social networks that just don't ultimately pay out. They may be a good mechanism for discovering new people, TikTok, YouTube, Twitter, etc. I use all those platforms. They're all great in their own right. However, I think there's room in there for RSS to improve.

And I think it begins with folks like you. It begins with you, Ben. You and people like you. Well, there's a cross section here, which I think will lead into another part of this conversation. Because as Adam has said, our livelihood at this point,

which didn't start this way, and we're thankful that it is this way, it relies on RSS as a technology. There's kind of two conversations that overlap, which is like RSS as a consumption slash sharing mechanism, right, as a network, which we think is the thing that has died and come back to life and died. And really, at this point, it's limping along. I mean, very few people use it in comparison to even the small social networks like Twitter. Twitter is a small social network in comparison. It's louder than the other ones, so it gets a lot of press. But user-wise, it's an order of magnitude less

than how many people are on Facebook, but still huge in comparison to people that use readers like Feedbin. But the technology has, to the test of time, it is used. It's under attack, of course, in the podcasting space. Spotify very much, I think, would like to get rid of RSS. And Apple doesn't seem to care one way or the other, which is kind of why it has thrived for many years because Apple made it a thing that was used

and then ignored it for a very long time. I mean, almost no changes to the way podcasting worked inside of Apple Podcasts for a decade, maybe 15 years until recently. They're trying to do some stuff now. But the podcasting folks are making moves. I mean, I'm not sure, Ben, you have been working in the podcasting world. We should talk about some of the stuff you've been working on recently. I'm excited to hear about it. But there are people like with the podcasting 2.0 movement now where they're trying to bring up the podcasting part of the RSS spec to modern technology and fill some of the gaps

that what podcasters need in 2022 and beyond. And so they're developing and changing it. RSS hasn't changed for a long time. I'm not even sure who the working group is, maybe Ben, you know, or how that whole deal works right now. I know there's RSS versus Atom years ago and RSS1. RSS has just not changed as a spec that I know of for many, many years.

Podcasting as a namespace of that spec or as an implementation of that spec is starting to change via grassroots efforts. And I'm speaking specifically of the Podcasting 2.0 stuff. Have you been following that at all or know what they're working on with the new podcasting namespace? No, I haven't heard of Podcasting 2.0. Okay, so it is led by Adam Curry and Dave Jones, and they've been working on podcastindex.org,

which is a completely free, open podcasting index. By their own words, they're here to preserve, protect, and extend the open, independent podcasting ecosystem. And they've been working on basically additions, a podcasting namespace where they're going to be adding new elements, new tags, stuff that's been missing. And they've already added a bunch of them. We've implemented a few.

Things like transcripts, things like chapters, things like actual author credits where you have rich objects for the people who are on the shows, not just the hosts and guests, but also other people involved in the creation of the podcast. So one thing that could be cool about podcasting is following a person around perhaps. So you have this people who are guests, like they don't have their own podcast, but they're on a lot of different shows because they're interesting people. And so you could then subscribe to a podcast guest will be a good example. I like that. Yeah, that's interesting. Maybe Tim Ferriss, like maybe you

already listened to all of the Tim Ferriss shows, but also he's a guest on other shows. Well, can I subscribe to Tim Ferriss in my podcast app? Well, with Podcasting 2.0. You know how much time that would save me on YouTube? Honestly, I would spend days, weeks, months just scrolling YouTube forever, waiting for the next thing of this person

I'm paying attention to currently. Of your favorite creator. Yeah. If I could just subscribe to them on shows rather than death scrolling forever on YouTube, TikTok, et cetera. OMG, I would get better sleep and my life would be improved by 10X. I'm being facetious a little bit there. But the point is, I do scroll.

I'm like, you know, when is the next thing so-and-so will say X? And I just want to see them on other shows and hear more of what they have to say, because I want to hear the circumference of their opinion about X. Yeah, no, that's a good feature. I mean, there's some people like that that I try to follow. This feature somewhat exists with ListenNotes. Are you familiar with listen notes.com yes uh they also they sell uh access to like a podcast directory right i'm not sure

what they sell and how they sell it i know that we're in there i know that you can see different episodes i know that you can pay attention to named folks i'm not sure if you can subscribe to them but i know if you wanted to find you know folks. I'm not sure if you can subscribe to them. But I know if you wanted to find Dave Jones or Adam Curry on podcasts, you can just go to ListenNose.com and plug their name in, essentially. And you'll see them on their own shows and other shows, too. Yeah, actually, ListenNose is an interesting company. It's also a one-person operation. Right.

I think the creator lives in SF also. But yeah, like there's like interesting stuff on their blog about the infrastructure and backend things that I find fascinating because like that's the exact situation that I'm in. So I love to see how other people do that at that scale of one. And there's other, I mean, there's VC backed things as well.

Podchaser is one that I think is similar to ListenNotes, scale of one right and there's other i mean there's vc back things as well pod chaser is one that i think is similar to listen notes but was backed and personally recently acquired by a larger entity and there's a lot of acquisitions going on in the space so like there's a lot of hubbub around podcasting there's money flowing in and out people trying to solve some of these quote-unquote problems really Really, a lot of them are enterprise things, which us little folk don't care about all that much. But there are cool stuff like transcripts, get it in there. I think the chapters, which we're working on internally here,

chaptering, trailers, location, sound bites, funding. So there's like this whole value for value thing they're working on where you can actually stream money to people as you listen to them. So non-advertising based models, I guess the point is like, there's a lot of people trying to make podcasting better. And specifically the podcast index is trying to do that by like, Hey,

we don't have to stand still with the technology. We can build upon the technology. It's built to be extendable via namespaces. And so what if we create a new podcast namespace and start to extend it via the old open source model of like, here's a GitHub org, here's a working group, let's implement some stuff, let's start supporting it and get app creators involved.

So they're out there getting different podcasting apps to support these new features. And I don't think there's anything like that in like the pure RSS world of like readers. Do you know of anything, Ben, or is that just like it's been stagnant? It has been fairly stagnant for a long time. The biggest thing that I think hasn't really taken off was an attempt to kind of redefine RSS, which is an XML-based format, as JSON. And I really like that.

Feedbin supports it, did from pretty much the beginning, just because XML is hard. It's hard to read. It's hard to read it's hard to parse and it can be really complex with the namespace thing especially if you want to like do that in a valid way we're following the document definition uh where json like anything can parse json you know right is it that json feed.org is that what that is json feed.org? Is that what that is? jsonfeed.org, yeah. By Matt and Reese and Brent Simmons.

Yeah, we support that as well. But then, you know, it doesn't, that doesn't really extend it. It just kind of re-implements it. Well, then you have like a browser war issue thing. Like the way browsers have progressed,

which I imagine the same way readers will progress, is one, how big is their market share? And two, do they adhere to this new suggested, even if it's a redefining of the RSS, do they support it? You know what I mean?

Because if the biggest behemoth in the reader space begin to support that new spec, well, then it's got a lot more going for it to be supported by others because it's got a large user base then you got features whatever like it becomes almost a browser war scenario in terms of like oh that chrome has this feature does safari have this feature no well then safari is bad because chrome has supported this feature you know it becomes like a better or less than

because of a feature being supported yeah yeah there there's that. That would be good, I think. But then there's also a chicken and an egg problem, which is if you're creating a spec, you're in outer space, and you just throw stuff back down to Earth and hope people pick it up. So it's really on them to make something compelling with what they're trying to do. Like, you know, the browser wars, you know, I think the What Working Group and CSS Working Group, like they come up with like really compelling stuff all the time that like make developers' lives better.

And I think there is a big incentive for browsers to implement that. It also helps that there's like essentially like, there's essentially two or three rendering engines right now. So it's, you know, whereas there's a million RSS readers and a million podcast players. So getting that uptake is, I think, the challenge there. Totally. This episode is brought to you by our friends at Retool. Retool helps teams focus on product development and customer value, not building and maintaining internal tools. It's a low-code platform built specifically for developers.

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And RSS versus Atom was the VHS versus Betamax, was the HDD versus Blu-ray or whatever. And RSS won. RSS stands for really simple, you know, syndication. And so it seems like it won because it was simpler. I wasn't paying close attention back then during the Atom versus RSS wars of yesteryear. I know that people would just do both

and kind of like, as creators, like you just publish both feeds and Adam was always like complicated in comparison. And so, you know, you have to be weary of making RSS, you know, too complicated by adding more things. But like you said, like by using it, we've been with it for many years now. And so like, we know what things that might be nice to have. What if we could just get the whole subscriber thing somehow figured out with current RSS technology? Maybe it's the headers thing, but you're not providing some sort of end user way of parsing those out. I know we do

grab those out of our user agent strings because we have a custom CMS that we built ourselves. And so yeah, we know how many people subscribe to Founders Talk in Feedbin. And we've got to work on that number, Ben. We've got to get that number up. Do you actually subscribe to podcasts inside of Feedbin? I don't. I don't personally. Yeah, you can. Yeah. Tell us the number, Jer. What's the number? Well, I'll tell you. Two. Two people have subscribed to Founders Talk via Feedbin so partially

Adam's fault partially Ben's fault partially just reality I'm going to make it three right now you're going to subscribe to yourself that's how we really

hack our growth I want to know how the experience of it really because I think this is where I don't want to go back to a point

I really think there's an opportunity to have similar incentives as a creator and as Ben as the platform creator like this tool. I think I want to know how my experience is in there as the creator so that I can suggest it to people as one yet one more way to consume a good experience of the podcast. If you don't want to go on changelog.com or if you don't want to subscribe via an iOS or an Android app, which is probable.

The most subscribed place for most podcasts is on a mobile device, desktop probably being second, and web listen is probably third. Maybe desktop is actually, web listen is probably second and some sort of Feedbin is a third. I would say mobile, mobile, mobile, and then web. There are like three people listening to it on their desktop. I do know that Feedbit has a really nice podcast support. I always make sure our stuff renders

in there and I can hit play and it goes down in the corner. I can keep reading and listening. And so I know you put some special work into that kind of stuff, Ben. But you've been doing like, you have a whole other podcast initiative going on. You tease me in the email. What are you working on with regards to podcasting? Yeah, so this has been in the works for a while now. Like I was

saying earlier, I, uh, taken the approach of making Feedbin omnivorous. So, you know, at first it was just RSS, uh, then, uh, newsletters. Cause I felt like, you know, it's better to read it in a reading environment than in your email app. Then like Twitter and YouTube feeds actually have some custom stuff to make them work nicely in there as well, too. And podcasts. But the podcasting component always felt unfinished to me. Like you were mentioning before, that the main place people go to listen to podcasts is in a mobile app. So, you know, I want to go where the people are. And so I made a podcast client. It syncs with Feedbin. It's for iPhone and iPad only currently. And it all goes

well. It's launching next week nice nice so it syncs with feedbin like if you want it to or like you sign up through feedbin it's like a feedbin client or a standalone thing that also works with feedbin yeah so there's three kind of ways you can use it the original idea was that it would be for Feedbin customers. You know, you're already paying for a Feedbin subscription. How can I like add value to your subscription? So if you have a Feedbin account, you can sign into the app. It's no additional cost.

And then you manage your podcast subscriptions and playback in the app. But, you know, I also wanted to see if it was interesting to more people. I think podcasting probably has a broader audience than RSS does. So, you know, what about like people that want to use the app, but don't want to have a Feedbin account? So then to support that, the app is free for everybody. You can download it and use it forever without paying anything. And then if you want to have Sync, but not have a Feedbin subscription, there's going to be an in-app option to subscribe to

the Sync service. It'll use Feedbin on the back end. It'll be less costly than a Feedbin subscription. And it'll just provide Sync across devices. So trying the freemium model with it, essentially. Cool. How long have you been working on that? Off and on for about a year now. I started in the summer of last year.

I was interested in checking out native development with SwiftUI. And so that's what the app is written in. It's a really interesting experience. My background is in web development. And it's very different doing on-device stuff. Yeah. And then, you know, the concept for the app is, like, initially I was thinking, like, you know, my kind of internal barometer for where podcast apps are at is that there's a lot of really good ones and powerful ones. But I was feeling like they were almost too powerful and starting to get into almost a complex territory.

And when I think about how I use podcasts, really all I want is a player screen. And I'm going to hit play, and then I'm going to listen to an episode, and then it's going to play the next one. And then when I'm done listening for the day, I'm going to hit pause and then I'm going to do the same thing over again. I'm like, can there be an app that's just a player screen? And the answer is no. You need some kind of management, right? Well, you tried, you tried. You need to be able to get podcasts on the device, right? So then it's like, okay, well, how do you do that? You know, you need to integrate with a directory. You need to be able to search that directory. And then you need some kind of queue or playlist for like what order the things are going to be in. And you need to be able to

edit that queue. And then, you know, when I think about how I listen to podcasts, there's kind of two types of shows I listen to. There's the shows where I listen to every episode, which I call in the app is called the subscription. And then there's shows where I'll listen to an occasional episode and we're all like check in once in a while, see if anything looks interesting to me and then add that to the queue and those I call bookmarks. And then with those two things in place, I felt like it was kind of like the, you know, people talk about a minimum viable product a lot, but a term I came across recently for this stage is SLC product, which is simple, lovable and complete. And that's where I want to start with this, Just have it, get the basics right, have a nice experience, and then see how people like it, see what's missing, and keep going. Wasn't that idea shared on JS Party recently, Jared? Simple, lovable, and complete? It was shared on something. It was a clip I saw.

I could have swore it was you even saying it. It might have been changed to log news. And it was a guest. I believe it was on JS Party. I don't know. It might have been changed log news and it was a guest i believe it's on js party i don't know it might have been changed log news it's actually it's funny that you bring it up ben because i just recently heard of that concept of simple lovable and complete as being a better framing over minimum viable and it might have been through change log news it could have been js party i don't know i think it might have been changed all the news now that you say it all melds together at some point. It does because that's what happens. Yeah. I can't remember either.

There's some good merits to your idea though for sure. Yeah your double headed concept makes sense to me because that's also how I listen. I have like my subscriptions and then I have the shows that I just want to keep around and just check what they've been up to lately and maybe there was a good guest or interesting topic you know. But I don't listen week in week out or day in day out And just check what they've been up to lately. And maybe there was a good guest or interesting topic.

But I don't listen week in, week out, or day in, day out, however often they publish. So I think subscriptions and bookmarks are good concepts for the starter of a simple, lovable, and complete. I'm sure there's lots of other things. Complete is the C, right? Gosh, that's the hard part. Thorough and not. And just polishing every corner so that it's complete. Like what you have, the idea there being the

things that are in the app are like completely fleshed out ideas, right? Yeah. Well, I saw an illustration that went along with the idea, which is like, like a skateboard, a bicycle and a car, like a skateboard is complete, but it certainly doesn't have all the features that a car does, but it can be used in its current state while the next thing is being built. Right. Or even just the concept of a board, trucks, and four wheels. Another version of the skateboard could be the one where it's,

I don't even know what it's called, but it's got only two wheels. One wheel on the front, one wheel on the back, and you can kind of wiggle to board. I don't know what it's called. That's a ripstick. Ripstick, yes, a ripstick. My kids love those things. It's on the concept of a skateboard.

Right. But it's another variation of it. You know, that's an innovation above and beyond the board, trucks, and four wheels concept. It's complete as is, but you had two more wheels. Now it's a skateboard. Or two less wheels, technically. And then one in the front, one in the back. How's it going the other way?

That's even simpler. That's right. It's taking away. But then there's the wiggle mechanism. Yeah, the wiggle thing, it makes it tough for us, us Gen Xers slash millennials. But then there's the one wheel, which I heard is the bomb by Adam Argyle. He's on, that was on JS Party.

What's it called? It's called One Wheels. I believe it's called One Wheel. The solo wheel. Yeah, the solo wheel. With the electric motor. Yeah, the electric motor. It's almost like a go-kart wheel

in the middle of this thing. Yeah. And Adam Argyle on JS Party was just raving about how awesome the one wheel is. So it's also, it was called a unicycle at some point, I guess. But different product altogether. So what's it called? Did I miss the name of a band?

Did you share the URL? I think I didn't say it. It's called Airshow. Airshow. Airshow. Okay. Where'd that come from? Just, you know, simple ideas.

I landed on it just because from? Just, you know, simple ideas. I landed on it just because it sounded nice, you know, like the light air as in lightweight shows and, you know, just feels good. Is it.fm?

I own that one now, but it's not live yet. So, you know, we're talking about something that hasn't actually happened because the app is in uh second app review right ah welcome to ios so imagine that someone's listening to this six months from now and so it's live where will they go is it airshow.fm or yeah you can go

to yep airshow.fm that's a good place to go. I was going to say, because you must use Hover to secure your domains, because that's what it says. It says, airshow.fm is a totally awesome idea. It's still being worked on. And in parentheses, being approved by Apple. It doesn't actually say that, but I just thought. I can imagine the concept. I mean, so you got some collisions with, it's a great well-known term,

but collisions with actual airshows, which are planes flying in the sky right you know being you know spectacles but you know a great play where you can have multiple or several planes as an avatar of some sort for the icon you know where you know it could be air show themed essentially we know ben has thought about the icon how did you see my icon? Yeah, well, we know that you care about such things because I think your hamburger icon is classic. We even talked about that last time. Yeah, I don't mind that double meaning. You know, a feed bin, not so much in the U.S., but in the U.K.,

that's what you call a bin that you put animal feed in. Oh. Do you like that double meaning? Sure. I mean, I can see how it applies to, you know, you go. I couldn't tell if you liked it or didn't like it when you said that. Yeah. Go to the feed bin to graze on news or something.

Maybe that's a stretch. Well, I think it's a good thing. I don't think it's a negative thing at all. I think for a while there, you'll have people potentially lost until you have enough juice, I suppose, from the search engines to give you priority in the index. But I think it's a great, it's got a lot of great things behind it in terms of like what you can use. Airplanes fly, podcasts fly, you know what I mean? Soaring through the internet pipes, so to speak, getting to listeners ears, you know, a lot of fun things, a lot of fun aspects to that brand. You know, an air show.

Yeah. Airplanes. My only requirement was just staying away from the word pod. That's been used. Also cast. Cast. Pod and cast. So pod and cast are like we're out immediately.

Can I introduce you in a show app called AirPod? Oh, wait. Or AirCast. Air wait. Or AirCast. AirCast. AirCast. Coming to a, yeah, anyways. Pod show. Good stuff.

Well, okay. So the mechanics are simple. A play button, essentially. A play screen. And then you have the concept of a queue, which is probably a mixture of what you would subscribe to or bookmark. So you essentially have just a few ways really to mechanic the app as a user, but a really simple experience in terms of being simple. What was it? Usable and complete.

What was the, what was the acronym? Lovable. Lovable and complete. Usable. It's nice to use. Lovable and usable or synonymous. I would assume to some degree.

So as a current feed bin user who doesn't do it for podcasts, I subscribe to our newsfeed in there just to make sure that the podcasts work, but I don't actually listen inside of Feedbin. Yeah. How would you imagine me using Airshow? Would you imagine me start to using Feedbin for podcasts and listen to them in there? Or would you imagine me just using it as a standalone?

Yeah, there is integration with Feedbin. That was important for me to have the option to start something on device and then pick up where you left off on the web. Like, it kind of completes the picture there with a desktop experience. But yeah, it is more geared to like just stay on the device. You know, the integration with Feedbin

is fairly lightweight at this point. You know, if you choose to download the app and sign in with your Feedbin account, you're going to get in just a new source, you know, kind of left column, and it's going to show you your queue. So you can pick up on the web. But then if you don't want to use it there, that's totally fine.

It's not going to take over Feedbin in any way. Right, but I do get, basically I get free sync because I'm a Feedbin customer. Like if I want to use it air show on two devices, I get to sync through Feedbin. So that's nice. This is great because you kind of got both sides of the coin, really. You've got feeds at large you can consume podcasts and for those feeds inside a feed bin that is a podcast

feed you could say hey this is a great experience here obviously because i made it but there's also this other cool things you could check out so that you have a way to promote air show via feed bin by way of saying there's a simpler more complete and lovable experience elsewhere right should you want to take it and there's free sync you're welcome that's true by the way wow i don't know if i think of myself like as highly as you do but i but i aspire to ben, you should. Okay, let me tell you. I'll be the first person to tell you. You should. Thank you. But yes, yes, that's the idea. And yeah, I mean, it really just seems like it requires that native component. I don't love how

Apple runs the store, but you've got to meet the people where they are. And for Feedbin customers, that's on iOS. So who should be using Airshow? What kind of podcast listeners should use it? Well, I think if you like Feedbin, you should check it out. It's designed by the people who make Feedbin, so that's one thing that has gone for it. If you're already into that aesthetic. The other thing is, you're already into that aesthetic. The other thing is like, you know, you're talking about being overwhelmed with RSS feeds, but I think that's also super easy to do

with podcasts. A lot of podcast apps have, you know, notions of like multiple playlists and preferences about what you're going to retain or just a lot of options. And it's like very powerful and flexible, but I think it's easy to hide like kind of how oversubscribed you are. So I think by like dialing it way back in terms of what's possible with the app, it could also help like staying on top of the shows you actually want to listen to. You know, like the way I think about it is maybe I can listen to, I don't know, 12 hours of podcasts in a week. So as soon as I see my queue getting longer and I'm not staying on top of it, that's like a really strong indicator that it's time to unsubscribe from something so you know if you feel like you're overwhelmed with your current podcast app

or um you just want like a lighter weight approach to the to the whole thing like something more casual i think that that it could be for you i can totally empathize with being overwhelmed with a feed because that happens in my podcast feed, that happens in my feed bin feed and I would consider it an internal epidemic if that's even possible. It's a shame. Well, we've discussed RSS, we've discussed

podcasting. I assume Airshow is not podcasting 2.0 compliant quite yet, but I would definitely consider looking at some of the new features, such as transcripts, such as chapters. I was curious about the chapters thing. So, you know, Airshow supports chapters. Okay.

But what it looks for is chapters embedded in the MP3 or AAC file. Right. So are you talking about putting chapters as like a feed-level thing instead of the embedded thing? Yep, feed-level chapters. And why is that advantageous to the thing that already is out there?

Well, it keeps your MP3 files smaller, first of all. It's also a lot easier to edit and build into hosting providers so that you're editing right through a CMS admin, similar to the way you would your metadata, your show notes, your description, your chapters. Now, of course, they can also build that into where it edits the MP3s and stuff, but why ship the chapters to everybody in their MP3 files when you could ship it once in the RSS feed, I think is the idea. Now in the RSS feed, it doesn't actually send all the data.

It sends a URL of where the chapters exist. And so the chapter, just like with the transcripts, the way they do transcripts is you point to a resource where the actual transcript exists. And so that way when an app wants to access the transcript, it can go fetch that as a separate request. So there's energy savings, performance, etc. And I think editability at author time

by more people than those who can edit the headers of an ID3 file, which is a very small few. Most podcasters are not that technical. But if it's built into their WordPress or it's built into their Buzzsprout or whatever is the hosting provider then they can edit the chapters there

that's the overall concept so it's awesome that you support that out of the box though because a lot of podcasting apps don't support the mp3 style chapters our plan as we add chapters to our podcast is to put them in both places is to have both of them in the mp3 for the foreseeable future, maybe if the namespace takes off

and everybody ends up supporting it, we don't have to ship the chapters in our headers, but then also include that in the RSS feed for apps that support it that way. I think the beauty of that is, I don't know how often someone would take an MP3 and just listen to it willy-nilly or by itself, but the beauty of it living in the files and no

matter where the file goes because really the file is what you ship not the feed right as the as the creator like the thing the artifact is the mp3 i kind of unless i know more about the trade-offs i kind of more for it being the mp3 than the spec and the rss feed because like no matter where the thing goes i can open it in preview on my mac with spacebar and if preview supports chapters i can listen to it right there which it doesn't which it doesn't but if they did well like you said who listens to mp3s willy-nilly like there's so many things in the id3 tags that i mean well if a feed think about it though jared if a feed dies if a feed is from 10 years ago and it's no longer on the internet but i grabbed the mp3

before so-and-so pulled it down it's it's a re-listen forever it could be a sermon it could be an actual podcast or whatever but it's got chapters then then that thing lives with the file sure you know we assume that the internet lives forever we assume that no i mean that that url can also be fetched and held i mean you that's I mean, that's a very edgy edge case, I think. If I have an MP3 from 10 years ago. I'm curious, though, from Ben's point of view, on the IndieWeb kind of thing, like the simplicity of things.

I think that in the file is resilient. Yeah. Well, I'm definitely, I mean, it makes me nervous that they are reinventing the wheel on a thing that already exists and has, you know, it's fairly well supported. You know, there's like platform level support for parsing out the chapter information. Like, you know, you can do that. What do you mean by platform level support?

Like in iOS framework? Yeah, like in Swift, you know, there's like an API where you can just grab a chapter metadata. Okay. So like, that's already there. And if you're now creating a new format for it, then that's like, so okay, I gotta be able to read mp3 and AC files, but then I also have to be able to do this XML thing. It's also adding kind of a interesting you said it was a external url so like if i want to like grab all of that stuff like front load those requests so it's like local on device then there's kind of like a explosion of HTTP requests that need to be made. Like, you're about to have your 500th episode. Now I have to make 500 calls to get all those chapters to have a complete picture of the metadata.

Would you download all my MP3s too, though? I guess that's unfair because you do have to do that with MP3s. So that's a small thing in comparison. Maybe it's just a quibble with the way they've chosen to implement it. Sure. Because that's something that could be improved. It's like, I'm already downloading this one thing, so let's get all that data right now. Yeah. I think authorship was the major concern. Yeah. And now that I think about it,

there might already be an XML spec for chapters. Have you heard of this Podlove thing? I think the Podlove people are involved in this. Okay. I think in building this app, I came across this Podlove thing that I think embeds the chapters in the XML. Yeah, but then we get

back to the spec versus the implementation thing. It's like, oh, I already have chapter support, so why am I able to implement another kind of chapter support? Yeah, you'd have to, well, I already have chapter support. So like, why am I, I can implement another kind of chapter support. Yeah. You'd have to be compelled, I think, by an abundance of podcasts that don't put them in the MP3s, but put them in the feeds.

Yeah. I think that's valuable. If people are doing that, then I would not support that. Right. As, as technical creators, we're going to do both because I think both the advancement of the namespace and the features that are based on the feeds is important. But I also think that I'm going to use exactly what already exists

because now I'm going to get complete coverage. So I think it kind of depends on who comes to it when. There are very few podcasts that actually put chapters in at this phase. And they're very technical people. So putting it in the feed, which can be generated from the CMS, I think is a net win. Because you're going to have a lot more people

doing chapters that don't otherwise. Because they don't have the technical chops to do so. Yeah, I think the tools thing is huge. If it's hard as a publisher to put that stuff in there, then that's no good. And rewriting the file has its challenges, which we know, Jared. I mean, I get that too. Yeah.

Just thinking, and I haven't finalized my case. I'm just thinking like, okay, what are all the pros and cons? Because resilience to me says there's already a spec like Ben's saying, but also it lives with the file no matter where the file goes. Yeah, but the album art lives with the file as well, but we also put it in the feed so why do we do that so you're saying we would the spec should say to put it in the feed and the mp3 in perpetuity or at some point the file would be bifurcated from it no i

don't think the spec should say i think if i'm writing a spec i'm going to tell you the way that you should do it which they think the best way to do it is outside of the MP3 for the performance savings, for the authorship, etc. But I think the fact that there's an existing way of putting it in the ID3 headers means that everybody who does that can just continue to do that. I don't know. Yeah. Well, that sounds like

a good feature request for podcasting to point out, like, let me write this stuff once and go ahead and rewrite my MP3 file and publish it in the feed. Yeah, I think that they had to get each individual host to do that is the hard part. But that's the thing about distributed decentralized networks.

This is a bunch of people that have their own priorities and everything like that. And so you have to convince your Libsyns, your transistors, your Anchor, which is probably never going to do that because now they've been owned by Spotify and the people that started Anchor have left. You know, all of these different people who end up doing the publishing at the end of the day on behalf of the creators, each one of those has to do their own implementation, which is the hard part. It's like, that's why they're calling it a movement because they're trying to create a

movement because you got to get people moving to actually adopt these things. And who knows? Maybe nobody will. I think they have some traction, but there's a lot of work left to do in order to get these things broadly supported. What happened with that, Jared? This is sort of inside our baseball, but didn't we have a – we had an invite to Adam Curry, and he didn't say yes, but Dave Jones did say yes. But we wanted to have them both on. We wanted to have the podfather

on the show too right because we wanted the full deal the full enchilada as we say here in Texas that's right we wanted the full enchilada we got half enchilada and I was like let's hold out for the he's like it's going to take longer to get the whole and I was like oh we can wait we're not in a hurry that's kind of what happened

what was your thing when you were on vacation Jerry? hey waiter you're saying something about your... Hey, waiter. Now you're very inside baseball. You're doing a visual representation of a thing I did on my vacation. I'm pointing down at my finger. Jared was on vacation. It was a meeting we had and something with a margarita.

Didn't have enough margarita in it or something. I don't know what it was. A Bloody Mary or this. It needed more, basically. And Jared hey-waited. I hey-waited him. Yeah. So we're just hey-waiting Dave and Adam. bloody Mary or this, it needed more basically. And Jared, hey, wait, I, hey, wait,

or them. Yeah. So we're just, hey, wait, I mean, Dave and Adam, hopefully they'll come on sometime,

the two of them, but yeah. Well, yeah. I mean, sure. I've, I've given it like two minutes of thought.

Why, why shouldn't they just go ahead and implement my ideas? We'll make sure to bring that up with them. Ben, you boy says, guys, just read it from the ID3 text. I can probably represent that argument for you better than I did

on the other side today. I haven't put too much thought into these things either, but I think it's cool that they're trying, at least, to do some stuff. The unknown pro and con, too, that hasn't been discussed that may take it one layer too far, I'll say, and we can just put it out there or go deep if we want to, is the process, which you know, Jared, as well as I do deeply, of creating the actual file. And the behind-the-scenes production, even before it hits a feed, coming near to you essentially as a listener, is behind-the-scenes post-production work on an audio file in an audio program.

In our case, we use Adobe Audition. And the workflow it takes to create the content, to create the ending WAV file that gets mixed down into an MP3, ready for broadcast, but then also includes all the chapters in the MP3, to then there re-edit or perfectly edit on the initial write these chapters. So there's a whole workflow issue that's beyond that. So I can kind of empathize with the fact that you want to put it in a feed versus the file because writing the file with the chapters is challenging unless you have the software tech or a workflow that works well. So in those cases, I'm kind of leaning towards feed because that's easier to write than a file.

That's what I've been saying. Yeah, it's such a challenge. It really is a challenge. It is. It's a pain in the butt, honestly. But anything worth doing well is hard. It's a very cool feature. And I appreciate when a podcast has good chapters.

And when my app that I'm listening to on it supports those chapters, it's really a nice addition to the experience of listening to a podcast. So we're working on it. Yeah, chapters are fun. You're gesturing before Adam. You could throw that in a chapter of specific artwork. Right. So that it's synced up. Absolutely.

I mean, we are a sponsored podcast. I would love to change the art and give them some visual brand recognition because that is a missing component. I think it would be helpful to our listeners too. We have some awesome brands we work with. If we can swap the artwork temporarily. Going back to my performance argument though, each one of those images could potentially be 3,000 pixels square.

And you're going to put that in your MP3 file when you could just put it in one place? Okay, okay. You're going to put, like, how many megabytes are we going to put that in your MP3 file when you could just put it one place. You're going to put, like, how many megabytes are we going to put into these chapters, guys? Well, you're a web developer. You know about squishing images. I also know about forcing a bunch of megabytes down the wire

on my users. So I try not to do that. Even those who don't support chapters will be forced to consume the content that would support the chapter no matter what. Everybody who downloads your MP3 is downloading a whole bunch of extra junk. Yeah. And very few people ever need that junk. Okay.

I'm seeing the pros for a feed version of this, Ben. All right. I got one. Ben, what are we going to do to get you on the side of – Well, that's why I said I'm holding out because I'm not sure. Because on one side, I see the benefits here for the resilience. I like the idea of taking the MP3 anywhere in the world and always having the chapters with it. So maybe you keep the chapters as ID3 and maybe not the images.

So maybe in that point, you can sort of let the two go. I don't know. And then somebody goatsies you. Goatsies? Don't Google that. Don't Google that. Nobody Google that. you don't google that well nobody google that so let's let's put it here ben is there yet another resurgence of rss yes or no where are you at with this you're knee deep in the water of rss so you must desire a re-re again resurgence no there's no resurgence and but that's fine you know i i think like i'm happy

with where it is certainly um as a as a user i'm happy with where it is as a business and i know like a lot of other people are too and i think i think that's okay you know like it doesn't have to take over the world to be interesting or significant or a benefit for people in their lives. I mean, it's almost like better in a way because it can just be our thing, like the people who know and love it. And I don't need the world's validation for my passions so no need for resurgence it can remain a small critical mass which it is currently who uses it loves it every single day i use it i don't love it every single day jared said admittedly yesterday in prep for this call i use it every day. That's a quote. That's true.

So you've got Jared. Multiply Jareds. Here's the one thing that does need to happen in terms of resurgence. If you are an engineer, developer, tinker, whatever you are out there, if you're writing on the internet and your personal website or blog does not have an RSS feed,

you need to stinking add one. That's all I ask. Because that's the only time where it really fails me is I find a cool blog by a person. I'm like, I would love to read more of their writings. And I copy the URL and I hop over to the feed bin and I paste it in and feed bin says, cannot find feed or whatever.

I'm like, you don't even have a feed you gotta have a feed so yeah that feels bad we need at least that level of resurgence now ben here's a feature scrape those sites and for watching for updates create feeds for us have no site disappoint that would be cool that'd be a lot of work would be pretty cool yeah there's been things like that. I never loved the results. Yeah. I actually built one of those way back in the day,

and I didn't like it either. It would email me. This was like a decade ago. It would email me when a site changed, and it was just too finicky because people change random stuff. And I had to use CSS selectors to select a portion of the site that actually mattered. Right. And it had to use CSS selectors to select a portion of the site that actually mattered. And it would just always be like, eh, it didn't actually have a new update.

They just rearranged stuff. It was always finicky. That was a long time ago. I'm sure there's more sophisticated ways of doing it. I wonder if Wayback Machine would be at least a good initial stab if you can leverage the fact

that they're going to always check most sites for changes. I don't know. I just wonder if there's an API that you can at least the fact that they're going to always check most sites for changes. I don't know. I just wonder if there's an API that you can at least use it as the...

My solution for that is just follow that person on Twitter. You know, they'll probably also tweet links out.

Yeah, but then you got to hear everything they talk about. Feedbin has filters too, so you can get just the links.

It's a lot of work. I prefer you do the work and I can just subscribe to the feed, but I've actually gone so far as... Yeah, I'm just the links. It's a lot of work. I prefer you do the work and I can just subscribe to the feed. But I've actually gone so far as. Yeah, I'm doing the work. I'm filtering those tweets manually.

You're manually doing those? Ben reads each one. He's like, oh, they're not going to like this one. They're not going to like that one. Yeah, I'm way behind because of this call. Well, airshow.fm is the new thing. It's probably out there for you to enjoy. Fingers crossed.

It's going to be a store near you sometime soon. Airshow.fm is the future long-term URL for this new thing. Feedbin.com, of course. Ben, you boys, thank you so much for helping us to clarify some of the icky, fun, weird things about RSS that we just want to improve, but maybe it shouldn't, but maybe it should, but who's going to do it, who's going to champion it, whatever. This non-resurgence again to never happen. It needs to be, it could be just this smaller critical mass, whatever.

But thanks for sharing your perspective. Thank you, I think more than anything really just thank you for you know having solid ground to stand on as a product developer which is the hardest part of making things is like having firm solid ground that you stand on that you say this is what i want to be and there is there's a velvet rope of what features will go in and what features won't go in. And I think that's, that's the hardest part as a maker is determining what your, your lens is for which you're making your thing. And so thank you for that. Thank you,

Ben. Anything else? Anything we didn't ask anything. We didn't say yet. What's left. Anything? Yeah. I had it.

I had some ideas of some more like technical directions we could go, but I think we're pretty long right now, but yeah, thanks for having me. Hope we didn't bore too many people. I love talking about this stuff and I hope people are interested in hearing it. Ditto. It's been a pleasure.

Yep, thanks, Ben. All right, good talking to you. That's it, this show's done. Thank you for tuning in. For our Plus Plus subscribers, hey, stick around. You got 20 minutes of bonus content on this episode. If you're not a Plus Plus subscriber, it's not too late.

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