Recently I looked at what’s happening in the world of Russian-language podcasts and the picture turned out even more depressing than I expected. Various heirs of rpod only evoke sadness and gloom and look like abandoned cemeteries of audio files against a backdrop of vague attempts to make it all “like the big guys.” Not that rpod was a special gem, but against the backdrop of these podsterofs and other podfms, it now looks pretty decent in retrospect.
I don’t know what caused their clinical death, but I suspect the very idea of podcast terminals has been irrelevant for the last 10 years, and it’s especially irrelevant for Russian-language podcasts. I’ve long and persistently advocated for podcast authors to leave the common sandbox which typically looks either like a garbage dump and spam collection of various pointless “shows” from success coaches and other bums, or a sterile set of dull crap of another sort, selected by these sites’ editorial staff according to principles known only to them. In any case, the result is quite predictable — “popular” podcasts at best have hundreds of subscribers, and if the listen count reaches thousands, that’s already a celebration.
Undoubtedly, part of the issue is that there aren’t many decent Russian-language podcasts, but there aren’t so few that we should just give up on this whole thing. And from all this I had an idea — what if we make a fully automatic, deploy-anywhere “podcast site in a box”? That is, this would be something where a podcaster would need to do exactly two things to set up:
- Acquire hosting space for this operation, for example on Digital Ocean or any similar service. The price is $5/month (on DO) and possibly even less at alternative places.
- Run one magic command, something close in simplicity to my other “set up … in 3 minutes” projects and get as a result a fully ready podcast site.
This ready site will be simple, lightweight, and minimally sufficient. Besides the usual, expected stuff similar to everything else I’ve worked on, the visible-to-listeners face (like on uwp or radio-t), there’ll be the necessary minimum for the author:
- ability to add and edit episodes/podcasts in a very simple but human-friendly way
- automatic creation of everything needed for publishing feeds and subscribing to them
- simple and minimally sufficient statistics both for listen counts and subscribers
- integrated comments
- basic search
- minimal social network integration
With this minimum, it’ll already be livable. Probably in the next stage we could add various, but not so important, useful features, like individual appearance settings, online broadcasting capability, chat with listeners, podcast archives, ability to distribute from multiple locations and everything else I’ve already done multiple times for my own podcasts.
Of course, the main question — is this worth the effort? Is there even demand for this? Do there exist in the wild podcasters who agree that all these podcast terminals suck and are burning with desire to leave this swamp but don’t know how to do it? Before starting to make anything, I need to understand how much it’s in demand and whether the problem I’m trying to solve exists not only in my head. Here, of course, I’m turning to you, to podcast authors and their listeners for advice and feedback.
P.S. If we all decide this is worth doing, I have an almost clear plan of exactly what and exactly how needs to be done. The work process will be (if it happens at all) collective and quite open. It doesn’t seem like a lot of work to me and I’m almost certain that some working version can be made without much brain strain.
This post was translated from the Russian original with AI assistance and reviewed by a human.