this post was submitted on 12 Feb 2024
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Are you sure? This sounds like the exact opposite
The blog assumes that people need megaplatforms to use the web, and celebrates that it's an oligopoly not a monopoly
I read it as a celebration that anyone can distribute podcasts. Distribution is via RSS so as long as you have the feed URL you can use whatever podcast player you want to subscribe to whatever podcasts you want.
Not just that but the feeds are indexed in many directories (if the hosts decide to, but most do) so you can just find it in Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or „wherever you get your podcasts from“ and instantly start listening. If you would need to go to a website, copy the feed URL and paste it into your client, that would already be fine for nerds but not very convenient. Which is why regular website RSS feeds are not as popular (and also because they are often shitty, on purpose).
You have fundamentally misunderstood the interoperability that is being discussed re: podcasts and drawn a totally spurious conclusion.
You can connect to nearly any podcast using as little as an RSS reader. You can build your own podcast app TOMORROW and that app will be able to access pretty much any podcast from any network (with very narrow exceptions for the worst actors, e.g. Spotify exclusives, NPR One, etc).
The only purpose of the various platforms is boosting discovery. There's nothing oligarchic happening there; for pretty much all of them listing your podcast is free. There's also absolutely no necessity to use any particular platform's discovery tools or to list your podcast on any platform. It's totally fine to distribute it yourself, via a link, using whatever means pleases you. Your "podcast discovery platform" could well be your local bookclub's email list -- and while the quality of that discovery may be worse, it in no way inherently limits what you can access. Even if you use that platform's app, it should still generally be possible to add any podcast via RSS URL (if any major apps don't support this, they're behaving in a deviant way).
There is absolutely nothing oligarchic in general. At least for now, so long as the fucking fuck fucks at Spotify don't get their way.