Episode 272: "Is this Y'all?" · Podcasting 2.0

Podcasting 2.0 September 25th 2026 Episode 272 - "Is this Y'all?"

00 - 🗄️ THE SCHEMA IS LIVE — AND THEN THE AGGREGATORS PICKED A FIGHT

Dave has already told us this one is his: "Will explain in the board meeting tomorrow."

Mon 22 Sep — the cutover lands: "#api All api endpoints are now live with the new database schema. Bug reports welcome. I'm tired. 😅"

@dave — all endpoints live on the new schema

Tue 23 Sep — and now the real work: "Now comes the post-deploy quality testing of the Index as a whole. Now that we have an audit trail for every feed we will need to walk every podcast in the Index to see where it stands and what metadata needs reconciling."

New tables in the dump: "@js There are new tables in the ndjson dump now. 😉" · "@js You're the guinea pig. Let me know if anything looks off."

On breakage, to Mitch (Podverse): "Any additional parameters should be additive. The overall shape of the response should not change. There *shouldn't* be any breakage unless the client is doing a Rust style strict type coercion. But, I wouldn't expect that to be common since JSON is fragile."

Thu 24 Sep — the brawl, in four posts:

12:10 — "#api Adding 2 new indexes on the feeds table. Expect the api to choke for a few minutes until this completes."

14:38 — "#api All out brawl with the feed aggregators this morning. I'm about to win though."

17:08 — "Battle is over. The war is ongoing."

20:02 — "#api I fixed a huge problem with the feed aggregators. Based on this snapshot of our database metrics, can you guess at roughly what time that happened?" · 20:03 — "Network throughput up. CPU and disk rate down. It's a win-win."

🔍 The question for Dave: what were the aggregators actually doing — hammering the feeds, or something subtler that the new audit trail made visible for the first time? And what did the two indexes fix?

19:13 — the bug he flagged for today: "#api There was a problem with search ranking in the search/byterm endpoint after switching the db schema. This should be fixed now. Will explain in the board meeting tomorrow."

Loose end: @ChadF, 24 Sep — "@dave looks like podcaster wallet is returning the old node address." Not visibly answered yet.

Also closed this week: docs-api #160, "BUG: Wrong season number in some episodes" — season 14 coming back as 4.

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01 - 🎤 GUEST: SAM SETHI — TRUEFANS, AND THE THREE FEEDS HE ASKED TO TALK ABOUT

He set this agenda himself. 22 Sep, to Dave: "thank you my friend. When are we going to get you back on PWR and equally I would love to come back on P2.0 to talk about SuperFeeds, Publisher Feeds and Network Feeds."

@samsethi — the ask (22 Sep)

📦 1. SUPERFEEDS — what he has actually shipped

His own definition, 19 Jul: "Traditional RSS feeds were designed to distribute podcast episodes, with the audio attached using the enclosure tag. Then came Podcasting 2.0, introducing more than 30 new namespace tags… A SuperFeed lets you combine much more than audio or video. Alongside your podcast episodes you can include blog posts, publisher updates, events, premium paid content — all delivered through a single RSS feed."

The bit that matters for the Index: SuperFeeds started (Jul 2024) as "the ability for a podcaster to add any new Podcasting 2.0 tag to their existing RSS feed and then publish the new TrueFans RSS feed to the Podcast Index while staying with their existing host" — a free claim-and-enrich service that keeps the enclosure with the original host.

Where it is now: two experimental tags added Apr 2026 — podcast:pinned and podcast:store — plus podroll and publisher feeds, with events and merch built on the publisher-feed pattern. "Our goal is to allow creators to build a SuperFeed by picking what elements are added to their RSS feed."

And the anti-Patreon argument, 7 May: "Apple's proprietary API for HLS video doesn't use RSS. TrueFans is going the other way. We are building Super RSS feeds with Audio, Video and Freemium/Premium RSS in the same feed. No need for Patreon private feeds."

🔍 Ask: if a SuperFeed is one feed containing podcast + blog + events + merch + premium, what does an app do with the items it does not understand? Is there a medium or a filter, or does every app have to learn every type?

📡 2. PUBLISHER FEEDS — and the pattern he keeps reusing

He builds everything on remote items off the publisher feed: "We will add NEW Events and Merchant tags based on the publisher feed" — `<podcast:publisher><podcast:remoteItem medium="publisher" feedUrl="https://feeds.truefans.fm/rss/publishers/…" /></podcast:publisher>`

Event feed proposal, 1 Aug: "We are proposing a new EVENT feed based on the Publisher Feed" — events in the admin dashboard appear on the podcast page; tickets sold externally or in-app via Apple Pay / Stripe. Live example: the Cheerful Earful Comedy Festival on one page.

Merch — the StoreFront proposal, 31 Aug: "TrueFans recently added a new experimental tag for RSS feeds called Podcast:StoreFront. The aim of this StoreFront tag is to mirror the Funding tag" — a URL to a third-party store (Amazon, Sticker Mule, Shopify) puts a shop icon on the page. Later: products hosted in TrueFans, paid in fiat via Stripe or in SATs.

🔍 Ask Dave: is the publisher-feed-with-remote-items pattern the right substrate for events and merch, or is this three tags that each want their own medium?

🕸️ 3. NETWORK FEEDS — the one nobody has seen yet

This is new. He has posted publicly about SuperFeeds since 2024 and Publisher Feeds since 2024 — but "Network Feeds" appears exactly once anywhere on podcastindex.social: in his 22 Sep ask. There is no proposal, no example feed, no thread. This is the scoop of the segment — let him define it live.

🔍 Ask: what is a Network Feed, and how is it not just a publisher feed with more members? Who owns it — the network or the shows? What happens to a show that leaves?

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02 - 💳 SAM ON PAYMENTS — "THE FUTURE IS MICROPAYMENTS… BUT MAYBE NOT BITCOIN"

🚨 This is the live wire of the episode. V4V was built on Lightning and SATs. Our guest — who has shipped a SATs wallet — is now saying the rail may be wrong.

24 Sep, in his own words: "We also just enabled Paypal, Amazon Pay, Samsung Pay to go alongside Apple/Google Pay and Bank. I am now looking at Stablecoin as an option. I still [think] the future is micropayments direct from fan to creator but maybe not Bitcoin."

Stripe Pay By Bank — TrueFans added support same day: "Pay by Bank is a single-use payment method that allows customers to pay directly from their bank account instead of using a card… runs on banking infrastructure and takes advantage of open banking APIs." Caveat he flagged: "only Finland and UK which is odd but we will keep an eye and see if other countries get added."

25 Sep 00:29, the thesis: "there is still a real need on the web for micropayments. I think when mainstream banks give customers a current/chequing account and a digital account and make it easy for us to transfer money from one account to the other will be the start of a wider adoption."

27 Jul, the post-mortem on v1: "Maybe v1.0 was too complex with KYC, Nostr, Alby and Moonpay. I am watching Stripe, Stablecoins and x.402, a new open payment protocol that makes internet-native micropayments…" — and the Dizzee Rascal quote: "Some people think I'm bonkers / But I just think I'm free."

💡 But his funding tag is the purest V4V in the ecosystem — give him credit for it: "The podcaster only gets paid if they continue to publish more episodes… Platforms like Patreon or Substack will continue to take the monthly amount even if the podcaster doesn't publish." The fan sets a monthly maximum; TrueFans draws from it per episode published. That is value-for-value enforced in code.

Also: if a feed has no funding tag, TrueFans turns its own on and takes 10% of funding transactions. Worth asking how that sits with podcasters who did not ask for it.

🔍 The question for the room: if Pay By Bank and stablecoins do the job with less friction, is Lightning still the point of V4V — or was the point always fan-to-creator with no intermediary, whatever the rail?

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03 - 🏛️ SAM'S THESIS — "LESS LIKE PODCAST APPS AND MORE LIKE CREATOR PORTALS"

15 Sep, his four-part statement of direction: "The old model was simple: one creator → one podcast → one audio app. That worked when podcasting was primarily about listening. But creators are building something much bigger now… the next generation of creator platforms will look less like podcast apps and more like Creator Portals — a single place where creators can build, engage, communicate with and monetise their communities."

What is already live: host and stream audio or video, publish blogs, run live events, sell tickets, merch links, premium per-episode and per-blog pricing, a fan wallet.

New this month — newsletters: "Starting next week we're taking another step forward with the launch of the NEW TrueFans Newsletter… the plan is to make the same newsletter functionality available to every TrueFans creator" with subscriber / delivered / opened / clicked stats. "The goal is to give creators one place to build, own, manage and monetise their entire relationship with their true fans."

Roadmap he published: customised domains · new native iOS & Android apps · CarPlay, Apple Watch, Apple TV.

Features built on P2.0 tags — the good citizen argument (31 Aug): "I'm excited that we are starting to see apps building new features on top of Podcasting 2.0 tags… I'm now looking at every tag, trying to see if we can build a new feature on top."

• Frequency tag → show the NEXT publish date instead of the last one · • Live Item tag → PENDING / LIVE NOW / END status on the page, localised · • Person tag → aggregate every podcast where you are tagged into one dynamically-updating playlist on your profile · • Location → new location search built on @alberto's Radar.

Coming: "Our next big feature will be to use AI to grab 5 clips from the audio and/or video… and add those clips to the Podcasting 2.0 soundbite tag, as well as auto publishing those clips to the podcasters social media." 💡 Machine-generated soundbites written back into the namespace — that is a namespace question, not just a feature.

And the gamification layer: 30 activity verbs tracking fan behaviour, points to identify SuperFans, fans can OAuth their socials and auto-publish chosen verbs — including how long they played and percent completed, with a play-percentage slider.

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Last Modified 09/25/2026 14:52:38 by Freedom Controller Link to the opml for this document.

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