Episode 272: "Is this Y'all?"

Podcasting 2.0 · 25/09/2026 19:15 · 1 h 31

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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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