The Podcast Landscape Is a Mess, and That’s a Good Thing.
I love the phrase “wherever you get your podcasts.” I get a little excited every time I hear a podcast host say this to promote their show.
The Internet is dominated by a few large would-be monopolists who force you to use their apps to access the things you want. Podcasting could easily follow a similar path. The phrase “wherever you get your podcasts” is a monument to the fact that this did not happen—a rare success for the open web.
When you talk about the best podcast apps , you’re not talking about which shows are available where, like you do with streaming services like Netflix or Disney Plus. Instead, you’re talking about the actual features the app offers—the user interface, of course, but also things like transcripts and changing playback speed . We at Lifehacker think PocketCasts is the best podcast player , but there are plenty more options that may be right for you. You can use the app which you like the most based on its features. This is how the Internet is supposed to work.
Surviving corners of the open web
Podcasting isn’t the only thing that works this way on the Internet. Email remains relatively open – for example, a Gmail user can send a message to an Outlook user, and both can contact someone using their own email server. This is because email is built on an open protocol that anyone can implement.
Similarly, podcasting is built on top of RSS, a protocol created in the early 2000s. Tech-savvy people like me like to tell you that the Internet would be a better place if we ditched social media and used RSS instead. The internet as a whole likes to ignore this advice, except when it comes to podcasts. When it comes to podcasts, everyone has a favorite app, and they’re all a little different. And, crucially, the difference isn’t what shows you can get. Every podcast app has every show worth listening to.
Spotify tried and failed to build a walled garden
Technology and media companies don’t like it this way. Spotify has tried to change the open nature of podcasting by buying up popular shows and making them exclusive to its closed platform. The company has spent nearly $1 billion buying up various companies and locking down their shows so that they are only available on Spotify. This is why I had to use Spotify to listen to the objectively best podcast, Jonathan Goldstein’s Heavyweight , even though the Spotify app was a pretty terrible app for listening to podcasts.
Spotify’s performance in this area hasn’t been all that bad. They made Joe Rogan less influential by removing his content from YouTube and most podcast apps – which may have made the world a little better. Jokes aside, the fact that things turned out this way points to how completely Spotify’s attempt to take over podcasting has failed . Podcasts as a medium reach the most people when a show is offered on as many apps as possible.
We may be moving towards a more open social media environment.
I think the open web is long overdue for a comeback, and we can look to podcasts to see how this can happen: you need a robust protocol that allows anyone to distribute information to many different applications at the same time. Something like this is perfect for social media. Heck, this is already happening in some places.
I believe that ActivityPub, the protocol that powers Mastodon and other social networks, can and is pushing in the right direction. Threads users can now join Fediverse ; Automattic, the company that currently owns Tumblr, also plans to eventually integrate with ActivityPub; and any WordPress site can become part of Fediverse by installing a simple plugin.
There are shortcomings in this system. There is a complication with Bluesky, a federated social network built on a completely different protocol that currently does not interact with ActivityPub in any way. That could change— third parties are working on the connections —and there’s nothing stopping Bluesky from eventually connecting the protocols. However, this has not yet happened.
Plus, Fediverse is full of drama, which you might remember from the forums of the 2000s. For example, right now some people are very excited about Threads becoming part of the Fediverse, while others are very concerned that Meta, the (evil) company that owns Threads and Facebook, may end up destroying the influence. Some large instances block threads altogether. This kind of drama plays out all the time, as in any online community.
Regardless, I think the idea behind ActivityPub is encouraging. Over time, this could make social media more like podcasts; a world where you can use any app to follow and interact with anyone on any other app. This is the version of the Internet I would prefer over our current system, which is dominated by four social networks, each of which mainly contains screenshots from the other three.