Proposal: The Podcast ActivityStream (discussion)

[yassinedoghri]

Hey all 👋

First off, thanks for all your work with Podcastindex-org!

I'm the lead developer and maintainer of castopod, a free and open-source hosting platform for podcasting. I've worked on implementing ActivityPub and other Fediverse protocols on version alpha.42.

It took me quite a bit of time getting my head around the documentation of ActivityPub as it may be a bit hard to digest at first. Also, I hit some walls and had to hack my way around some of the limitations with other fediverse platforms. It definitely could have been easier if there existed a widely used spec for podcasting!

That being said, I would like to kick things off with this proposal (#1).

To help anyone overcoming the initial push back that may arise from ActivityPub, I've included a document to describe how it could be extended to push new experiences for podcasters and listeners. I also included concrete examples for anyone familiar with the podcast RSS specification and particularly the Podcastindex-org/podcast-namespace project:

• The Podcast ActivityStream
• The Podcast JSON-LD namespace definition
• Example

NB:

• This issue has been created as a base for discussion
• The examples are not exhaustive and the aim of the documents is to give an idea of what's possible
• Trying to make use of this repo, I think it is the best way forward to start a conjoint ActivityPub spec for Podcast and more

This is a team effort with @benjaminbellamy

Anyways, hopefully, this will help! And of course, any feedback is welcome! 👇

Some resources for context:

• https://blog.castopod.org/how-podcasting-will-save-the-open-web-and-free-speech/
• https://github.com/skymethod/minipub

[daveajones]

Great info here Yassine. Will you and Ben be putting your slides from the dev chat here as well?

[benjaminbellamy]

I posted the slides on Mastodon but they are pretty useless without the comments: I was thinking of writing a full article with my beautiful drawings instead 😉

[yassinedoghri]

Hey @daveajones, thank you! I thought of editing the issue with relevant links as they come into the discussion. So, as soon as @benjaminbellamy's article is up, it'll be referenced here.