One issue with pointing to a podcast audio file by its original URL is that those files may disappear (or, even worse, change) at any time, which would completely break the user experience and the trust model (imagine a podcast supporting a political opinion later on being changed to oppose it, or vice versa).
I happen to be the author of http://static.space, whose goal is to solve this issue (and more) by providing an index to look up existing files by their digest. By default static.space does not host any content itself (it only keeps track of where the content was seen), but it can also optionally host the actual files on a CDN so that even if the original file disappears, a cached copy is preserved.
Would there be interest in considering some lightweight integration between podcastindex and static.space? It would be pretty easy to fallback on the current mechanism in case anything went wrong with static.space, so I think the risk is minimal, and I believe it would be an interesting exploration and collaboration, seeing how philosophically aligned the two websites seem already.
One issue with pointing to a podcast audio file by its original URL is that those files may disappear (or, even worse, change) at any time, which would completely break the user experience and the trust model (imagine a podcast supporting a political opinion later on being changed to oppose it, or vice versa).
I happen to be the author of http://static.space, whose goal is to solve this issue (and more) by providing an index to look up existing files by their digest. By default static.space does not host any content itself (it only keeps track of where the content was seen), but it can also optionally host the actual files on a CDN so that even if the original file disappears, a cached copy is preserved.
Would there be interest in considering some lightweight integration between podcastindex and static.space? It would be pretty easy to fallback on the current mechanism in case anything went wrong with static.space, so I think the risk is minimal, and I believe it would be an interesting exploration and collaboration, seeing how philosophically aligned the two websites seem already.