Oh, podcasting 2.0 for September 11 2020, this is episode number
two and we have lift off
and despite the rumors that he is just an AI that I control
secretly through a Twitter API, he's alive. Dave Jones in
Alabama. Hey, Dave.
alive but tired.
You must be wiped buddy.
Yeah, it's it's been a crazy week. Let's. Yeah, let's just
agree to that. It's been crazy.
We have not I don't think we've actually spoken on the phone. We
had a call was Monday, I think on Labor Day or late talk. Yeah.
It's been email. It's been instant message. And we both and
we have not we have not spoken. So everything you're hearing
here on podcasting. 2.0. Is it is the corporate meeting. It's
the board meeting right here.
When you take your doing minutes, right.
Yeah, of course. Yeah. It's called show notes. We've just
change that. Yes. Well, let me see. I think the best place to
pick it up is from the last episode, where we were planning
on launching a lot of things happened really quickly, after
we recorded that initial podcast, which I think was
August 28. And I do want to say it feels weird to do a show on
September 11. Because you're supposed to do all kinds of
patriotic shows. I think actually, this is one of the
most patriotic things we could do. Because we are, after all,
going for a platform of free speech, which is funny.
I had a I've got a buddy. We have a long sort of long running
text chain. And I did not know until today, like this morning
that he He's originally from Indiana, but spent some time in
Boston. And he'd say he texted the our thread and was talking
this telling the story about how he was interviewed by the FBI
after nine like after right after 911 Because he had
inadvertently talked to one of the terrorists on the train like
the morning of Yeah, and he was he was like, it was surreal. I
mean, they Yeah. He didn't say a whole lot more about it. But he
evidently had contact like the AC the morning over the day
before. And he had no idea. And then his mother saw the gallon,
one of the mug shots on on TV. And he was like, that's the guy.
You know, that's the guy. He got like a visit from the FBI and
all this stuff. He's like, Well, I don't know what to tell you. I
mean, I just, you know, we're just chit chatting or whatever.
Yeah, it was crazy.
Well, that means that you're on a list somewhere to you with
your endless texts. Oh, yeah. You're on the list. You're on
the list man
on 12 levels deep and on certain linkage to linkage to linkage.
So we got kind of a surprise after we'd recorded episode
number one. And that was Joe Rogan, who texted me and said,
bro, you got to be the first person on on the podcast and the
new studio. And so I knew that I would be talking about podcast
index, which actually, eventually I got it out.
Yeah, that was an interesting show. It's an interesting show.
Yeah, I get to get to that was a slow mo show.
Well, and by the way, if anyone heard the audio, please note
that there were I think there was some transcoding error from
48 kilohertz to 44 one and I sound like had cotton mouth and
mouth flirting with Oh, is
that what that is? Yes. I kept thinking Adam never has a list.
No, no, no, no. If you put it at one time to speed it's normal
then it's right back and I don't know Joe's voice that Well, I
mean, I know what of course. And it his doesn't change that much.
It's so slight but for me, it was really just this is what I
know we were lit but not like that. Not
yet hair lip. Even Tina
the keeper, my wife. She's like, what's wrong? I've never heard
you like that. And it was him a pothead. But no, no, no, no, it
was something that was a technical thing. It sucked.
That's the part that bothered me the most everything else I could
live with. But let's make it sound like that. Well, I knew
those guys had a lot of technical shit to deal with. So,
I mean, they put their whole studio together and like, what a
week? Yeah, a couple, three weeks but yeah, audio stuff, and
it's just a temporary studio. He's building something
outrageous. So yeah, a lot of people don't realize that but
that's okay. Now of course it did spark a lot of interest. A
lot of people started showing up with questions the I made the
mistake of not yet installing a filter on info at podcast
index.org. So what is all this email I got? I've got segregated
out the response to me now we have different responsibilities.
And I'm you know, if anything, I'm I'm driving the, the outward
force and getting, you know, getting the word out as talking
to developers, end users at a level that, that at least I can
go to passing anything off for Dave, you're grabbing stuff that
is technical in nature. What I saw was incredible enthusiasm. I
saw, I would say a large percentage of people who
contacted us saying, oh, man, I've been waiting for something
like this. This is so needed. I wrote a white paper I've I've
been collecting feeds, I mean, everyone has been doing so. And
it feels like to me, a little ripple of goose kind of went
through the whole maybe the whole industry in a way,
something's happening. Oh, wait a minute, wait a minute. This
might be this might be something oh, maybe this will be good.
Feels like kind of people were waiting for something, or we're
hoping or maybe just felt a little despair? Or what was your
impression?
Yeah, I think I felt that too. There are a lot of people, like
from the I had emails from people that either it was kind
of like they wanted two camps. They either got it, like, right
off the bat, they got the whole point. Or they just didn't like
they didn't get it at all. I mean, it was there was no, like,
there was very little of like, what, what exactly are y'all
trying to do? I mean, it was more like this, you know, this
is sort of irrelevant. You know, why are you even bothering or
100% on board both feet in? And like, I think that some of them
confusion, maybe around some of that may come from just not
understanding what this thing is. This is not, this is not a
product, right? We ran off. And this is not a Silicon Valley
product launch, where we ran off and built this product with a
team of 10 Dudes over the course of six months. And now we're
going to quote unquote, launch this, that's not what this I
mean, this, this is not a, this is not the launch of a product.
It's like the opening of a project. And the goal of the
project is to be a central directory start initially, for
developers to be able to have a directory that's been open and
free, that they can depend on. I mean, that like, that's, that's
the beginning of it. I mean, consider that we did I committed
the first code of this project. On August the sixth. That's how
fast this happened. Okay. It was helped. It was helped by the,
you know, like we said, On the last episode, 10 years of
development of aggregator development, with our, with our
other project, but so I was able to let you know, lift and drop a
lot of code in there. So it got off the ground quick. But I
mean, if you look at, you know, if you look at the project, now,
I mean, the the email, the email confirmations need to give her a
verification look like crap. You know, the UI is sketchy in
places. I saw it on safari last night, and there was something
that was that way. And
just, just me interject for a second. Part of the whole idea
of this project, is if you have skills and you can fix whatever
Dave just said, Yes, help us. That's exactly what we want.
I've got a web developer showing up saying, Well, I've got these
skills. Uh, hey, man, jump in. Do whatever, you can feed it
back to him. And you'll have to tell me, David, GitHub, the best
place to do that,
or Oh, yeah, we're rolling a bunch of stuff on GitHub. Yeah.
Yeah. Because we,
you know, we'd love that if we got comics through blogger who
created 18,000 lines of code for every scripting platform
imaginable. Big, big up to pod news, by the way, who James
credible. Yeah, definitely got the as you said, Dave, the
squishy as squishy as launch ever, which is true, because
it's not really a launch. It's a project opening. They really
helped and, and I'm really appreciative of that. And they
integrated almost right away, we got interrupt with them on their
search. Fantastic. Okay, so I interrupted you. I just want to
make sure that people understand that's the whole idea here is
help out jump in.
Yes, that lit. So James over at pod news is has been fantastic.
He's, you know, he sent us that article. He had written about
this very topic before, and a few years, a couple of years
ago. And so when he saw what we were doing and heard what we
were doing, he ended it was like Antinous energy. So he said,
Yeah, I'm on board. I mean, he was he was on board. He was
pinging us. He was pinging our search, like renew like three
days before we even had any product out on or excuse me a
side up. So he was like he was early in and also the guy
as@transistor.fm Yeah, they're jump, they jumped on board. A
lot of folks, I mean, just to too many dimension to have just
jump, send us an email and said, This is great. And all those
guys are just like started redirecting over to GitHub. And
we're throwing, like, we're throwing repositories up on
GitHub as fast as we can. And those guys, they're starting to
moderate projects themselves. And like, it's cool. Yeah. And
I'm, I'm gonna go, especially the documentation, there's a lot
of API help that they have. They're editing the API docs. So
and so I'm gonna, I'm going to be putting up pieces of
aggregator code probably today, just to let people see that and
because I think we're going to talk about the aggregator song.
And, yeah, now it's been great, very busy, but great.
If you're listening to this, and your eyes are starting to glaze
over, don't worry, that's because you're probably just
interested in what the future could be of podcasting, what
we're trying to do. That goes along with that, although it
hasn't been that much, but people saying, Hey, I just wanna
make sure I'm in your index. And these are obviously users. And
also, people who say, I'm a fan of the show can make sure it's
in the index. That is exactly the point. We want to be able
for everybody to submit their favorite podcast feed to the
index. And there's all kinds of things that we have to look at
for that. The feedback has been invaluable. Like we also think
it should happen. at the app level or the player level, you
know, that's where you should be able to do these things. Will we
have a submission, of course, but when I see stuff showing up,
like a no agenda social.com, which is just a mastodon
account, I guess it will work on a federated server if you toot
at podcast, and then I think you can even add from there. Now
cancer, you can add a feed to the index just by sending a
mastodon toot.
I don't know, I haven't looked to date. Other things you could
add in there. Yeah, that'd be great. I
think so I think so. I'll check. Yeah. So
if you have to, do you have to toot at podcast and nogen to
social? Or is it just all across?
I think it's podcast at no agenda social.com If you're, if
you're not on our server. So that's how you do it federated
let me just see what what the here's podcast so we can do the
Yes to at podcast ad and then your XML feed to submit a
podcast RSS feed. So it's already in there.
That's crazy. So you can add like, in this is the perfect
example of the stuff. So if you imagine a podcast directory or a
podcast index, if I just say, you know, if you just say those
words to somebody, what they envision immediately is a
website that you go to that you search for a podcast, and it
brings back results. Okay, that, like, there's some of that out
there already. I mean, that's not that's not a compelling
thing that the quote unquote world needs. What what the world
needs is a Is that is that but focused on the underbone? The
the inner the man I'm trying to say like the piping so that I
mean like immediately within like a day thing is a Jeff over
on Oh, no agenda social had written this bot. Yeah. Now it's
it's using our as using our API to subscribe to an ad feeds to
the to the index through Toots on mastodon. I mean, it's like,
we had actually talked about that. And he did it in like an
hour. He was awesome. Like, that's the perfect example of
stuff that, like, we roll out this thing. And as long as it's
free and open and accessible, everybody just comes out of the
woodworks and does crazy stuff.
And that's exactly what I mean, I could not have hoped for a
better start to this by by seeing the creativity, because
that's really what we need. I mean, we have ideas. We have
lots of thoughts. We'll talk about a few of them today. But
really the creativity, I'm presuming that there is
creativity in abundance amongst the developing development
community who have worked with podcasts. And once you get your
mindset a little bit out of, okay, this is overcast, or by
the way, which has a lot of great features or, or this is
the Apple podcast app. What can you do? I mean, is it a key you
make something customized key make something that features the
ones that you like, or the ones that your users of your app,
like there's so many different things, subscription lists,
sharing comparison, we've got machine learning people in AI
people and I'm actually I'm on a different I'm going to try this
day. So I'm going to do a at podcast at no agenda. I'm on a
different instance. No agenda social.com
And you're on a federated instance. Yeah, yeah, I'm
on a fake derated instance let's see if it works across
Federation. I don't see why wouldn't miss the new see if
I've addressed that properly. See if it comes back. Takes a
second usually. Okay, so far nothing.
Excitement, excitement.
We're working on it. We're working on it.
Yeah. That's, you know that. I wonder how much they regulate
bots across? Federation? I don't know anything?
That's a good question.
I really don't understand. There's some businesses out
there that don't they're like no bots at all. They just ban
Amina. I think Mastodon dot online is that way if you're a
bot, and you're getting immediately immediately
squashed. I wonder there may be some like they had to ask Jeff
about.
Okay, let me just check and see. I got one. Let me see. Let's see
if it worked. That came through. I may not have addressed it
properly. Okay. Okay, I don't know how this works. But the
podcast and the podcast bought returned. Thank you for your
courage.
Something to happen, but you don't know what it was
stuff with the AI already. We'll have to figure out what that is
that. That's that's very holy. That's hilarious.
Yeah, we need some more descriptive search results
there.
All right. So there's a couple here, I want to bring up one, I
think meta issue that has been brought up several times. And
this is I would call it since we're talking about Mastodon,
the mastodon issue with the app stores. As we know, Google Play
has either has started or is or has completed removing any app
that connects to a Mastadon server. And they use the
developer Terms of Service guidelines to do this by saying
you have created an app that could potentially connect to
servers that contain hate speech. And they're being
removed. For that reason. The obvious counter argument is, oh,
well, what about a browser? Well, you can also get different
browsers and those have not been taken down. And I've seen an
actual concern amongst some developers that Apple may go the
same way. And I actually it is in their terms of service. There
is some language for the app developer that insinuates Hey,
let me see, I brought up this page earlier. It's under that
under safety, user generated content. Apps with user
generated content presents particular challenges ranging
from intellectual property infringement to anonymous
bullying. To prevent abuse apps with user generated content, or
social networking services must include a method for filtering
objection of material from being posted to the app, a mechanism
to report offensive content and timely responses to concerns the
ability to block abusive cert users from the service and
publish contact information so users can easily reach you. So I
think in this there's a lot of you know, they go on to
children, and there's just a lot of stuff in there that I just
can be used at any time, will they? I don't know. Personally,
the way I feel about this is a, it could not it's almost the
best thing that could happen if they started throwing podcast
apps out, because they connect to an index that might
potentially lead you to harmful bullying content, which we hear
just think speeches speech. There's obviously there's a
constitutional limitation, that's where we draw the line.
Because that could actually cause enough pushback to change
those rules. I think that pushback is very, very possible.
It may never happen. I don't know. We also have been thinking
about solutions on our end that we can offer the care to address
on which which aspect is that just
purely if, if there's a threat? Do we have a way that people
can? Is it simple for an app to say, Okay, I have an issue, I
need to remove this or not surface this? What do you do as
a developer? Forget the philosophical part. How about
the technical part?
Yeah, on the technical part, there's going to be there's
going to be a there's no API for this yet. But there will be a PR
for that will basically just filter. So you can say these,
well. It will be something similar to this. I read stir
with my API key, I register a set of feed IDs or feed URLs
that I just didn't that I basically banned from my API
results. There. And there will be even say in any, you know, if
you, let's just say you're the guy that doesn't want Alex Jones
showing up in your, in your feed searches for your user base of
your app. Well, you just register the filter. And that
doesn't that doesn't appear anymore. Very similar to the way
Mastodon works, where you can moderators of a server can say
we don't want, right, we don't want to federate with this other
server. Oh, that's, that's fine. So it would be, it will be
something like that. And now Now, currently, there is a text
string in one of the API calls. And there will be more of this
as well, where you can just say, exclude anything with the
strings in it. And the reason I put that in there was because
there's so many God casts out there. And it was dominating the
carousel on the front page. So I had to put in, like, Okay, give
me these results.
You did not? You did not AI God down to you. Oh, my goodness.
Sorry, but I had to keep sermon audio off the page, because they
do in
a minute. Yes. Yes.
It was too much. I was like, okay, all right, no sermon
audio. But
just that day, that's exactly what I'm talking about. It's
like to be able to work because we had a carousel that was that
was one of our first test apps just have a carousel of the most
recently updated podcast, the idea that you can solve that
issue, that exception of which in the RSS world, in my opinion,
there are 1000s. With with a simple added string to your
call. That's, that's perfect. That's off so much. It's so many
problems. I think,
what the new the newest API call that I added before, before the
aggregator, gave me Hill was the it's recent, recent feeds. So
it's essentially the firehose, right. So if you had, if you had
an app, you had there's recent episodes was there already, and
that's where we get the carousel from. But the recent feeds is
the same thing. But it just tells you which feeds out have
ever updated. So you can just monitor that. And if you see if
the feed ID or the feed URL is one that you don't want to, you
don't want to handle just, you know, ignore it. Right. So you
know, there's, there's, there's that type of thing where it's
simple, if you're returning all this data with every call, it's
very simple to just ignore the things you don't like to. So you
know, I mean, clearly, there are limits, like you said earlier,
where, you know, there are going to be things that just bought
violate law that that be that be considered. But if you're just
talking about things that your preferences, you're free to do
whatever you want, I mean, we're just given the whole thing to
you. And then you can just dice it and slice it and dice it
however you like.
Which, which, which brings up another question that surfaced
in different, different variations. So if I look right
now on the podcast index, and I searched for no agenda, well,
there's a lot of no agenda podcasts, or at least a lot of
podcasts that have no agenda in the name. This the result
ranking the, you know, is that just alphabetically Is that
something that pops up as by feed most recently updated? I
don't know exactly what we're returning on the search. But the
the obvious question is, well, what about pirated feeds and
stuff like that?
Yeah, that that's something that I would like to solve with the
whole community. It mean, you both have ideas? And we talked
about it? Maybe a week ago? I don't remember. But we both have
ideas. And it would be, and I think they're good. But I think
really, this needs to be a community discussion of how to
solve this problem, because that I don't know how many emails you
got, but I got quite a few. And they were saying, how do you
solve the fraudulent feed issue? Right? You know, and that, that
issue being if I'm explaining this correctly, somebody clones
your feed, and then just starts to stick ads in it. Or,
excuse me. Joe Rogan, gave me an example. Although it's not a
feed example, when they were doing the Joe Rogan experience
live, streaming live to YouTube. They would, by the time they
finished the show, there would already be clips up on YouTube
on other people's channels, monetizing his clips. So that's
why they stopped streaming live so that they could have some
control over that. In this case, as a creator, there's a couple
things I'd be looking for. So first of all, discoverability?
And how do I surface so if I'm the no agenda Show podcast, and
someone searches for no agenda, I have some personal
responsibility to make sure that my, my description, my art, my
titles, all that clearly shows what I am. But if there's
something that is a clone feed, and usually those are not
necessarily one for one clones, but they're out there for sure,
I would just be to me, in 99.9%, of all cases, I'd be like,
great, my shows out there and more places, that's fine. I
really don't care that much. The minute someone starts to make
money off of it by, you know, I guess, have connecting to pod
track or one of these other services and add service, all I
would really need to know is okay. How do I go address that
with either the person who made the feed, which would I guess
it's not much more than an email contact, which may go nowhere.
And ultimately, it's, I think it's also my responsibility to
go and track that down. If there's some violation of you,
we can't always be counting on a third party to do all the shit
for you. And I know that you and I certainly don't want to be
doing that. We don't want to have to figure out what who's
doing what to someone else's feed. But in this open world,
you're right. It's a community problem that we need to solve.
And I think it's, yeah, it depends on what's going on. But
you have to kind of take some responsibility. You can't just
say, Well, someone put it out there, and then you take care of
it. You know what I mean?
Yeah, you can, like the delisting thing,
that's the I don't want to do list this is this is what you
and I talked about, we really don't want to do list. I'd
rather you go after somebody, and their feed stops, or you get
them to D list.
I was thinking about that. This morning, I was listening to on
the way to on the way to work, I was listening to a podcast
called The Bible project, which is great. And they they
mentioned on there something about Luke Skywalker, they were
talking about Star Wars or reference or something like
that. So in between the two, these two clips, or the in
between these two segments of the show, they entered, they
wove in, like a piece of music from the Star Wars soundtrack.
And it was, it was so well done. I got good editors on that show.
So well done. And it was great. But I was thinking as soon as I
heard that, though, it was it was actually quite a long piece
of music. It was maybe, I don't know, 30 seconds or so. I was
thinking, you know, if this show was on YouTube, there would have
been DMCA by their algorithm immediately. Yeah, because it's
just it because it's going to it's going to trigger something.
But because it's a podcast, and it's coming in from the district
from the decentralized, distributed internet, you can't
stop it. It's, it's just there, there's no central place where
it gets demonetised or D, you know, or D listed. So as long as
there's some, as long as it's a feed, and it exists somewhere,
you can subscribe to it, and you can listen to it. So they like
that. That is the whole idea. So we don't want to get into the D
listing game. Because that's that's just not like, that's
antithetical to everything.
Well, and we're doing and to take it even further, as I've
learned from some of the people have reached out the D listing
game is in podcasting is becoming gross. And here's what
I've learned. Yeah. So most hosts these days where you get,
you know, half a gig, whatever, do your podcast, they got the
WordPress plugin and all that stuff. They will also help you
submit your feed. So if you want to submit your feed, to
everything all in one go, and we already have a couple of a
couple of podcast hosts who are now integrating with with the
index. So that that'll be an automatic submit to us as well.
They, when it comes to Spotify is crazy. When it comes to
Spotify, they force the podcast host to host that file from
their servers. So you can't you know, upload it somewhere else
where you might have, you know, some unlimited space or just a
different service and hand off an enclosure URL that is not
accepted by Spotify, in this case, and the reason why is they
reserve the right to remove an episode which goes all the way
downstream to the podcast host Believe it or not, they remove
it from their server.
Oh, so if I'm so what you're saying is if I'm Lipson Is that
how you say it? Then I have to host the mp3 at my house on my
domain. I can't
add Lipson they have to have left Lipson, yes, they have to
be Lipson Yeah. And or else you can. I don't know if Lipson has
a deal. I don't I have no idea. We're just using that as an
example. Okay. Right. Yeah. So Spotify, find something
offensive. They they send a ping back to the host. And those guys
gotta take it off the server.
Wow. Okay. That's that is kind of crazy.
I'm not even sure why.
I mean, well, they're not. That's weird. I wonder why they
would do that. Because they're not in, they're not putting ads
in or anything. So
what someone will let us know, it's not about ads. It's about
it's about the removal. And instead an episode basis the way
I understand it. So
oh, maybe it's, well, I guess it's probably got to do with the
larger ad safety of the so context. Yeah.
So I think I tried to bring this to Joe Rogan's attention. I want
to reiterate it, maybe we've already done this. It's like now
it's an old story for me. Having
brand safety, not ads, I'm sorry, right?
Yeah, brand safety. Having something outside of the safe
zone. Whatever it is, is completely analogous to America
Online. AOL was a closed system. AOL, people love, they had
message boards, they had chats, you had all kinds of stuff you
could do. And as the internet grew outside around it, people
started saying, I want to see that, can you we want to browser
give us access to the internet and they relented, it took a
long time. It must have taken a year and a half. They relented.
Okay. You click on this button, but you got to confirm, you
know, it's dangerous out there. It's really scary. And then once
they open that portal, and people could go get all the
quote unquote, fun stuff. He was over. And they became a dial up
service. They literally became a dial up service within a few
years. And it's because people always want what's on the on the
dangerous side. And and all that dangerous when you're just
browsing around, you're in your house. So I mean, as
you get as soon as you get the warning, you're like, Yeah,
good.
stuff. Exactly. We used to say in the music business, kids will
beg, beg, borrow, steal, they'll do anything they can to get that
record, they gotta have that up. Gotta have it, they'll do
anything back in the day, pre internet, pre internet, you did
everything you could. And so I think that that still holds
today. That's why you know, kids today, and I'm just when I say
kids, I'm talking millennials. 2030. Even younger, although I
did not my life anymore. Younger kids. They know what Tor is.
They're like, am on the deep web Dad. Look at his shit. I found a
whore. Yeah, they know what Tor is yet. They don't know exactly
how it works. But you want to go on the dark web, you get your
tour? And you find that or Yeah. So yeah, that's the level which
is understandable. It's understandable. So there's we're
going to have apps connected to the index and the and what is
available and the functions from the index that I think will be
very, very popular. It may be an html5 app.
With that, I mean, that's great. That'd be fantastic. html5 apps,
or DL and get the list them. They just exist.
Exactly. And there's no app store. I already saw one
developer to check in. I think I think she said I think that she
was was going to start working on it. Let me see if I can see
who that is. While I'm looking through these emails. Thank you.
Go ahead. Good. Well, I was gonna say, and I'm not quite
sure how typically with a value for value podcast, we thank all
individual donors who supported the podcast under our value for
value model. We don't really need the podcast sponsored, we
need the entire index supported by the community. I was blown
away. I was I was blown away. We even got a $1,000 donation. And
several $100 $5 $10 $50. I mean, we have our bandwidth covered
for at least a little bit in our servers, and it's so appreciated
at the end, and also the notes that people were sending with it
just I don't know if we want to, if we want to credit those
people, not everybody may want that. So if it's okay, or if
it's let's put it this way, if it's not okay to talk about your
support. Put that in the note as you do it. Because from time to
time, I just want to reference people, you know, it's just it's
incredibly, incredibly kind. And people
if you donate Yeah, if you donate and you don't want to be
mentioned on the show, please, you know, put that in there
because I mean, otherwise we'd love to hear your name because
you're awesome. And they know. I mean, our hosting fees right now
are right about $200 a month and that's gonna go, that's gonna go
up. Clearly we need, we probably need about three more servers.
And I'm holding off.
Yeah, tell me a bit about the infrastructure, where are we at?
And how's, how's everything working? Because we knew that we
were going to get a lot of I mean, you basically were heads
down for a week and a half, maybe two weeks, just making
sure that we were ready for something we didn't know what
will be coming other than people, curious people. But how
many? We don't know.
Yeah, I'm gonna put, I'm gonna put all this stuff up on GitHub
in time as I, as I'm able to, like a diagram with the way the
Arca architecture is. But I mean, from a simple perspective
is, you know, we've got a couple of database servers that are
hosting that are hosting everything, hang in front of
that is an nginx server that is running the is the front end for
the API behind that as PHP FPM, which is dialed in to, to talk
to the database servers. Now, for search, we're using a thing
called Sphinx. So we have a sphinx server, that index is the
newsfeed stable about every 15 minutes. Then, hanging off of
that is the or the, there's five, currently five aggregators
that are running nonstop and they split. They split up the
workload between feeds that have updated within the last three
days, seven days. I think it's 14 days, 30 and 60. Out, I don't
know, I forget the exact breakdown. But basically, we're
trying to say, Okay, this aggregator is looking at stuff
that update updates based frequently. This one's looking
at stuff that's a little bit older. So that way, we're
spreading a million plus feeds across multiple aggregators. And
that's one of the servers we'll have to add, we'll probably
need, you know, a couple more, at least. And that's just,
that's on top of the web sub stuff that that I'm working on
right now. So
one question. So when you say you're spinning up the servers,
what, what? What size? You're spinning up? You're not setting
up, you know, 20 core?
No, no, no. Yeah, that now the database is servers are beefy.
Yeah, they have they have horsepower, but the aggregators
are all this is hosted on Linode. And Linode. Is, is
fantastic. Now, why not?
Tell me about the difference between Linode and anything
else? Why did you choose that?
Well, I've had my I've had my personal stuff there for a
while. And what I like about it is the pricing is predictable.
I've not told you about the latest AWS bill I
got. Oh, no. Is it bad?
Oh, my God. I don't want to tell you about it. Because I don't
want you. I don't want you to have to think about it. That was
that's for no agenda stuff. That's personal. As different.
As you know, we got search engine guys scanning my
directory, and I had a chat with a couple of them. Yeah, we're
like scan a little less, bro.
Okay, yeah. And you gave me give me too much. Think about it.
And I'm sorry, I just wanted to say this. That's what we're
trying to avoid. Like, No, I know, it's exactly what we want
to avoid precisely
because AWS can kill you. Because it's not like it's this
transit transaction. Right. It's because you get dinged for the
transit, you get things for transactions, for requests.
Yeah, it's all this stuff that get all the auxilary stuff. So
you may, if you have a low volume server on Linode, you may
end up paying paying a little bit more. But you know, you're
always going to pay no more than this. Which is like, it just
lets you sleep at night. So that's, that's why we chose it.
And so we can, we can just spin up. Like with the aggregators,
we can just clone new ones. And they're running on like, you
know, single core. Right? To get against this. They're just
small, because all they're doing is just pulling in parsing feeds
all day, and then feeding it back into the database. Right.
And then we've got, then we got the www if sort of front end
server on in there. And I did, I think there may there may be
something else, but that's about that's roughly what we're where
we're at right now. So on the upstream,
I was just looking at the $1,000 donation, I'll just use his
first name, because it's a good way to get our attention,
obviously, and to send off some information. So Brian sent
donated $1,000, and I cannot thank you enough, Brian. And he
said very happy to support this project think there can be a
bunch of ways of building value using Blockchain tech. If you're
ever interested in moving that direction, let me know. Yeah,
the two things that popped up regarding that was IPFS. The
interplanetary filing system. Um, and, you know, distributed
hash tables, Blockchain as a lot of thinking and a lot of wishing
for sure. And we've always had this in our minds. Really just
make the index really, really distributed. Yeah. What have you
got? What
have you heard? Yeah. Yeah, same thing. IPFS is definitely going
to have to be something we do.
Now. We've been using that, but it's already integrated into the
freedom controller. Yeah, yeah, we
know how to use it on sort of a simple level where we're just,
you know, you're just posting things, posting OPML files is
what we've been doing. And then just getting back and IPFS hash.
And so if we could take, if we could take that, and
can we just use the bandwidth? Just use the Cloudflare node?
They have an IP Fs? Yeah,
I think it's ipfs.cloudflare.com. I think,
oh, yeah, IP Fs dot cloud layer,
because we're, we're using Cloudflare as our as our caching
reverse proxy already, which has been, which has been great to
those guys are good.
See IPFS gateway. Here you go. Oh, wonderful. Cloud flares read
only distributed web. We read only distributed web gateway
lets you access content stored on the interplanetary file
system quickly and easily without downloading any special
software. Well, I
don't know. Did you see Did you see that Chrome. The chromium
project has integrated his put the IPFS protocol scheme like,
oh, no, I haven't I used to send there. I'm still using
dissenter. I like it so much. Yeah. Cloudflare dash ipfs.com.
Okay. Are you on a boat?
No. Not sure exactly. What just passed Bob.
Love both. Like,
yeah, I'm floating. I'm floating on my house boat. No,
that's great. Hey, this is interesting. Simplify speed up
and secure access to both the Aetherium network and the
interplanetary file systems. Didn't know that doesn't
Cloudflare to Yeah, so do those kind of work together?
Well, somebody was talking about smart contracts.
Oh, well, that makes total sense. I mean, that stuff I want
to get into for sure. I would say if you're an IPFS developer,
jump in?
Yeah, yeah. Yeah, reach out or just get on the GitHub or
something like get involved? Because that's absolutely
something we want to do. Yeah, I
think that GitHub is the place to go. I mean, the email is just
going to be so poor, that just
what are you supposed to do through email anyway, I mean,
like it, you can see, that's all you can do is set up something
and then push it off to some other location like GitHub. So
it comes to code, I mean, probably, the GitHub is, is
where to go. And I mean, she, she does an email, definitely
let us know that you know what you got. But I mean, really just
jump in and start doing stuff is fine. Just start posting code
and do whatever. And hopefully, I will be able to help that by
starting to push up code. Like, I've just got to take the code
as it stands and split stuff out and just start putting those
segments up on up on the GitHub repository, so people could see
it and sort sort of get an understanding of, of the way the
back end works. Which, which is something else I know, you know,
we're wanting, we definitely want to post the whole index as
a download. And initially, that'll probably be on
archive.org. Unless somebody else has a better you know, big
file download location.
Yeah. What's the size? Now say that thing? What what size? What
size you were looking at?
Well, without if you don't include that, if you don't
include the episodes, then you it's it's manageable. I mean,
it's the four gigs. If you include the episode, you're
pushing, you know, 3035. So that, I guess what to decide,
maybe initially, we'll just push the feed list, right? You know,
and then talk about or maybe as two separate downloads feed
list. What is one download and episodes as another? Yeah. Yeah.
Well, it depends on how much I don't want to kill our
bandwidth.
Yeah, because just that alone could be reasonably efficient at
30 to 35 gigs out can cost you money. Yeah.
Yeah. And it's more it's more just like, it's gonna weld
everything up. So
that Well, there you go. There's our instant IPFS application.
Yeah, that should be IPFS. Yeah, I'm not crazy. Does that make
sense?
Well, I've not I've not seen anything that big of a PFS? Is
it able to handle stuff like that? You're asking me? Yes. The
offense expert. Sure, sure. You knew that Cloudflare had one
therefore you're the ex Well,
this also seems like a torrent project. I mean, this that's
what Tor was made for. You know, that's that kind of stuff. All
of this has been solved. This is what I love so much about this
project. So many of these issues have been solved. Have we just,
you know, when and I was doing the same and I was sitting
around bitching, like, we need to have some decent centralized
naptime, and that's not named. And those guys, we got to do it.
You sounded
just like that. No. Honestly, I'm just setting your house and
did that all the time. Kenny
what I was doing. Exactly. And so yeah, yeah, here we are. We
just said screw it. Let's, let's let's get started.
There's a couple of see both Fisher emailed in, he had a few
questions. And these these are sort of representative of a lot
of questions. He said, like any plans for a discord channel? No,
that's not. It's just too. I can't handle real time right
now. What are your infrastructure plans, we talked
about the Linode, we actually do have some, we have a few Spot
Instances in AWS, because those are dirt cheap. I don't know if
you know how Spot Instances work. But you can
use them up and down as you need them, I guess?
Well, you bid on time. And I'm willing to pay, let's say, point
04 cents per hour for this workload. And whenever they're,
whenever their auction price level hits that mark, it'll spin
your instance up and run until it goes above that rate again,
and that'll stop. Right. So we're doing that for like
crawling and that kind of thing. So we do have a few servers over
there. And that is that's like cheap. Looks like exposed API's
or rest HTTP? Yeah. So the API stuff, there's a lot of stuff
going on and GitHub with that. And a lot of talk around the
API, as it stands now not being quote unquote, restful. Meaning
that it's not returning. It's not, it's not compliant with
what you would call a fully restful spec. So it's not
returning HTTP status code. And in the endpoints are not exactly
what you would want. It's more, this is a very simplified, quote
unquote, REST API that we have right now. And it's really just
wrote, this is V, it's v1 is 1.0, in the URL for a reason is
because it needed to be something simple, that everybody
can kind of jump in, and not have to have a full blown
RESTful client ready to go to handle it. Right. So that and
the way we talked about it on GitHub the other day was, what
would be best is if those guys are gonna help design sort of a
1.1, or a 2.0, API spec for the more robust RESTful API. And
then the 1.0 spec will stick around for you know, forever,
possibly, just to have sort of a lightweight spec, and a
heavyweight spec to give each group whatever they need.
Because if you're just doing something with if you're doing
something simple with an html5 app, you may not be able to
handle that for or just maybe too much right to handle like a
full blown full blast client. Yeah. Wasn't it simple? Yeah. So
you may want something more simple. So I think that's kind
of where we're aiming at on that. I'm gonna give you the
whole load. Oh, God, please don't? How will you separate
maintain independence? So that Amazon CloudFlare, blah, blah,
blah, can't shut the project down? I mean, I'm not really
worried about about that. I mean, what that's what another
reason why we picked, picked Linode is because a lot of
podcast projects are hosted there, from what I can tell
already. And I mean, if that ever becomes an issue, I mean,
that's just that's it. We'll cross that bridge when we get
there, but not too worried about that. And the Oh, yeah, the E
are the emails. And the emails look like crap. So if anybody's
really good at email templates, shoot them to me, cuz that's the
other thing UI, the UI design. The Oh, yeah, one piece of hate
mail this week. That was like your website sucks.
Yeah, well, yeah, it was. Yeah. We finally got something called
Art. And that's still open and up for review, as far as I'm
concerned, although I do kind of like the logo, you you cut out
of it. It's like it actually looks kind of like that. Do you
have a big version of that? So I can put it as the album mark for
the show. Oh, yeah, sure. Because I don't remember it was
all over Twitter and it was all the new agenda people make an
art which I did love them before it love them for Yeah, this
one's pretty good. I like that. It's pretty good that random I'm
kind of diggin it. What I like about it almost looks like a
dude leaning forward. Yeah, you know, talking and receiving or
both ways? I don't know. It's
it has it looks like a mic too.
Yeah, no, it has all that it looks like an antenna a
microphone. The Big Bob vibrating dildo has a bit of
that look to it, familiar with the product.
But if it looks like that, you know,
I hear it's an outstanding product. You've heard heard from
friends, right? It's the podcast pounder. Everybody. That's our
show today.
Okay, you got it, writing it down right now.
Some see? Yeah, that's all he had for this question. But like
people sending code, and just general input is exactly what we
want. I mean, that's just perfect for the whole this whole
thing. Because what we're trying I think I've said this in in
emails about five times this week is we're building this in
the open. And what that means is, like, we are building the
building the the things that people need, and if you don't
know that people need it, then you can't build it. Otherwise,
we're just going to end up building stuff that we want. But
that not might not be exactly what's needed exists. So we got
to know those things. Okay, for one, I'll tell you my thing
about imposter way, I guess you call an imposter feeds. You had
an idea the other day in which I liked. And then so my idea was
just to get throw this out there for people to chew on was, what
about a set of API endpoints that could help machine learning
and AI? Guys sort through it, hook into the index and start
finding things that look like imposter feeds? I don't know how
any of that works. I'm not an AI guy. All I know, is that like, I
know, we had at least one AI guy that did send us an email that
said he was doing something with GPT three, I think, yeah, yeah,
I
did remain. I read that too. Yeah.
So I mean, like, what endpoints do you need to make something
like that happen? Tell me and we'll, we'll put them up there.
And if you tell me exactly what you want, we'll give it to you.
And then you start playing around with it. And maybe you
can just start pop, you know, surfacing some potential
imposter feeds, and then we could put them up on a website,
we can list them and shame them. Mina say,
yeah, absolutely. If we could, that could be a whole business
just doing that. Yeah. Someone could actually have a business
just finding crap that you may or may not want to do stop or
intervene or do something. That's imperfect service,
perfect service
podcast that you suck.com It's just a big list of people who
suck. Yeah. The so that was my day, I think you had an idea for
like a, like, some surfacing on on a website.
I don't remember what it did I write this, I must have texted,
you texted to take me home. I don't remember what I said. You
gotta write that down. Man. It's here on gone.
You get to me, I did?
Well, this is true. I'm just looking at the GitHub is cool,
man, a lot of stuff coming in people. You know, I'm not a
developer, but I can see how GitHub a good GitHub, I can see
how it can be a real social thing. Right? With a lot of
interaction. Yeah, that's cool. That's very cool.
Well, you know, the, so those are the real, those are the
things that I see that people can jump in immediately with,
in, like, you are design. If, if you if you look at our website,
it any of them and it makes you shudder. You know, don't, yes,
fix it fast. It may may, or you may, Adam and I are neither one
of us or have a design bone in our body. So you get what you
guys
don't even know it looks good. So it's nothing at all. And when
you have a project, this is this is what I this is what I like to
do. And I've been struggling with a little bit because I just
can't keep track of but maybe the GitHub is the place, if you
got a project like the mastodon bot, if you got, you know,
whatever it is, let's find a place for it on the GitHub, so I
can just go in there. And I can talk about it on social media
and other places where where I can push stuff out, I'd like to
have a page for normies like myself, this is Oh, look at the
cool shit we're doing with this index, so people can just see
it, I just need to know what your project is. So I can I can
get to it. I can point people to it, and I can describe what it
does. That would be very helpful for me, because I obviously
can't do anything, I can't do any of the stuff we're actually
talking about.
If you have if you have a GitHub, you know account name,
and you just want to shoot it to me and have me put you into the,
into the into the teams or whatever. It just emailed to me
and you're, you'll, I'll stick you in there and then you can,
you know, post comments or moderator do whatever. And
that's the more the merrier.
Coming back around to publishing. Want to remind you
that Pub Sub something of that nature.
Yeah, well as a web sub is what I'm gonna do. Yeah, well, it's
Pub Sub hubbub was the initial spec. Do you remember that?
Yes, I should do it's taken me back. It's crazy.
Yes, it's Pub Sub hubbub. But nothing has been renamed a web
sub is one of the indie web standards. And with if I, if I
understand the history, right? I think RSS cloud came before.
Pope's Oh, I
think so I think so. In fact, because, as would be typical
with anything Dave Winer invents, he has a great idea
does a fantastic implementation, and everybody goes off and does
their own version of it, which is, yeah. And by the way,
that's, that's the thing that I think was very destructive for
RSS is when we became Adam versus RSS. And there was all
this jihadi stuff about it all this, you know, just pure
religion. It's like, I hope we can stay away from that.
Yeah, you know, in this funny because people just don't look
into the iTunes spec. And it clearly says in the iTunes spec,
that a pot a valid podcast feed must be an RSS feed. That's got
to be RSS, not Adam. But I can absolutely tell you 100%, there
are plenty of Atom feeds in the iTunes index, and they just
parse them, and they work. And so yeah, and they work. So yeah,
the pups of hubbub or web sub is what I'm putting in right now.
And it's gonna, you know, it's necessary.
What will that do? What what benefit? Does it give us what is
what happens with that?
Well, there you have various hubs. That's me. Now the drama
to take you away chasing the boat is Jason. There are various
hubs, of which I know about three off the top of my head,
they're super feeder, Google has one. And there's one, I think, I
forgot the name of one of the podcast network guys run one, I
can't remember which one, it is off top my head, but I saw it in
their feet. So when you have a hub, the hub becomes the central
point for subscribing. And for pushing to then what happens is,
if you see a feed that has a hub listed in it, then you can say,
you can ping the hub and say I want to be notified whenever
this feed updates. And when ever the feed changes, the publisher
of the feed will also ping the hub and say, Hey, I've just
updated it. And then you get the notice without having to crawl
it. Nice. So you instant notification. Now, the thing
that going back, so because freedom driller supported our
SaaS cloud, you know, 10 years ago. And I think that was pretty
puffs of hubbub. If I'm not mistaken, I believe so the thing
that always Yeah, I think the thing that always was a bother,
even though it works well. The thing is always a bother is you
never know, am I not getting an update? Because the feed didn't
update? Or am I not getting an update? Because the RSS cloud
hub is not sending me anything? Right down? Right? So you had
your it's sort of unfortunate thing that you can't it's like
an argument from Silence type of deal where you can't be sure of
what why you're not getting a paying. So we even though you
have public website up and running, you still have to
continue to crawl on the back end, of course, right? So we're
gonna have to have a it doesn't really doesn't help you that
much, in my opinion, with infrastructure, because you
still have to have that infrastructure running all the
time. But but it does help to with with timeliness,
you know, what we need, just dreaming like a nut job. You
almost need like the infrastructure of Bitcoin, where
people who are doing the mining, which would be our version of
aggregating, somehow get some value out of spitting out that
information within the network. And, and it's distributed. So
people are doing these pieces all over the place. I know. It's
a druggie type comment, but
it just you're told that proof of work.
Yeah. Work is obviously different from from what I'm
talking about, but they're doing actual work. Yeah. Which in my
mind, could be aggregation in a distributed format, not that
it's necessary. I'm just throwing it out.
Yeah, no, I like that a lot. And the distributed nature is and
that would be so nice to have some, essentially a dedicated
network for aggregator Yeah, yeah, that'd be wonderful. So
but anyway, that so the Pub Sub stuff is something that I'm
putting in right now. And I would have been in, it would
have been in a week ago, if not for the aggregator baloney that
I had to deal with.
You want to talk about that? Because you went through
something fun? Yeah, come on, man. Come on warts and all.
So, okay, I'll give an I'll give the quick overview here. So said
last Friday night, I had error. Last Friday, I added a new data
point in the newsfeeds table, is what have we been doing so far?
For the you know, all these years has been taking the last
update out of the channel. And if there if, if less, if there's
a last update element listed in the channel of the RSS feed, and
we just we use, we hang on to that value. And then as you
parse the feed, then most recent item time, the pub date of the
individual items themselves, if there's one, if those if those
are listed, which they don't, a lot of times they are not. But
if those values exist, then the pub date in the item, the most
recent one, overrides the value of the pub date.
If it's younger,
well, no matter what,
even younger girl Oh, of course. Okay. Gotcha. Makes sense.
Because it's considered authority. Right. Right. Right.
And the reason is, because a lot of RSS generators, will will
automatically update their pub date. And last build date.
timestamps. Just when you refresh the feed. Ooh, so it's
server end. Yes, it's funny, sir. You can just wrong, you can
just sit there and hit. Yeah, you can refresh 10 times and
you'll just get a new timestamp every time
that's almost like so people want to be at the top of the
stack by doing that. It almost seems nefarious, like kind of
sleazy. Yeah, may not be meant that way. But
I don't know. I can't decide if it's on purpose. Or if it's just
that they don't understand the spec. I don't know. But it's
some big ones. Like, there's a couple of big publishers that do
that. So that becomes the update. And the challenges
becomes almost irrelevant at that point, right. So the items
themselves, we take that that as authoritative. But I still want
to hang on to that let to the pub date channel pub date, just
because you can use it for comparisons. When you're trying
to decide if a feed is updated or not, it's just so which I
have to stop here and just say aggregating is as much an
exercise and heuristics, as it is about actually parsing,
right. Because yes, this is structured data. But structured
data doesn't mean that you get perfect content. Structured data
just means that it has to be arranged in a certain way. But
the data that you get can still be just garbage. It's just well
structured garbage
and well structured garbage that I've seen it kill apps, I've
seen all kinds of weird things, even just on the ampersand in a
title tag.
You had that the other you had a bad entity, character into data
came through in your HTML Day of the Day exporting the show notes
and you message me
Yeah, was stuck, wouldn't come out.
I mean, I haven't seen that in years. But one bad character was
like, boom,
this is this is by the way, the nucleus of the atom curry, Dave
Jones relationship is broke. I'm actually pretty good at breaking
everything. If it can break. I'm the guy that's gonna find it
like, oh, I don't know what I did. But I broke it.
That's perfect. It's perfect. I hand you this beautiful thing.
And then it's like, here's all the bugs. Isn't that
the user you want, though? The one who breaks everything quite
glad you're not 100%. Good. I'm happy. I'm happy to oblige.
So what I've done is added another data point in the
newsfeed table where we could track most recent item time
instead of just overriding the pub date, value. And using that,
as you want to see them both. So I did that. And in order to have
that populate, I'm like, so I'm just going to set off a new
index of, of about half half the table that didn't have it yet.
So triggered off near the index is about 500,000 feeds. Well,
going, going back again, this has been something that I've
needed to fix for a long time, is the way that the puller and
the polar and the parser are two separate things. The polar which
is called aggravate downloads, the downloads the feeds, the
parser, which is called party time, go in up pick these up on
GitHub did It It parses the FIE the content out of the feed and
sticks in the database, or the pull the polar when it pulls the
feed, it takes the content, the raw content of the feed and put
it in the database too. So that when the parser comes along, it
can grab it out of there. And the reason we did that is
because if you're if you have multiple servers, it's easier to
share. You don't have to start bouncing files back and forth.
Right. But
so you got into survival of the fittest mode.
Well, what happens is when you have when you're pushing
potentially 20 megabyte RSS feeds, what and that's what some
of these
20 megabyte Rs? Well, there's no rule, I don't think there's
there. There's no limitation on size.
There's some there's some in the database steps, how much and how
much I could afford
serving it from AWS, I learned that lesson
ooks. I don't know how people get away with having a 25
megabyte RSS feed,
it flashed up everything.
I don't get it. But but we had in there. And so as soon as you
start putting in those things in the database, it gets rid the
inserts get really, really slow and really, really slow, right?
So what happened was overnight, the app, the polar, was going
faster than the parser. And the parser just couldn't keep up. So
I wake up the next morning. And the parser is just like cron
just can't handle it. It's toast. Yeah, it's all backed up.
So all hands on deck added just re re engineer the whole way,
the thing the whole way, the thing, those two pieces
communicated with each other. And just using files, which is
fine. But that means that if you're using files, each
aggregator has to have an S to have a node ID so that basically
have an ID number, so that they can so that the other
aggregators won't walk all over. So they know what's pulling our
database. Right, right. Yeah. Well, that took like, kind of a
couple of days.
I'll bet I must have been fun. No. This brings us to frequently
asked question, which we've already partially answered,
looking at our potential roadmap. People are saying, hey,
you know, you guys, you guys, nice guys. But are you going to
be able to be up for my app? You're going to be able up for
my what I'm offering, you're going to be able to service me
what? What guarantees?
Yeah. I mean, I feel, you know, I feel good about I feel good
about where we are. And there's, there's clearly no, you know,
there's no SLA, there's no guaranteed uptime. But you know,
you don't get that through Apple either. You don't get you don't
get any SLAs from any of these, any of these people, if you're
picking an index. If you're and you're just sort of hanging off
that index, with your app. There's no guarantees anywhere
you go. Right. So from that standpoint,
so how are we better?
Yeah, are we? I don't know. I mean, at this at this point, I
can't claim that we're, that we're gonna have better uptime
or anything like that. But you know, that's a, that's something
to talk about in the future as we go forward. If people say no,
I don't know of any other services that offer SLAs or
anything like that. Maybe Maybe that's something we could do.
You know, for maybe that's a paid? I don't know. Yeah, I
think the long term answers, obviously, distributing that
into some kind of DHT or something where it just can't go
down, because it's always there. But Apple. And this is something
that's cropped up in the past week or two. And a lot of people
use iCloud for email. And one of their SMTP servers has been
listed on a UBL block list. Really, and you know, people I
can send you email now, when Mark void zero when he redid my
mail server, he put all that shit in all the SPF, he said,
we're either you want to be on my server, this is how we do it.
Okay, yeah, do it all the demark all that stuff. And it's really
interesting to see how much fraud abuse and bullcrap goes
on. Once you put in all the protocols, which I'm not a
proponent necessarily of all of that, but so he also has the
block list. And yeah, there it is. Apple UBL block was so of
course, I can put it in an exception. But, you know, Apple
should at least have some way to escalate this issue to them.
You're not going to do it on, you know, on feedback.apple.com
Because no one lives there. Never seen a living person
online from Apple. Yeah, but that's like a huge problem. Now
it's like, come on, people.
Oh, yeah. I'm a sysadmin. I'm in office 360 Five goes goes down.
I mean, at least once a month for an hour or more. So, I mean,
in the world we live in me. Can we guarantee 100% uptime? No,
no, I'm not even going to try to guarantee that. But the thing
that we, you know, that we can say is that we care about this
service. It's our base what we're doing, people are
supporting it. And if it's down, and I can guarantee you that I'm
working, you know, if it's down, I'm working on it. So like,
yeah, there's, you know, I think, I think Marco overcast, I
think they had some downtime the other day. Oh, really? Yeah,
things are not in the when it comes to servers and comes to
that kind of thing, things around 100%. But we we do backup
a lot. And I would say this, as far as in sysadmin, speak, our
RTO are returned to Operation Tom is, you know, it, let's just
say if there's a complete disaster, the thing everything
is constructed fairly simplistically. And it's loosely
coupled. So I'm thinking of worst case scenario. RTO is
probably 12 hours. And we could be back up and running on it,
you know, even on a different host if, if necessary.
I'll reiterate what I said in the first episode. At more than
10 years of working with you everything you've ever built,
server based, the downtime has been increased mean, maybe maybe
what in 10 years, maybe 10 times that there's been an issue. That
was a showstopper issue. And, and what the way you construct
these things I said that on the first episode, is if something's
wrong, I know that Dave can go in and three minutes later, it's
like a couple keystrokes. And he's brought something back from
the dead, which works again. And I know that's weird. That's the
way you construct stuff because your your your SIS admin, a dude
named Ben, you know, your your guy who knows that you've got to
get your office back up and running no matter what even if
you have to sacrifice some other features or something just to
keep it working. So it's
Yeah, and I can post those scripts that we use to like if
they're because each, the critical servers will each have
a restore from AWS script associated with them. So for
backing up to AWS, the restore from AWS is basically just a
shell script, and I drop in the last backup, right, bring it
right back, it sucks it down rebuilds the server, and like it
can be back up and running fairly quick. Now, the one thing
that we're not doing, and this was a RTO of like, 12 hours, if
we're talking about complete disaster, that we just lose the
database or something like that, right? We're not I'm not backing
up episodes, the episodes table, every one of those would have to
be re parsed. They basically had to be re indexed. And we can do
reindex. Right. So we'd have to pull on the parson again. So
that could take that could take half a day.
Well, we're doing something very unique here. And it feels like
people, not the not the core. And obviously of Linux
community, you have lots of cool projects on GitHub. But we're
we're doing something where it's a total throwback, whenever I
tell the story, people who really aren't involved in what
I'm doing at that level. They say, Oh, it's kind of like the
daily source code and what you're doing back then you're
just trying to get everything rolling. So yes, exactly. We
while we are a partnership and official organized partnership,
this whole idea is going back to the the origins of how we used
to get stuff done on the internet. And that's when
everybody on the internet was a de facto a developer, you could
not you could not really use it without having some command line
skills at minimum. At minimum.
I had to you had to install your you had install your dos driver
for your network card.
Oh my god. Oh, that takes me back. What was that? What was
that other protocol before before basic became TCP IP? What
was the?
Well, I know I'm an old Novell guy. I
don't know. No, no, no.
And it was there's no protocol called SPX,
SPX.
Oh my god. Well, you remember. Before SMTP I think it was a UU
ID was a Mail Transfer Protocol.
Yeah. user to user. Yeah. Was it Unix the Unix or user? Yeah, I
can't remember what it acronym was. I don't remember. I don't
remember what yeah, when I first got on the internet I had to
dial up into into a shell account, fire up a PPTP
connection. And then, and then open it PPP stack on my, on my
Mac my Mac Plus, with a huge 20 megabyte external scuzzy drive.
Whoo. Oh, nice. Yeah, I got scuzzy cable Stillson. I
still have I still find I found a scuzzy cable the other day I
held on to that but that it was massive, huge box. 20 megabytes.
It was great. It's like a
freaking where they they call the we used to have twin X For
now, if you remember twin x, it was like this big. It was our
old terminals, terminals for like 50 to 50 terminals for IBM
servers. So we had this huge twin x. And then we had these
two network segments in our in the office. And if one if
anybody ever if one if one device or if one day somebody
pulled the Terminator off of one of the lines
down you had to have the Terminator. Yeah. Well, then we
had the member Apple Apple talk.
Let's say I wasn't a Mac guy, then I was a Windows eight, you
basically
plugged a telephone line in. It had an RJ 45 Jack, what at 145 I
forget what that 11 rj 11. You just plug it right in. And you
had like a little, you'd do a little ring network at home with
phone line, which it kind of worked. It was interested in
the last one in the chain have to have the terminator or
whatever. No, no, at that
point that Apple talk, dongles did all the work, I think, I
think I think good times. Nice. So in addition, if, if you're
just someone who has a great idea for a podcast experience,
the way a player could work, or a widget or an app or some
function, send it to animate podcast index.org, or Adam
mccurry.com In that case, but it'd be easier that I can start
filtering it so I can keep these ideas separate. You know, Dave,
and I will bring it up, and we'll see if we can find other
people to implement. That's the idea is truly the three pillars
of podcasting, the podcast creators, the producers who make
and by the way, you can be multiple of these people at the
same time. The, the the listener, the audience, who
really know what they want, they haven't probably had a place to
tell anybody. So we'd like to be that place. And then we have the
forgotten man and woman who were who were who were bringing this
tool toolbox and this lunchbox to their table, which is the
developer of podcast apps. And that's when I think back to the
events I think I saw Andrew Gromit ping me on Twitter. He
was really Yeah, Andrew was the original guy with with iPod or,
Oh, cool. iPod or lemon. I think he started I can't remember
anymore. But Andrew eventually went into pod show with me and,
and, and help start all of that.
Oh, that's nice. That's great to have to have him back in the
mix. Yeah, I think like, okay, you know, one of the one of the
obvious things that's not there is a public search. You know,
there we don't have every, if you go through us, you have to
sign up as the developer account, right. And that's what
we're focused on right now. But there's nothing stopping
somebody from putting up a a podcast index search.
Gosh, wouldn't that be nice to have someone just focus on
that? And make it look beautiful and be beautiful? And yes, be
beautiful. I can do it. But it's just going to Illinois. You
can't we can't do beautiful we can do you can do beautiful
code, but we suck at design. And yeah, no, you I think, Okay.
Perfect. Perfect example, was it Trent transistor, those those
guys are great. I worked right. Pierre over there to get him
some to get his API stuff set up. And to their website is
beautiful. I will transistor guys, I will give you SSH keys
into my server. If you can make
our website look beautiful. It is I'm looking at it now. Like
that's the
kind of stuff that the you know, the I can't do. So what
is the what is transistor doing? Are they are they adding feeds
or what are they doing? They?
Yeah, they're Yeah, they're, they're integrating so they can
put nice, they can be sure and get listed out is a
pretty website. Yes. Beautiful. They have most of the things you
need right down to the icons for subscribing. I mean, they got
all of that stuff.
Yeah, it's beautiful. Yeah, they're good guys. Yeah, I think
they're just, I think there's adding so they can make sure
their guys are listed. Yeah, anything like that. If somebody
sees it's like, hey, why don't you Why don't you have so and
so? The answer is go build it.
Yes. Go build it. Exactly. Exactly. What else do you have?
David, anything else on your plate?
Ah, long show. I think we're good. I think we can probably
probably to get I want to talk about the how code relates to
the evolutionary argument against naturalism. But we can
talk about that next year.
Okay. Can't wait for the cliffnotes. Yeah. Well, good
corporate meeting, Dave. I appreciate it. We'll have the
meeting notes out to everybody. Thank you again to everybody who
has supported us with your code with your thinking with your
creativity, and certainly those with financial support. This
will definitely keep us going for a couple more weeks. So
without any having to put anything ourselves, it's highly,
highly, highly appreciated. Let us know what your your thoughts
get on the GitHub, remember where it podcasts index.org. And
you can send an email to either Dave or I even info at podcast
index.org, we'll get to pretty much everybody in our vast
organization. And, Dave, should we be looking out for something
in the next few days specifically, that, that you're
that you're finishing up or you're pushing out?
I'm working on the right now I'm working on the PubSub stuff. And
once I get that finished, I'm going to I'm getting a batch add
feature in a batch add endpoints so that you can bulk submit feed
feed URLs, but that's going to be that's going to require a
different API permission key permission level as your best
you're gonna have to ask for that. So that's meant that's
meant mostly for the podcast network guys, so that they can
batch add their shows and not have to call out you know, the
API 1000 times.
Yes. Much easier to do in one one blast.
Yeah. And we have a tweet, we have a Twitter account, podcast
index. Oh, good. There's also a blog that podcast index.org is
also the micro blog for if I add new things that I think like new
API endpoints and that kind of thing will be I'm going to blog
it there and it but it cross posts to Twitter and mastodons
if you follow the Twitter, or subscribe to the blog feed, or
Macedonia stuff, you should see those things come out. Like if
there's a new little blurb that I think everybody needs to know
about.
Can you put a link on the homepage to the blog?
Oh, yeah, yeah, I can I guess on the developer portal but yeah,
let's
let's put it on the on the homepage as well. And then I'll
I'll start put some stuff in and I'll post when the when the show
goes up. I'll post about it right there so everybody can
grab grab their copy know about it. Okay. All right. My brother,
thank you so much. Have a great weekend. I'm sure we'll be
chatting on Saturday or Sunday. Anyway.
All right, man. Good luck with shows this weekend. Thank you.
And
thank you all for being part of podcasting. 2.0 we are
preserving podcasting as a platform for free speech. We'll
do it again next week right here on podcasting 2.0