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by notpushkin 16 days ago
It makes sense to talk about “RSS aggregators”. Especially it makes sense to talk about “RSS aggregators that speak a specific vocabulary on top of RSS, host 99% of content using that vocabulary, and if you host your own RSS feed with said vocabulary they’ll show it in their aggregator but can ban it any minute”.

Did I just describe Apple Podcasts? Huh. Regardless, yeah, there’s no “ATProto instances” technically, but there are ATProto apps and the single biggest one now owns the trademark to the protocol name.
2 comments
throawayonthe 16 days ago
i guess that's fair, but i've never listened to a podcast from a non-foss app; i'm not really "in" the podcast sphere, but from where i'm sitting it seems podcasting would survive and migrate just fine if apple podcasts had to go away suddenly
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notpushkin 15 days ago
I guess that’s fair, too. I’m not really into podcasts either, and the ecosystem seems healthy enough. Many FOSS podcast clients use Apple for discovery, which I guess make sense; but there’s probably other databases, and the contents themselves aren’t usually hosted by Apple, just the metadata.

So yeah, podcasts are in good shape. In fact, they are probably the most used decentralized media right now (apart from torrents, maybe). I hope Bluesky gets to that point, and I do wish them luck, but we’ve got to see the incentives are not that well aligned. As for the trademark... it’s surely weird, it’s not the end of the world if they continue to hold it, but setting up a non-profit (not in US, perhaps) for the protocol itself would probably be more appropriate down the road.

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danabramov 16 days ago
The solution to that is to create more apps, and for one of them to become more popular. This is entirely in our hands as developers.
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notpushkin 15 days ago
The thing with ATProto is, there is little incentive in creating apps that speak the app.bsky vocabulary. If I understand correctly, there is one other full-fledged app that does that, Blacksky [0]. By full-fledged, I mean they host a PDS, a relay, an app view, a moderation service, and a bunch of feeds and other doodads. If Bluesky goes down, Blacksky will probably be fine. They are, however, yet another US company [1], which is not ideal.

[0]: https://docs.blacksky.community/

[1]: https://blackskyweb.xyz/about/support/tos/#:~:text=Blacksky%...

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