3 ms·

This all sounded great but I slowly realized that it's closed source and proprietary.

busterarm 10y ago
Right. It's still a platform that someone has to live on and may be hard to switch off. My idea is to give the podcaster ownership of everything by allowing them to self-host.
- iagooar 10y ago
  Well, this is the same discussion as cloud vs on-premises. Sure that you can run your own VPS, install Wordpress, MySQL and all the other jazz, make sure backups are done correctly, maybe even have a load balancer and two servers behind it. You need to keep everything up to date, take care of installing all those weird plugins that might break your site... Then you'll have to convert your audio files into different formats, bake images and chapter marks into them, make sure your RSS feed doesn't grow too big... Did I mention serving audio files to hundreds or thousands of clients at the same time? You can do all that, sure. But it's not something everyone WANTS to do. I am a software engineer and have a blog myself, and I pay a company to host it and maintain it for me, because I don't want to waste my time on keeping it running, although it's the kind of thing I do for a living. I just want to spend my reduced amount time on providing real value. And that's the whole value proposition of SaaS.
  - busterarm 10y ago
    > Then you'll have to convert your audio files into different formats, bake images and chapter marks into them, make sure your RSS feed doesn't grow too big... Did I mention serving audio files to hundreds or thousands of clients at the same time? And an open platform could still be built to do all of that. I'm not saying SaaS has no value, I'm saying that people who don't want to be behind a closed platform have no option. Why be obtuse about it?
    - iagooar 10y ago
      Being obtuse wasn't my intention. It's true that some people want something they can run themselves, no question. I was just explaining the value that we currently try to provide and the reasoning behind it.

Right. It's still a platform that someone has to live on and may be hard to switch off. My idea is to give the podcaster ownership of everything by allowing them to self-host.

iagooar 10y ago
Well, this is the same discussion as cloud vs on-premises. Sure that you can run your own VPS, install Wordpress, MySQL and all the other jazz, make sure backups are done correctly, maybe even have a load balancer and two servers behind it. You need to keep everything up to date, take care of installing all those weird plugins that might break your site... Then you'll have to convert your audio files into different formats, bake images and chapter marks into them, make sure your RSS feed doesn't grow too big... Did I mention serving audio files to hundreds or thousands of clients at the same time? You can do all that, sure. But it's not something everyone WANTS to do. I am a software engineer and have a blog myself, and I pay a company to host it and maintain it for me, because I don't want to waste my time on keeping it running, although it's the kind of thing I do for a living. I just want to spend my reduced amount time on providing real value. And that's the whole value proposition of SaaS.
- busterarm 10y ago
  > Then you'll have to convert your audio files into different formats, bake images and chapter marks into them, make sure your RSS feed doesn't grow too big... Did I mention serving audio files to hundreds or thousands of clients at the same time? And an open platform could still be built to do all of that. I'm not saying SaaS has no value, I'm saying that people who don't want to be behind a closed platform have no option. Why be obtuse about it?
  - iagooar 10y ago
    Being obtuse wasn't my intention. It's true that some people want something they can run themselves, no question. I was just explaining the value that we currently try to provide and the reasoning behind it.