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Interesting you say that, I got into podcasts recently (a bit late I know) and found the space very confusing. It's kind'of all on iTunes, but not really, you c

Interesting you say that, I got into podcasts recently (a bit late I know) and found the space very confusing. It's kind'of all on iTunes, but not really, you can get them from their source sites, but also some apps have a subset. Understanding the model is not easy. I didn't know it was powered by rss until this thread. I am really pro federation, and I am not deterred, but I am an engineer on HN. I wonder why email, being federated as well, is easy for anyone to grok.

afterburner 9y ago
Pocket Casts is a nice podcast app.
- CAT0 9y ago
  They also have a nice web interface https://playbeta.pocketcasts.com/web/ https://playbeta.pocketcasts.com/web/
  - _asummers 9y ago
    There's a native OSX app, too, which has been mostly ok for me, so far. A few bugs occasionally, but it's better than running in browser in my experience.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
princekolt 9y ago
The email protocols are hell. Absolute hell. I don’t think anyone truly groks how it works all the way down either. A big difference is that email has slowly been developed over a period of decades, and so a lot of great software (both libs and GUIs) were built on top of it, and “perfected” over the time. Maybe what prevented RSS from reaching the same level of development is that RSS is only composed by “creators”, while email has no target audience.
- jon_richards 9y ago
  An example: My server sends notification emails to the company automatically. Everyone is using gmail to view their emails. When there is an update about a previous notification, I send an email with the in-reply-to header. Oh wait, gmail doesn't use that. Alright, I'll just make sure that the subject line is exactly the same as the original notification (as gmail says to do). This works for a bit, but if someone hits reply-all, suddenly the subject line for the thread is now "Re: <the original subject>" and my followups no longer thread. I'll just make sure that my followups always have "Re: " in them, so they thread whether or not people have been communicating on the thread. This mostly works, but if the update is a week or two later, gmail just decides they shouldn't thread. This is on top of the fact that emails with similar subject lines occasionally thread together. This gets really annoying when you send automated emails where the subjects are the same except for an identifier of some sort (specifically to prevent threading). And there's no way to give feedback to gmail about this. No way to forcefully thread or de-thread emails. You are just given the choice of gmail's threading or no threading at all.
  - iforgotpassword 9y ago
    Just don't use the web front end, access them using your favorite mail client using IMAP. Oh wait, google fucked that up too. Luckily most clients worked around the google bullshit over the years.
  - thinkloop 9y ago
    Good points - so federated email works so well because most of us decided to federate to a single server. Something sad about that.
  - walshemj 9y ago
    Well you just need to start using a real MUA like outlook or thunderbird and drop gmail
    - andybak 9y ago
      I dropped both of those in favour of Gmail (and now Inbox) years ago much to my delight. What am I missing?
nicky0 9y ago
Open solutions are always more confusing than centralised ones. End user podcast apps try to hide all the details an make it look like "here's an app with podcasts in it". But behind the scenes it is wonderfully messy. Same with email. Any time you try to make things work without a single central point it makes the whole thing harder to grasp and explain. Open ID was another example. End-user contact points try to simplify things by "productizing" the offering and hiding the implementation details, with various degrees of success.

afterburner 9y ago

Pocket Casts is a nice podcast app.

CAT0 9y ago
They also have a nice web interface https://playbeta.pocketcasts.com/web/ https://playbeta.pocketcasts.com/web/
- _asummers 9y ago
  There's a native OSX app, too, which has been mostly ok for me, so far. A few bugs occasionally, but it's better than running in browser in my experience.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

princekolt 9y ago

The email protocols are hell. Absolute hell. I don’t think anyone truly groks how it works all the way down either. A big difference is that email has slowly been developed over a period of decades, and so a lot of great software (both libs and GUIs) were built on top of it, and “perfected” over the time. Maybe what prevented RSS from reaching the same level of development is that RSS is only composed by “creators”, while email has no target audience.

jon_richards 9y ago
An example: My server sends notification emails to the company automatically. Everyone is using gmail to view their emails. When there is an update about a previous notification, I send an email with the in-reply-to header. Oh wait, gmail doesn't use that. Alright, I'll just make sure that the subject line is exactly the same as the original notification (as gmail says to do). This works for a bit, but if someone hits reply-all, suddenly the subject line for the thread is now "Re: <the original subject>" and my followups no longer thread. I'll just make sure that my followups always have "Re: " in them, so they thread whether or not people have been communicating on the thread. This mostly works, but if the update is a week or two later, gmail just decides they shouldn't thread. This is on top of the fact that emails with similar subject lines occasionally thread together. This gets really annoying when you send automated emails where the subjects are the same except for an identifier of some sort (specifically to prevent threading). And there's no way to give feedback to gmail about this. No way to forcefully thread or de-thread emails. You are just given the choice of gmail's threading or no threading at all.
- iforgotpassword 9y ago
  Just don't use the web front end, access them using your favorite mail client using IMAP. Oh wait, google fucked that up too. Luckily most clients worked around the google bullshit over the years.
- thinkloop 9y ago
  Good points - so federated email works so well because most of us decided to federate to a single server. Something sad about that.
- walshemj 9y ago
  Well you just need to start using a real MUA like outlook or thunderbird and drop gmail
  - andybak 9y ago
    I dropped both of those in favour of Gmail (and now Inbox) years ago much to my delight. What am I missing?

nicky0 9y ago

Open solutions are always more confusing than centralised ones. End user podcast apps try to hide all the details an make it look like "here's an app with podcasts in it". But behind the scenes it is wonderfully messy. Same with email. Any time you try to make things work without a single central point it makes the whole thing harder to grasp and explain. Open ID was another example. End-user contact points try to simplify things by "productizing" the offering and hiding the implementation details, with various degrees of success.