Episode 272: "Is this Y'all?"

00 - ️ THE SCHEMA IS LIVE — AND THEN THE AGGREGATORS PICKED A FIGHT

<b>Dave has already told us this one is his: "Will explain in the board meeting tomorrow."</b>

<b>Mon 22 Sep — the cutover lands:</b> "#api <b>All api endpoints are now live with the new database schema.</b> Bug reports welcome. I'm tired. "

@dave — all endpoints live on the new schema

<b>Tue 23 Sep — and now the real work:</b> "Now comes the post-deploy quality testing of the Index as a whole. <b>Now that we have an audit trail for every feed</b> we will need to <b>walk every podcast in the Index</b> to see where it stands and what metadata needs reconciling."

<b>New tables in the dump:</b> "@js There are new tables in the ndjson dump now. " · "@js You're the guinea pig. Let me know if anything looks off."

<b>On breakage, to Mitch (Podverse):</b> "Any additional parameters should be additive. <b>The overall shape of the response should not change.</b> There *shouldn't* be any breakage unless the client is doing a Rust style strict type coercion. But, I wouldn't expect that to be common since JSON is fragile."

<b>Thu 24 Sep — the brawl, in four posts:</b>

12:10 — "#api <b>Adding 2 new indexes on the feeds table.</b> Expect the api to choke for a few minutes until this completes."

14:38 — "#api <b>All out brawl with the feed aggregators this morning. I'm about to win though.</b>"

17:08 — "<b>Battle is over. The war is ongoing.</b>"

20:02 — "#api I fixed a huge problem with the feed aggregators. Based on this snapshot of our database metrics, <b>can you guess at roughly what time that happened?</b>" · 20:03 — "<b>Network throughput up. CPU and disk rate down. It's a win-win.</b>"

<b> The question for Dave:</b> what were the aggregators actually doing — hammering the feeds, or something subtler that the new audit trail made visible for the first time? And what did the two indexes fix?

<b>19:13 — the bug he flagged for today:</b> "#api There was a problem with <b>search ranking in the search/byterm endpoint</b> after switching the db schema. This should be fixed now. <b>Will explain in the board meeting tomorrow.</b>"

<b>Loose end:</b> @ChadF, 24 Sep — "@dave looks like <b>podcaster wallet is returning the old node address</b>." Not visibly answered yet.

<b>Also closed this week:</b> docs-api #160, "BUG: Wrong season number in some episodes" — season 14 coming back as 4.

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01 - GUEST: SAM SETHI — TRUEFANS, AND THE THREE FEEDS HE ASKED TO TALK ABOUT

<b>He set this agenda himself.</b> 22 Sep, to Dave: "thank you my friend. When are we going to get you back on PWR and equally <b>I would love to come back on P2.0 to talk about SuperFeeds, Publisher Feeds and Network Feeds</b>."

@samsethi — the ask (22 Sep)

<b> 1. SUPERFEEDS — what he has actually shipped</b>

His own definition, 19 Jul: "Traditional RSS feeds were designed to distribute podcast episodes, with the audio attached using the enclosure tag. Then came Podcasting 2.0, introducing <b>more than 30 new namespace tags</b>… A SuperFeed lets you combine much more than audio or video. Alongside your podcast episodes you can include <b>blog posts, publisher updates, events, premium paid content — all delivered through a single RSS feed</b>."

<b>The bit that matters for the Index:</b> SuperFeeds started (Jul 2024) as "the ability for a podcaster to <b>add any new Podcasting 2.0 tag to their existing RSS feed</b> and then publish the new TrueFans RSS feed to the Podcast Index <b>while staying with their existing host</b>" — a free claim-and-enrich service that keeps the enclosure with the original host.

<b>Where it is now:</b> two experimental tags added Apr 2026 — <b>podcast:pinned</b> and <b>podcast:store</b> — plus podroll and publisher feeds, with events and merch built on the publisher-feed pattern. "Our goal is to allow creators to <b>build a SuperFeed by picking what elements are added</b> to their RSS feed."

<b>And the anti-Patreon argument, 7 May:</b> "Apple's proprietary API for HLS video doesn't use RSS. <b>TrueFans is going the other way.</b> We are building Super RSS feeds with <b>Audio, Video and Freemium/Premium RSS in the same feed. No need for Patreon private feeds.</b>"

<b>Ask:</b> if a SuperFeed is one feed containing podcast + blog + events + merch + premium, <b>what does an app do with the items it does not understand?</b> Is there a medium or a filter, or does every app have to learn every type?

<b> 2. PUBLISHER FEEDS — and the pattern he keeps reusing</b>

He builds everything on remote items off the publisher feed: "<b>We will add NEW Events and Merchant tags based on the publisher feed</b>" — `&lt;podcast:publisher&gt;&lt;podcast:remoteItem medium="publisher" feedUrl="https://feeds.truefans.fm/rss/publishers/…" /&gt;&lt;/podcast:publisher&gt;`

<b>Event feed proposal, 1 Aug:</b> "We are proposing a <b>new EVENT feed based on the Publisher Feed</b>" — events in the admin dashboard appear on the podcast page; tickets sold externally or in-app via Apple Pay / Stripe. Live example: the Cheerful Earful Comedy Festival on one page.

<b>Merch — the StoreFront proposal, 31 Aug:</b> "TrueFans recently added a new experimental tag for RSS feeds called <b>Podcast:StoreFront</b>. The aim of this StoreFront tag is to <b>mirror the Funding tag</b>" — a URL to a third-party store (Amazon, Sticker Mule, Shopify) puts a shop icon on the page. Later: products hosted in TrueFans, paid in fiat via Stripe or in SATs.

<b>Ask Dave:</b> is the publisher-feed-with-remote-items pattern the right substrate for events and merch, or is this three tags that each want their own medium?

<b>️ 3. NETWORK FEEDS — the one nobody has seen yet</b>

<b>This is new.</b> He has posted publicly about SuperFeeds since 2024 and Publisher Feeds since 2024 — but <b>"Network Feeds" appears exactly once anywhere on podcastindex.social: in his 22 Sep ask</b>. There is no proposal, no example feed, no thread. <b>This is the scoop of the segment — let him define it live.</b>

<b>Ask:</b> what is a Network Feed, and how is it not just a publisher feed with more members? Who owns it — the network or the shows? What happens to a show that leaves?

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02 - SAM ON PAYMENTS — "THE FUTURE IS MICROPAYMENTS… BUT MAYBE NOT BITCOIN"

<b> This is the live wire of the episode.</b> V4V was built on Lightning and SATs. Our guest — who has shipped a SATs wallet — is now saying the rail may be wrong.

<b>24 Sep, in his own words:</b> "We also just enabled <b>Paypal, Amazon Pay, Samsung Pay</b> to go alongside Apple/Google Pay and Bank. I am now looking at <b>Stablecoin</b> as an option. <b>I still [think] the future is micropayments direct from fan to creator but maybe not Bitcoin.</b>"

<b>Stripe Pay By Bank — TrueFans added support same day:</b> "Pay by Bank is a single-use payment method that allows customers to <b>pay directly from their bank account instead of using a card</b>… runs on banking infrastructure and takes advantage of <b>open banking APIs</b>." Caveat he flagged: "only <b>Finland and UK</b> which is odd but we will keep an eye and see if other countries get added."

<b>25 Sep 00:29, the thesis:</b> "there is still a <b>real need on the web for micropayments</b>. I think when <b>mainstream banks give customers a current/chequing account and a digital account</b> and make it easy for us to transfer money from one account to the other <b>will be the start of a wider adoption</b>."

<b>27 Jul, the post-mortem on v1:</b> "Maybe <b>v1.0 was too complex with KYC, Nostr, Alby and Moonpay</b>. I am watching <b>Stripe, Stablecoins and x.402</b>, a new open payment protocol that makes internet-native micropayments…" — and the Dizzee Rascal quote: "Some people think I'm bonkers / But I just think I'm free."

<b> But his funding tag is the purest V4V in the ecosystem — give him credit for it:</b> "The podcaster <b>only gets paid if they continue to publish</b> more episodes… Platforms like Patreon or Substack will continue to take the monthly amount <b>even if the podcaster doesn't publish</b>." The fan sets a monthly maximum; TrueFans draws from it per episode published. <b>That is value-for-value enforced in code.</b>

<b>Also:</b> if a feed has no funding tag, TrueFans turns its own on and takes <b>10% of funding transactions</b>. Worth asking how that sits with podcasters who did not ask for it.

<b>The question for the room:</b> if Pay By Bank and stablecoins do the job with less friction, <b>is Lightning still the point of V4V — or was the point always fan-to-creator with no intermediary, whatever the rail?</b>

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03 - ️ SAM'S THESIS — "LESS LIKE PODCAST APPS AND MORE LIKE CREATOR PORTALS"

<b>15 Sep, his four-part statement of direction:</b> "The old model was simple: <b>one creator → one podcast → one audio app</b>. That worked when podcasting was primarily about listening. But creators are building something much bigger now… the next generation of creator platforms will look <b>less like podcast apps and more like Creator Portals</b> — a single place where creators can build, engage, communicate with and monetise their communities."

<b>What is already live:</b> host and stream audio or video, publish blogs, run live events, sell tickets, merch links, premium per-episode and per-blog pricing, a fan wallet.

<b>New this month — newsletters:</b> "Starting next week we're taking another step forward with the launch of the <b>NEW TrueFans Newsletter</b>… the plan is to make the <b>same newsletter functionality available to every TrueFans creator</b>" with subscriber / delivered / opened / clicked stats. "The goal is to give creators <b>one place to build, own, manage and monetise their entire relationship with their true fans</b>."

<b>Roadmap he published:</b> customised domains · new native iOS &amp; Android apps · CarPlay, Apple Watch, Apple TV.

<b>Features built on P2.0 tags — the good citizen argument (31 Aug):</b> "I'm excited that we are starting to see apps <b>building new features on top of Podcasting 2.0 tags</b>… I'm now looking at <b>every tag</b>, trying to see if we can build a new feature on top."

• <b>Frequency tag</b> → show the <b>NEXT</b> publish date instead of the last one · • <b>Live Item tag</b> → PENDING / LIVE NOW / END status on the page, localised · • <b>Person tag</b> → aggregate every podcast where you are tagged into <b>one dynamically-updating playlist</b> on your profile · • <b>Location</b> → new location search built on @alberto's Radar.

<b>Coming:</b> "Our next big feature will be to use <b>AI to grab 5 clips</b> from the audio and/or video… and <b>add those clips to the Podcasting 2.0 soundbite tag</b>, as well as auto publishing those clips to the podcasters social media." Machine-generated soundbites written back into the namespace — that is a namespace question, not just a feature.

<b>And the gamification layer:</b> 30 activity verbs tracking fan behaviour, points to identify <b>SuperFans</b>, fans can OAuth their socials and auto-publish chosen verbs — including <b>how long they played and percent completed</b>, with a play-percentage slider.

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