Wherever You Get Your Podcasts

Podcasts are one of the few examples of media distribution that is both meaningfully decentralized and widely used.

Podcasts are decentralized in a way that AT Protocol specifically aspires to be, where the user doesn't realize it's decentralized.

But podcasts go further in a way that I don't think we talk about enough. Podcasts are decentralized in a way that is not thought of at all by the user, but is implicitly understood through the language used to talk about them.

The RSS of it all

Podcasts are, at their core, RSS feeds. They are really the only form of RSS feeds that actually survived the "death" of RSS as a medium of blogging and microblogging consumption.

While podcasts apps like Apple Podcasts and Spotify take submissions of RSS feeds in order to be included in the app, there are public registries of all podcasts, including ones made available by Apple Podcasts and Podcast Index. This allows smaller apps that podcasters wouldn't submit their podcast directly, to still maintain a library of all the same podcasts as any major app.

The wherever of it all

The true measure of the success of the decentralization of podcasts is the way people talk about them. Listen to anyone promoting a podcast and you'll hear the 5 words "wherever you get your podcasts."

This is especially interesting as I would assume that the vast majority of podcast listeners use Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or maybe even YouTube Music. It would make sense, and is a common practice for other media like music, to simply list out the most popular options for listening to podcasts instead of making such a grand statement.

But for other mediums like music, the statement wouldn't be true. Every platform that a song is on is a platform the artist explicitly submitted it to, whereas many small podcast platforms simply discover podcast RSS feeds without any submission from the creator.

This, I'm coming to realize is the sign of a truly decentralized network, a critical mass of people whose ways of referring to the network in speech acknowledges they understand the completely interoperable nature of said network.

But the reason podcasts are so interesting to me in this way is that the critical mass who refer to podcasts in a way that communicates they understand its decentralized nature have never consciously acknowledged or even realized that it is in its nature and design, decentralized.

Because the reality is that the language, "wherever you get your podcasts" doesn't actually communicate that podcasts are decentralized. It simply communicates a benefit of that decentralization.

Because even if a person who listens to podcasts doesn't understand that that podcast is hosted independently, they will understand that they can switch their podcast app to one with more features and still listen to all the same podcasts.

The now of it all

I think we, as the AT Protocol community, spend a lot of time thinking about how to communicate how AT Protocol works to users who are non-technical. This boils down, in large part, to the language we choose to use when giving this explanation.

I think podcasts show us the best way to communicate to users the decentralization of a network is indirectly and often through direct interaction on the network.

There are a lot of other lessons you can learn from podcasts about decentralized networks, especially about monetization, but I was just fascinated at the language used to refer to podcasts once I thought more deeply about it.

A network is, in large part, people's perceptions about what it is, and the best kind of network, especially a decentralized one, is one where people know how to use it to its full potential without having to know how it works.