Awesome, thanks comrade! I’m working on the new site and I’ll post it in this comm as soon as it’s ready. The process for donating feeds will be the same manual one as for Jumble’s old site: PM me the link here and I’ll add it.

Fantastic, comrade, thank you so much for the research! I have a first version of this project almost ready, and it works almost exactly as you described:

• a cronjob downloads, processes and dumps the xml files into a folder
• a Caddy file server exposes those files through my sellf-hosted VPS

I think Jumble’s site was more elaborate than that, but as a quick replacement this should be fine. I’ll post the site here as soon as it’s ready, and you’re welcome to donate your feeds then.

Fair enough, that would make it more resilient, but it would also require trusting each mirror to not accidentally expose the distribution feed. Also only one person so far has offered even just to chip in to the hosting costs, let alone to host stuff themselves. I don’t think I can expect any help on that for now…

I have a PoC ready for a very simple implementation, but I’m waiting to add some extra safety precautions before I post it here.

I wish Jumble came back online to share their knowledge. Looking at the download URLs of episodes my app cached from their feeds it doesn’t seem like they strip anything from the download URLs. They look just like the ones in the original feeds. And I don’t think it’s possible to do that without fully mirroring the files. I also don’t have the capacity/budget to create a full mirror of the media files.

Edit: see this comment by Jumble.

I don’t get it, why would you have that? Seems like that’s just increasing the number of failure points…

I don’t know if that’s the case, Jumble told me some time ago in a PM that they had crosschecked a few different users’ feeds and the download URLs were the same for the same episode. Jumble’s site doesn’t mirror the media files, I can see that the download URLs for their feeds point to Patreon. In don’t know if that’s a risky way to go, but it seems to have worked for their site so far.

Also, the media files themselves are not always hosted by Patreon, sometimes it’s an external service like Fireside or iTunes, in which case it would be hard for Patreon to track account sharing across platforms.

Yeah without having looked into it properly yet it doesn’t seem like a particularly complex project, unless there’s some trickery I haven’t foreseen. I don’t think you even have to mirror the actual media files, just the RSS feed with the signed download URLs. At least it doesn’t seem like Jumble did that, I can still download the audio for episodes my podcast app has cached. They told me previously that they do some processing to anonymize the feeds by removing identifiable components, so that will take a bit of work, but otherwise this could be done with just a shell script in a cronjob and an NGINX file server.

I’m just wondering if it’s worth putting the effort in the first place. Otherwise I’m just making a fancy mirror for the few podcast feeds I’m already paying for…

What do you mean by this? Were there banners on the site? Or text posts in the individual feeds with warnings? My podcast app (AntennaPod) doesn’t show text posts in feeds so I might have missed them, but I think all the feeds I sub to come from Patreon.

Either way right now the whole website is down. It might be that a few broken feeds took down the whole site due to bugs, but it’s more likely that the VPS expired or something similar…

He’s one of the few cases of indie artists that I’m genuinely glad went big, because he fully deserves the reach and recognition he’s getting. The only sad thing is that a lot of his humor and slang probably gets lost in translation.

Shit, I just realized I don’t think I’ve read No Sleep Till Shengal yet… Thanks for the reminder, I’ll go grab a copy!

Holy shit, I didn’t know his comics got translated into English. This is one of the best ones, but Kobane Calling remains at the top for me.