12.09, 15:30–16:00 (Europe/Berlin), Dachgeschoss
Sprache: English
Social platforms take everything, your content and your audience.
The audience is not even yours: the platform built it on your content, then lends it back to you on its terms. Podcasting broke half of that.
Thanks to RSS, your content stays yours.
But reaching your audience often still runs through a GAFAM.
The Fediverse fixes the other half.
With Castopod, your podcast is a native ActivityPub actor, with no middleman between you and the people who follow you.
You stay in control end to end: your show, your instance, your data, your direct relationship with the people who listen. They follow your podcast from Mastodon or any Fediverse app, and their likes, boosts and replies come back as real engagement under your episodes, with no extra account and no walled garden.
The footprint today, from the public Podcast Index (Castopod feeds only): 1,607 shows across 487 independent instances, 66,242 episodes, in 25 languages.
306 instances run a single show (heavy self-hosting), and more than 180 host several, often community and local radios such as JET FM, Fréquence Banane and Radio BLV.
The catalogue is strongly multilingual, led by French, English and German, with Italian, Spanish, Catalan, Dutch and Turkish well represented. German publishers include CORRECTIV, the Offener Kanal Schleswig-Holstein and Uni Erfurt.
The follows are real and direct: nearly 10,000 Fediverse followers across the indexed Castopod shows, led by Linux & Open Source News (1,900) and Solarpunk Prompts (919). Smaller shows build genuine audiences too, like our own RdGP (430).
Castopod also helped push Podcasting 2.0 into the mainstream: the transcript tag it implemented early was later adopted by Apple Podcasts.
Why now: Spotify disables RSS by default, Google has retired RSS across its products, and YouTube is pulling podcasting into a closed silo. I will close on how to get involved, whether you self-host one show or run an instance for a community.
Benjamin Bellamy founded Ad Aures, creator of Castopod, a free and open-source podcast hosting platform built to empower creators and strengthen open podcasting, and of Podlibre, an open-source podcast editor. Active in the Podcasting 2.0 community, he hosts RdGP, a podcast on digital rights, individual freedoms, privacy and GDPR, and contributes to the radio show Libre à vous !, produced by April. He joined WikiPortraits, a collective providing freely licensed portraits for Wikipedia. A passionate advocate for Free and Open Source Software, he is Business Development Manager for AI Solutions & Community Management at LINAGORA, where he turns open, privacy-respecting AI into practical products and grows contributor communities.