Castopod is an open source podcast hosting solution for anyone who can connect to the Fediverse via a W3C ActivityPub standard. Here, fediverse means ‘a collection of federated (or interconnected) servers for web publications such as social networks, microblogging, blogging or websites’. And on top of that, for file hosting. NGI Zero Discovery supported this project by improving search, discovery and discoverability through free and open source tools.
Castopod is user-friendly and makes it easy for users to discover new things. Whether they are beginners, amateurs or professionals, they get everything they need: create, upload, publish and manage server subscriptions. Users can let their users listen to podcasts directly, but just as easily connect to commercial parties such as Apple, Google or Spotify.
The internet is still a great place for users to discover new content. Whether it's music, movies or podcasts, for example. With cheap hosting and reliable streaming technology, users can listen or watch a lot of new content today. Unfortunately, the larger streaming services decide for users (for example with algorithms) what they can and cannot see. They rank and review content. Both users and artists on these platforms themselves have little control over search and discovery, content and privacy.
Users can take back control with Castopod. Communicate with audiences on their own platform (like, share, comment); this social network IS the podcast. Besides supporting W3C ActivityPub, users can also export to social networks like Twitter, Instagram, Youtube, Facebook.
Castopod is easy to host on any PHP/MySQL server: just extract the program and you and other podcasters are ready to broadcast professionally.
Read more about Castopod at: https://nlnet.nl/project/Castopod