Castopod Mobile
Userfriendly mobile podcasting application
Castopod Mobile is a free and open-source mobile podcast player application (GPL v3). It is intended to be installed on your mobile phone (iOS, Google Android, /e/…). You can install it from F-Droid, from your usual app store or you may compile it yourself for your own needs. Castopod Mobile is a two-in-one application: a podcast player and a Fediverse client. It serves several purposes: to provide a mobile application that takes advantages of ActivityPub features for podcasts (the ones that Castopod Server provides for instance). Secondly, to reduce the complexity of the Fediverse ecosystem during onboarding: account creation currently prevents many users into joining the Fediverse because it is difficult to guess where to begin. And thirdly: to provide a podcast application template for communities who want to build and manage their ecosystem from beginning (with your own private Castopod Server) to end (with your own Castopod Mobile based application).
- The project's own website: http://podlibre.org/
Why does this actually matter to end users?
The internet can be a great place to discover new content, be it music, movies or podcasts. Cheap hosting and reliable streaming technology lets users listen or watch new content then and there as they discover it, almost like a candy store. Unfortunately major streaming services decide for users what candy they should and should not have, ranking and rating content based on who happens to be the best selling artist of the day. Both users and artists on these platforms are left with little control over search and discovery, content and privacy.
What if instead of handing over independently produced music, videos and podcasts to a few companies, artists and users watch and listen on their own terms? Like Mastodon, Pleroma and Pixelfed, Castopod offers a decentralized alternative to social networking, hosting and sharing content without some platform pulling the strings. Castopod allows users to host their own podcasts themselves and then easily share it for discovery with everyone on the federated social universe, better known as the fediverse. Anyone on Mastodon, Pleroma and elsewhere can seamlessly interact with podcasters on Castopod, follow their favorite channels and keep up to date through feeds. This adds yet another rich layer to the fediverse where users can search and discover content, artists and possible friends entirely on their own terms.
This project extends earlier work done on Castopod and adds an important feature for most people interested, namely a mobile application. An added bonus is that this widely available app is not only a podcast player, but also a client for the fediverse, allowing you to easily reach out, follow, interact and share your favorite podcasts with others.
Run by Ad Aures
This project was funded through the NGI0 Discovery Fund, a fund established by NLnet with financial support from the European Commission's Next Generation Internet programme, under the aegis of DG Communications Networks, Content and Technology under grant agreement No 825322.
