So the pirate podcast feed at https://jumble.top/, maintained by our comrade @[email protected], is down again. Seems like the server is fully unreachable at the moment. I know there were issues with how Patreon premium feed URLs work, but it seems like that was solved for some time.
For those unaware, the way that site works is that people who are subscribed to some podcast's premium feed on Patreon donate their premium feed URL to Jumble's site, and users can then access a mirror of that premium feed for free through the site. I myself have donated a few feeds that I pay for, and I then sub to a few more for free through the site. As a chronic slop addict I genuinely feel the absence whenever the site is down, and I know I'm not alone based on the posts I see here every time it happens.
Given that downtimes have been getting more frequent, I'm wondering how me and other volunteers from the comm could contribute to maintaining and improving the stability of this service. So far it seems to have been mostly a one-person operation by Jumble, who deserves plenty of kudos for it (if there were other contributors I'm not aware of I apologize and extend the praise to them as well). The issue of course is that a one-person hobby project is inherently fragile and opaque. If Jumble - understandably - doesn't have time to respond to incidents then we don't get any slop and we don't even know if we'll ever get it back.
First off, for @[email protected] if you see this: what's the status of the project at the moment? How much time and effort are you able to give it these days? Would you be willing/able to involve other volunteer contributors? Do you have an idea of what that could look like? If not that, would you consider allowing someone else to fork the codebase and create another instance of it? Would you be willing to share at least some of the working feed URLs you've gathered so far? The URLs donated by other users should probably not be shared without their owners consent, but the leaked ones at least could be.
Unfortunately Jumble doesn't seem to very active here these days, so as an alternative I'm calling out to the rest of you hogs to figure out if anybody else would be willing to help me work on a replacement for the slop feed. What I can offer is:
- a couple hours a week of my free time
- software dev and web hosting experience
- spare compute in my existing self-hosted setup
- a few bucks a month to contribute to running expenses
- a few podcast feeds I'm subscribed to
What's needed on the other hand would be:
- contributors to help developing and maintaining a new site in a more collaborative/democratic way
- small financial contributions for web hosting costs (potentially not necessary if I just use my existing setup)
- more feed URLs to collectivize (this is the most important one)
To start with it would be good to know how much interest there is in this comm for this kinda service, if it even makes sense to put work into it at all, and if there are enough people still willing to donate feeds for it to be viable.
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...
iirc the download urls are personalized so that patreon can monitor account sharing. Mirroring the media files is necessary to prevent the feed donors getting got.
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.
I will defer to Jumble's expertise. I had noticed unique elements to shared patreon urls in the past but evidently it is possible to strip those.
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.
Just confirmed this is still the case with a feed a friend is paying for vs its version from jumble. The only differences are the link to the rss, ('ns:0 link' element), 'pubDate', and 'lastBuildDate'. 'enclosure url' is the same across both feeds. And actually 'ns:0 link' isn't identifying, it's the same between my expired patreon sub and a paid sub. So nothing inside the feed looks identifying, only the link to the feed itself.
I don't have the resources to mirror any rss right now, but have two feeds I'd like to donate to the revolution.
My I'm broke idea for sharing those:
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:
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.