Podcasts have ads directly in the audio, similar to sponsorship ads in YouTube videos and on other platforms directly in the video the creator uploads. I was wondering when an open source solution to that would come out, similar to sponsorblock for YouTube, but I guess Spotify is first.

Podcasts are still slightly different, as the easy pliability of audio means podcast hosts inject ads based on your location and other factors into the audio stream instead of just going with one single global ad for everyone. But you still only get the audio stream from the regular podcast host, which is why classic ad blockers don't work. A community-run solution might be "for podcast id 123 skip from audio fragment "sponsor" to "welcome back". Just purely going by time (skip from 10:00 to 10:30) wouldn't work, as ads can be longer or shorter. There can also be multiple ads back to back even if they're a standard length.

A service like Spotify at least partially hosts its own podcasts and probably does the ads for those podcasts itself, so it can just leave them out. If Spotify proxies podcasts from elsewhere, it can detect (via querying the podcast multiple times from different locations) where the dynamic bits of the podcasts are and cut them out. That could also be a community solution, though it would require more computational resources. A centralized service like Spotify makes it easier. Spotify is also AI-happy, and what they've actually done might be to just train an AI on ad segments, and let the AI cut those segments out.

By the way, YouTube already skips some creator sponsorships with their premium service.