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submitted 1 day ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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.

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[-] [email protected] 6 points 22 hours ago

Here’s how to do it:

Get your list of feeds

Make it so their content is mirrored on your own storage periodically, this is so the hundred people using the replacement jumble service don’t all hit “Jim’s personalized private feed url” and blow up Jim’s spot. He was nice enough to give you his private feed after all…

Change the rss url to point to your store of content

Post the changed rss url on a website you host.

Tell people about it

Loss!

[-] [email protected] 4 points 18 hours ago* (last edited 17 hours ago)

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...

[-] [email protected] 3 points 15 hours ago

I think so. But I like a project

[-] [email protected] 2 points 14 hours ago

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.

[-] [email protected] 1 points 2 hours ago

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.

[-] [email protected] 1 points 14 hours ago

You raise a good point. Perhaps there should be a layered approach with a distribution feed that is shared only with mirrors who then provide public feeds.

[-] [email protected] 1 points 2 hours ago

I don't get it, why would you have that? Seems like that's just increasing the number of failure points...

[-] [email protected] 7 points 1 day ago

I can contribute a couple feeds... unfortunately I don't have the technical skills to do more

[-] [email protected] 5 points 1 day ago

Several of the feeds had messages from the hosts saying that something was changing with the feed URL. I think it was in iTunes

[-] [email protected] 4 points 1 day ago

What do you mean by this? Were there banners on the site? Or text posts in the individual feeds with warnings? My podcast app (AntennaPod) doesn't show text posts in feeds so I might have missed them, but I think all the feeds I sub to come from Patreon.

Either way right now the whole website is down. It might be that a few broken feeds took down the whole site due to bugs, but it's more likely that the VPS expired or something similar...

[-] [email protected] 3 points 1 day ago

That was about a month ago when the feeds went down the first time. They came back on after that. They went down again briefly last week, and now they've been down for about a day

[-] [email protected] 4 points 1 day ago

I guess it’s a good thing I hadn’t noticed it being down yet but I am also a big slop connoisseur. I have no technical expertise to offer but am quite interested in its continued existence and would happily contribute for any hosting costs

[-] [email protected] 2 points 1 day ago

i thought that slop was neoliberal nonsense; am i wrong?

[-] [email protected] 6 points 1 day ago

This site originates from the chapotraphouse subreddit, where "slop" referred to podcast episodes, especially premium. It's still a derogatory term, but it's self-deprecating. The "post other peoples' bad takes" community on this site adopted the name "slop" because people started reading about the racist origins of the original name, "the dunk tank". Among the broader public, "slop" has come to refer to unwanted AI-generated content (which is to say, AI-generated content in general), and people here will use it that way as well.

this post was submitted on 08 Jul 2025
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