Hi all,
Just chipping in as gcrk pointed me (indirectly) to this thread in a conversation on Mastodon
Personally I think Funkwhale's potential is on the side of the media consumer, rather than that of the publisher (podcaster). The latter would be possible too, building on the functionality of 'channels'. But given that developments in that area go fast and that there already is an open source project that fulfils that role perfectly (Castopod) I don't think it's worth pursuing that. The former (consumer) is also where the option to synchronise playback position is relevant. So I guess Georg was thinking in that direction anyway 🙂
So, focussing on the consumer side, what would Funkwhale's role be then; client or server? E.g. if it was supposed to synchronise with the AntennaPod app, do you envision Funkwhale to be
- the 'server' where the data is stored, the central point through which listening progress is synchronised
- the 'client' through which podcasts can be viewed/subscribed to, and episodes can be played (like AntennaPod)
- both; 2-in-1
Given that there already is an interface for playback plus a way to follow RSS-feeds, I reckon there's a (very) solid base for the 'client' part. But depending on the state of the back-end which makes this client role possible, the step to 'server' might not be far away either.
Then, in the context of APIs, I think it's a question of functionality: what (client) features might be there, what might be missing (if anything, I'm not fully up to speed with the FW functionality).
That discussion about (synchronisation) functionality and the necessary APIs is what we (over at AntennaPod) will be having quite soon (mid-October). We're reaching out to other client and server projects to get their input, to see if we could agree on a successor of the gPodder API (the field has advanced a bit since then, and we want a new standard to be app-agnostic). In fact, Funkwhale was one of the projects that we wanted to reach out to, so the timing of your discussion and Georg's toot couldn't be better. Once we have a datepicker, I'll share it here as well so that interested folks can fill it in & join the call.
(I realise this is quite a long post that focuses really on podcasting, though FW APIs would probably need to be able to do much more than that. So feel free to move my post to a new thread 🙂 )