keunes I am skeptical of cryptocurrencies as well, mainly for environmental reasons. But I hope that a project's involvement in that area won't be a reason for folks to completely ignore that project's work. (Personally I feel crypto ≠ attacks on human rights like racism would be. So for me I don't see a ground to block all collaboration.)
I didn't make an argument to block the collaboration, I actually tried to have a call with the castopod people a few months ago, but it didn't worked out. I just wanted to point out a reason why one might not want to use castopod and having an alternative is a good idea. There could be other reasons: Castopods development stops, license issues, social troubles. So even if there is something out there doing a great job, we can work on another implementation.
keunes There's much to gain also: Using Castopod you don't have to use the crypto features, but can benefit from great ActivityPub integration, as well as RSS features like 'transcript' that could help the hard-hearing, 'location' that could make content discoverable by travellers, 'person' that could help make hosts and guests from marginalised communities more visible & easier to discover.
Yes, the Community did a great job and did quite some innovation, which is amazing and probably not possible in the scope of Funkwhale, since we maintain a huge codebase with a lot of other features and its not too easy for us to do experiments. So I am happy to leave the innovation part of the business to them, but we can consider some of those features to be valuable for Funkwhale as well.
On the other side it might be a path to remove the publishing of Podcasts from Funkwhale altogether, focusing on consuming podcasts. But I don't think this is something we want to do.
keunes Glad to hear :-) (Side note: our API spec focuses on the consumer side, so Castopod wouldn't be involved. But there are other players on the consumer side that are involved in crypto, which might or not also get involved at some point in the API spec.)
I wouldn't mind if those bits are optional and we are able to just ignore this.