Notices by Sam Sethi :pc2red: ⁂ (samsethi@podcastindex.social)

On this week's Podnews Weekly Review @james Cridland and I talk about:

1. Spotify for Creators sends out their first video cheques.

2. Acast posted their year-end financials but are they profitable yet?

3. Fox News Media gets into podcasting and Netflix is following them?

4. Transistor.fm integrates with Bluesky Social.

1/2 - New Feature: Pinned Playlists

We have our new native apps coming soon but no harm pushing out a few cheeky features while waiting.

Now you can PIN any playlist to the top of your homepage.

You can quickly ADD episodes or music to your default 'My Queue'. You can LIKE any episode and we will automatically add it to your playlist called 'Liked'.

Or you can create a 'New Playlist' of your own. TrueFans playlists can be either STATIC or DYNAMIC.

A dynamic playlist updates automatically.

According to a new leak, Apple has pulled the plug on a project that allegedly hoped to produce lower-cost augmented reality glasses after the project seemingly couldn't meet executive expectations.

https://appleinsider.com/articles/25/01/31/apple-reported-to-have-killed-the-project-to-create-mac-connected-ar-glasses

Is there anything Apple can innovate on and get to market without Steve Jobs?

Seems to me that they can't. Search, AI, Cars, Folding Phones, VR and no AR all failed.

As of fiscal year (FY) 2024, Apple had around 164,000 full-time employees.

Seriously what do they all do?

Now live. You can now just click one follow button on TrueFans.social to follow their activities on TrueFans.fm

Before you had to do a search on your Fediverse instance to find their TrueFans.social account.

e.g https://truefans.social/@sam

One click makes it much easier. /cc @adam @dave @james

P.S We are adding Threads and Bluesky support next.

Should we add X?

We have started creating our Creator Portals.

We are going to turn TrueFans podcast pages into Creator Portals that can be customised by the podcast/music creator.

Today we added the option to turn off comments either for the whole podcast or individual episodes.

Tomorrow we will enable creators to reorder or hide tabs on the creators portal.

Next we will allow you to change the URL to your own domain.

1/6 - TrueFans now has multiple new ways for you to customise our app.

1. Country
When you sign up, we use your IP address to pick your local country.
We use your country to show "Home Grown Hits", "Recommendations" and "Country Charts". You can pick another country to see a different perspective.

2.Playlist
By default, when you click "add to playlist", episodes are added to "My Queue". Additionally, you can create your own playlists and then make one of those your default playlist.

I can't wait, we are back with a new episode of Podnews Weekly Review.

@james and I did our highlights show for 2024 and our predictions show for 2025 but normal service is resumed this Friday!

This week we talk about:
Spotify, Meta, Audioboom, BBC Audiolabs, Global, Substack, Mastodon, Triton Digital, Shure and much more.

I'm equally thrilled because on Friday I will also be a guest on Podcasting 2.0 with @adam and @dave.

No idea what we will talk about. ;-)

#backwithabangin2025

Later this month we will feature freeze TrueFans and focus on our Native Mobile Apps, CarPlay and Alexa.

We're currently updating the Creators Dashboard with Leaderboards and new Dynamic Charts e.g show monies earned but in a pie chart.

We have also deprecated boost and boostagrams to more user friendly terms such as Like, Comment (no payment) and SuperComments (paid).

We still send the TLV record as boost and boostagram.

We will also soon add Chat and SuperChats using XMPP to LIT podcasts.

I love this screenshot. If you look closely it combines so much of what the Podcasting 2.0 community has working on for the past two years.

It shows support for the Person Tag. It would have shown guests too. This podcast has Chapters and a Transcript which the metadata icons indicate.

We have also added support for the updated location tag so we show the recording location.

We are supporting the alternate enclosure. There are a few more tags we also support on this page.

1/6 - 🧵 Three options for Video Hosting on TrueFans.

In England, we have a phrase to describe London buses "You wait ages for one – and then two come along at the same time!”.

For two years we have been working hard towards offering video hosting on TrueFans. And of course, "You wait ages for one video hosting solution and three come along at the same time!"

Podcast creators on TrueFans now have three options to host their videos. /cc @dave @james @adam

@BeAware @hallenbeck @evan @swf here is an example of the TrueFans activities we are publishing to AP.

https://truefans.social/samsethi
https://truefans.social/podcasts/podnews-weekly-review

Now anyone can follow any podcast to see what activity is happening. i.e if there is a new episode published (announce), if a new comment has been made (boost) and by whom or someone becomes a new fan (subscribe) or even who just played the podcast. (listen).

Equally once you claim your podcast in TrueFans, all of this published activity is up to the podcast creator to choose what verbs they make public. /cc @dave @davejackson @theDanielJLewis @evan

@BeAware I think 18.1 is coming to the developer build shortly. All of it is pointless as all the so-called Apple Intelligence only works on iPhone 15 Pro Max and above and I have not updated my iPhone for a few years. #NoNeedToUpgrade - I will wait until next year when iOS18 actually has the AI features before I upgrade.

@BeAware you can switch back in the iPhone UI under settings.

@evan @julian @pfefferle @manton @renchap @andypiper @Gargron I 100% agree with Julian. We are new to AP development but very excited. I was surprised by the lack of AP vocab support in Mastodon given the AP vocab has not been updated since May 2017.

Being a podcast & music app we had hoped to use the LISTEN verb. Sadly we can't as there is no support? Equally we offer blogging and event ticketing in our platform, so using ANNOUNCE, ARTICLE and BUY verbs will hopefully work???

Fediverse Help. We have successfully got activities to publish from TrueFans.social to other AP clients.

However for my own acct I have messed up in testing. The original TrueFans name was truefans.social/@sam and this worked. We were testing if I could change the name as a feature. I changed it to @sa and changed it back and now my posts wont federate. I follow @sam but the minute I try to federate the activity Mastodon unfollows my truefans acct and so no @sam activity appears here?

Q: Has the ActivityPub Vocab been updated since May 2017?

https://www.w3.org/TR/activitystreams-vocabulary/

We know @Gargron does not support the LISTEN verb. Hope they update their support.

We are testing the READ & ARTICLE verbs for blogs, the ANNOUNCE verb for new episodes and the BUY verb for payments like tickets or merch.

I am live demoing TrueFans today at my 1st FediForum - 4pm (UK) 8am (PST)

I'll demo subscribing to a podcast (become a fan), liking an episode (boost) and writing a comment (quote/boostagram) as well as playing an episode and recording my listen time, percent completed and value paid in micropayments.

All that activity creates my ActivityStream truefans.social/sam which I share to the fediverse and friends can follow. /cc @chris @fediforum @_elena @tchambers @docpop @evan @mike

Join @james and me on this Friday's Podnews Weekly Review, our special guest is Steve Pratt the author of a new book on the attention economy called Earn It.

1. Who the F*@# is Steve? (his words not mine).
Steve co-founded the world’s first and leading branded podcast agency, Pacific Content. Steve is publishing a book in the fall/autumn of 2024 called Earn It: Unconventional Strategies for Brave Marketers. It’s available to pre-order now.

2. Book Link: https://lnkd.in/esWvbh9N

@BeAware @dave @dave@truefans.social @ChadF please bear with us. We finally got the comment verb to federate on Friday. We will add in other verbs like play/listen, follow and like. We will allow you to reply to comments from your AP client and show the replies inline with the original comment inside TrueFans.

I am sure we can fix this issue too.