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

1/3 - I'm excited to announce TrueFans has launched not one but two new podcasts.

A few weeks ago, we launched our training course podcast called Fanzone, which is a bi-weekly series of eighteen 3-5 minute episodes covering every aspect on how to use TrueFans from a user's perspective.

The podcast is produced and hosted by Claire Waite Brown, who also created the highly successful Podcasting 2.0 in Practice course.

1/2 - MasterCard enables Stabelcoins

"Mastercard will enable stablecoin spending via traditional cards through partnerships with platforms. Consumers can use stablecoins stored in their wallets at over 150M merchant locations worldwide. Mastercard Move also facilitates withdrawals of stablecoins to bank accounts."

https://www.linkedin.com/posts/zahid-ali-9b899a40_stablecoinspendingandsettlement-enhancingtheuserexperience-activity-7322918497620021248-9iuc

Good news TrueFans has been approved by Stripe to now payout creators.

We are connecting the updated API so Creators on TrueFans will be able to withdraw funds from their TrueFans wallet either via direct payment to another lightning wallet or now to their Stripe account in a Fiat currency.

@evan have you seen TrueFans is 100% built on the Activitystream format. And we apply micropayments to the 30 verbs in TrueFans for gamification. So we have leaderboards, badges, and superfans.

We also publish to X, ActivityPub, Bluesky, Threads and Linkedin the users activity.

2/2 So I exported my data from ActivityPub/Mastodon, and to my surprise the export is in ActivityStreams.

@evan @chris @dave

1/2 - TrueFans now allows you to export your podcast activity in the W3C ActivityStreams 2.0 format.

We use the AS2.0 structure - Actor, Verb, Object format. e.g Sam (Actor), Plays (Verb), Podnews Weekly (Object). plus attributes Listen Time, Percent Completed, Value Paid.

We enable users to auto publish their activity to X, ActivityPub, BlueSky, Threads and Linkedin.

We allow Creators to do the same.

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

/cc @evan @chris @dave

@tchambers @russell @nathan @dave @adam @StevenB @steven @james @merryoscar Hi Tim we have integration in and out of the Fediverse e.g Auto-posting my activities to TrueFans.social and others can follow my account. Auto posting to BlueSky and Threads. We also aggregate comments into TrueFans from ActivityPub/Mastodon, X, and BlueSky. I am not sure what people would like to see at Fediforum? So I have not applied.

Tune.FM is an interesting new company. It compares to Wavlake and LNBeats. They also use a micropayment system based on a platform called Hedera Hash???

They use JAM Tokens for direct to musician payments from fans. They use gamification, social networking plus rewards.

This is worth reading. We have many similar ideas for TrueFans. i.e fans pay creators but also creators can pay fans.

WhitePaper
https://tune.fm/public/landing/images/Tune.FM(JAM)WhitepaperV4.pdf

Hedera Payments
https://hedera.com/

@adam @dave @james

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