An Update on Limecast
Posted on in Limecast, Product by John Luther
Online content distribution has become highly centralized and increasingly dominated by a few tech monopolies.
We believe these companies prioritize profit and growth over user privacy and freedom of speech. What's more concerning is that their leaders are cozying up to politicians who have repeatedly promised to crack down on the press and free expression.
We believe this trend is dangerous, and we want to do our small part to resist online censorship. To that end, we've shifted the development plan for Limecast, the podcasting platform we're working on.
We will offer Limecast as a paid service someday, but our new priority is to develop it into a free, open-source, privacy-first, decentralized podcast management, distribution, and monetization platform.
We hear you thinking, That is a lot of words, what do they mean? In brief:
- Mandatory HTTPS transport between podcast storage and listeners.
- Provide a decentralized content storage and distribution option. We're still discussing what technology to use for this (IPFS, Storj, Iroh, etc.) and welcome your ideas. Local server filesystem and CDN-like storage will still be options, too.
- Simple deployment and management to be platform agnostic. Run it on Kubernetes or a Raspberry Pi and everywhere in between. The whole app will be contained in a single binary file.
- Written in Rust and backed by SQLite to be type-safe, performant, and straightforward. Pure HTML, CSS, and minimal JS. No SPA, no bloated JS frameworks, no JSON API. Just plain old form POST-ing, cookies, and other web standards.
- Open standards for content syndication and discovery with RSS and ActivityPub.
- Privacy-first analytics to help podcasters understand their audience while not compromising that audience's privacy.
- Licensed under the Mozilla Public License, which we feel is a reasonable middle ground between permissive licenses like MIT and strong copyleft licenses like the GPL.
- Integrate with Open Collective so podcasters can get paid for their work.
It's the early days of the project, but we've implemented some basic functionality (creating podcasts and adding/editing episode metadata, etc.), which you can demo on your local system by cloning the Limecast repository on Codeberg.
To learn more, visit limecast.net. If you want to get involved, check out the repo), support us on Open Collective, or contact us at info@limeleaf.net.