Introducing RocketCaster 2.0: Community Update

One thing I wanted to do while I was first making RocketCaster, a gemini service I started in February for searching for and subscribing to podcasts, was have some sort of way to surface popular or trending podcasts. PodcastIndex does have an API endpoint for that, but I wasn't happy with its results and scrapped the idea.

It wasn't until recently that I started thinking about it again but realized that all the cool podcasts that I listen to regularly I learned about through word of mouth. So if I wanted to build something to serve useful podcast recommendations, word of mouth between podcast fans should be the focus.

The Update

I've just put out a relatively huge update to RocketCaster that adds the ability to register an account and participate in discussions centered around podcast episodes.

Check it out for yourself here!

Once registered with a client certificate and username, you can navigate to any specific episode page and choose to share that episode to RocketCaster's front page where others will see it and be able to comment on it. Discussions have basic features you'd expect like user tagging with notifications and slightly limited gemtext formatting.

Sure, you could already share podcast episodes through gemini by sharing a RocketCaster link somewhere like Station, but I'm hoping that having a dedicated community for podcast fans will make sharing even easier and more fun.

Feedback

I'm always open to feedback on anything I post here, but especially so with this. I have all my contact info on my capsule's home page. I've done my best and ironed out all the bugs I've been able to find but please let me know if you run into anything weird.

Happy podcast listening!

- moddedBear / 2022-08-12

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