So the pirate podcast feed at https://jumble.top/, maintained by our comrade @jumble@hexbear.net, is down again. Seems like the server is fully unreachable at the moment. I know there were issues with how Patreon premium feed URLs work, but it seems like that was solved for some time.
For those unaware, the way that site works is that people who are subscribed to some podcast's premium feed on Patreon donate their premium feed URL to Jumble's site, and users can then access a mirror of that premium feed for free through the site. I myself have donated a few feeds that I pay for, and I then sub to a few more for free through the site. As a chronic slop addict I genuinely feel the absence whenever the site is down, and I know I'm not alone based on the posts I see here every time it happens.
Given that downtimes have been getting more frequent, I'm wondering how me and other volunteers from the comm could contribute to maintaining and improving the stability of this service. So far it seems to have been mostly a one-person operation by Jumble, who deserves plenty of kudos for it (if there were other contributors I'm not aware of I apologize and extend the praise to them as well). The issue of course is that a one-person hobby project is inherently fragile and opaque. If Jumble - understandably - doesn't have time to respond to incidents then we don't get any slop and we don't even know if we'll ever get it back.
First off, for @jumble@hexbear.net if you see this: what's the status of the project at the moment? How much time and effort are you able to give it these days? Would you be willing/able to involve other volunteer contributors? Do you have an idea of what that could look like? If not that, would you consider allowing someone else to fork the codebase and create another instance of it? Would you be willing to share at least some of the working feed URLs you've gathered so far? The URLs donated by other users should probably not be shared without their owners consent, but the leaked ones at least could be.
Unfortunately Jumble doesn't seem to very active here these days, so as an alternative I'm calling out to the rest of you hogs to figure out if anybody else would be willing to help me work on a replacement for the slop feed. What I can offer is:
- a couple hours a week of my free time
- software dev and web hosting experience
- spare compute in my existing self-hosted setup
- a few bucks a month to contribute to running expenses
- a few podcast feeds I'm subscribed to
What's needed on the other hand would be:
- contributors to help developing and maintaining a new site in a more collaborative/democratic way
- small financial contributions for web hosting costs (potentially not necessary if I just use my existing setup)
- more feed URLs to collectivize (this is the most important one)
To start with it would be good to know how much interest there is in this comm for this kinda service, if it even makes sense to put work into it at all, and if there are enough people still willing to donate feeds for it to be viable.