Podcasts are great, but syncing them isn't. Once the RSS feed has updated, various platforms will take hours or days to update the page for a podcast. Listeners want and need some kind of effective notification system, and preferably one that isn't tied to some major platform like Spotify or iTunes.

In addition, the podcasting 2.0 spec allows for live stream updates, which need to have instant notifications for listeners.

Podping is a protocol that attempts to solve this. It provides near instant notifications on when a feed changes, and several major hosters have incorporated it. It's considered by quite a few people to be the best solution yet.

It's built on the Web3 Hive blockchain. I don't think I need to explain to the people of SN why this is an issue.

I propose that instead we build a notification system on nostr. Any change to the RSS feed that a podcaster wants listeners to know about can be sent out as a nostr event, along with any relevant data such as whether it is a new episode, live stream, edit to descriptions or metadata, etc.

The RSS feed can then include the relevant nostr public key, which can be grabbed once by platforms and used later to check for notifications. A minor change to the podcasting 2.0 spec would be required to implement this aspect.

All of this would be quite simple to run. Since it's not a social media or blog post, you don't need a full fancy client like with other nostr apps. Hosters and listening platforms can run all of this in the background quite easily. It would in fact be far cheaper on resources than Podping, as well as being interoperable with nostr social media applications if the podcaster would like to use the same public key for both.

Nostr presents itself as a fantastic method for sending out podcast notifications in a cheap, fast, and decentralized manner. I plan to start building this out and testing it.