Your signal. Your price.
The Podping monitor at ppmonitor.podcastindex.org shows a live mesh network of nodes, which Adam Curry encourages listeners to join to help decentralize the podcast index.
Podcast Index's Lightning node costs $240 monthly and generated only $50 per month in income, making it financially unsustainable.
Dave says the Podcast Index transcript tag is a vestigial organ, as modern LLMs would automatically generate transcripts if the namespace were designed today.
Adam reports that Podcast Index bandwidth usage spiked to 30% of its monthly limit mid-month, versus a typical 10%, due to automated bots downloading assets following a media story.
Dave Jones uses AI coding agents to add features to the mature Podcast Index codebase, but never lets them directly touch the Git repository without human oversight.
Jones implemented HTTP signing for the Podcast Index aggregator to combat Cloudflare blocks, submitting it to the Verified Bots program, but sees strong developer pushback over fears it could be used to block hosts or apps.
Jones has received acquisition inquiries for the Podcast Index from private equity and family offices looking to invest in podcasting, though he notes the open-source project doesn't generate revenue.
RSS.com donated a DGX Spark GB10 workstation valued at $3500 to the Podcast Index. The machine runs a Quen 3635B parameter model for spam classification and Whisper Turbo for transcription.
Jones published a central stats page on Podcast Index listing public datasets including live feeds, dead feeds, hosting provider stats, hourly counts, and a live tracking firehose updated every three minutes.
The Podping gossip swarm is stable with 18-21 hosts running for months, and the Podcast Index admin dashboard now allows curating feeds as spam or legit.
The Podcast Index is building a training corpus of 25,000-50,000 each of spam and legit feeds to fine-tune a custom model on the DGX Spark, aiming to improve classification beyond reliance on follower count data from apps.