Next community call on Saturday (13th) at 18:00 CET. Possible topics:
- Meetup at FOSDEM
- Forum category changes
- Open Podcast API
Some notes from the community call today:
- We will keep the Podcast Discussions section for now and try to lead more users to it. @delthia had the idea to maybe mention the forum on next year’s Echo screen
- We exchanged some ideas around how we could improve Echo for next year
- We want to meet at FOSDEM
- We discussed how to improve the workflow on Weblate for our website translations
Today only @delthia and I joined. We tried (and finally succeeded) to get the Hindi fonts to work in the screenshot generation script. Then we discussed how difficult it would be to add episode sharing similar to our podcast sharing.
Reminder @community-callers: in a bit more than 2 hours we have a community call again 
Quick report on what we @Listener, @ByteHamster, @delthia and I discussed:
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Windmills in the Netherlands (some of 'em are still run by volunteers, turning grain into flour) and how to pronounce beta (apparently in American English it’s the latter)
- /ˈbeːta/ (with a long “ee” sound, like “bee”)
- /ˈbɛta/ (with a short “e” sound, like “bed”)
- /ˈbeɪta/ (with the “ay” sound as in “gay”)
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An annoying crash of AntennaPod on Android 16: anywhere the database is called, something goes wrong somewhere in the Android system, causing AntennaPod to crash. This has destroyed our very good, low user-perceived crash rate.
Because it’s not caused directly in AntennaPod’s own code we don’t get good crash logs. We only know it’s not tied to a specific AntennaPod version, and (only) affects Android 16. Since Google no longer publishes the Android source code as it’s created and rolled out as beta, but rather once in a while, we don’t even see the context of the related error message. So we don’t have any clear pointers on how to fix this
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The AntennaPod calendar that you can subscribe to, which is created by our static site generator. The current approach it annoying for us to change an event’s day or time as it requires a pull request to the website rather than just a quick edit in a calendar app. Also we’d like to allow users to subscribe to all items in our calendar or just the community calls. It seems that neither Baikal, Radicale, Nextcloud Calendar, Davis nor the underlying Sabre DAV support this. We’ll create a request with Davis which seems to have a modern stack and UI and has a responsive maintainer, and see where it goes.
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The limit of feature request votes here on the forum: the amount differs by trust level (which is very hard to climb up) but we’ve doubled it basically for all users. And we realised that users ‘get back’ their votes when a thread is closed, we should do that when a feature is implemented (such as for Sleep timer until end of episode).
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How running an LLM locally on one’s computer might be a cheaper solution for progressing quickly with AntennaPod than any of the paid AI providers (but slower, depending on your hardware).
Is it happening now?
It was (now half an hour ago) but no one was there. I’m just about to leave. Better luck next time (we’re working on a way to make it easier to add it to your calendar)
I have been here the whole time, but it appears that nobody has started it yet.
Probably my fault. I think the /CommunityCall part fell off when I copied the link, so Jitsi was offering for me to start a new meeting rather than joining the existing meeting.
@community-callers Two important announcements:
New calendar & meeting room links
We have updated our website to move calendar management out of our static site code to a dedicated calendar server. Please remove any old calendar subscription links you may have had, and get the new link from https://antennapod.org/events/community-call
If you use the old link, you’ll end up in the wrong meeting room
Use of AI in app development
We’ve had some feedback on Mastodon about our use of AI in the app development process (see Proposal to change expenses policy: AI subscriptions). We’d like to invite you all to discuss this topic in the upcoming community call: Saturday 13 June at 18:00 CEST.
Because of the summer period there weren’t many folks and it was a quick call this week. Some notes:
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Suggestion to drop ‘Podcast discussions’ category
The idea of this category was to allow folks to share podcast tips, discuss broader podcasting trends, etc. It’s not being used for that (there was only one that actually did that: Your favourite podcasts).
Last time we discussed it was suggested that we could allow/encourage users to discuss/share their Echo in this category, but that’s probably not going to happen any time soon. We therefore decided to remove the category. -
Expense policy tweaks & recurring expenses of active contributors
We discussed the suggestion in Expense policy tweaks - do you agree? - #4 by DavidDez. I then floated the idea to allow incremental periods (first 3 months max, then 6 months max, than 12), but that makes things probably more complex and the only benefit of the mandatory 6-month period is slightly less accounting to do (there’s no price/cost benefit). -
Improvements to how we use Weblate for the website
See Weblate config changes. @delthia’s plan is to set up a private copy of the repo in Weblate to out the new approach, before implementing any changes in the official repo. Timeline: some point this summer