I just realized how awfully broken is the UX of discovering a new podcast:
- first no one can share links to podcast episodes, or even to full podcast "profiles", only links to proprietary platforms
- then you have to go on your podcast client and search for it on a search box that looks up on a hardcoded centralized registry and hope for the best
- then if you find what you need you have to wait at least 5 seconds, possibly more, for all the XML to be downloaded and parsed and the feed to be shown to you
- but then you can't just download one episode from the feed and listen to it, you have to subscribe to the entire podcast
All because the thing only deals with this big XML file, each episode has no independent existence or a standardized universal reference to it, and it's unvariably tied to a specific server with a specific DNS domain that in 99.9% of the cases is not owned by the person publishing the episodes.