I tried a bunch of podcast hosts recently and was disappointed that even the ones that allowed a custom domain typically served the RSS feed itself off of their own domain. Many do say they will serve a redirect from that domain in perpetuity for free if you do leave to another platform, but it is a bummer that you can’t permissionlessly migrate your own podcast from most hosts.
I ended up just setting up an endpoint that reverse-proxies the RSS feed served by the platform on my own domain.
Anil also mentions migrating from Mastodon, which has a similar problem: migration is a form of redirect, so the platform you’re migrating from has to continue to exist and not block your migration.
> Anil also mentions migrating from Mastodon, which has a similar problem: migration is a form of redirect, so the platform you’re migrating from has to continue to exist and not block your migration.
FWIW, when migrating from Mastodon instance to another, as long as both instances are online and in agreement during the migration, the ActivityPub protocol will automatically update any followers to use your new instance. The old instance could go down the next day and you wouldn't loose anyone.
However, the posts remain at the old platform - so they disappear if the old instance goes down.
And, of course, any hyperlinks pointing to the old instance will stop working when it goes down.
>I ended up just setting up an endpoint that reverse-proxies the RSS feed served by the platform on my own domain.
I did the same thing and eventually felt like it was too complicated to maintain a service just for that, so I switched to Bunny CDN and use a custom domain on Bunny to sit in front of the podcast host's RSS feed (just the RSS, not the actual episodes).
It works pretty well, but sometimes the caching does things I don't expect and new episodes don't appear in my player until I manually flush the cache on Bunny. I suspect I could do it more smoothly if I experimented more with Bunny's settings.
I ended up just setting up an endpoint that reverse-proxies the RSS feed served by the platform on my own domain.
Anil also mentions migrating from Mastodon, which has a similar problem: migration is a form of redirect, so the platform you’re migrating from has to continue to exist and not block your migration.