If someone can please figure out how to integrate a purchase/payment system into a similar protocol we would love you forever :)
I would so love to help my many artist/musician friends get set up direct-to-consumer with digital content, subscriptions etc — and with their own shops, that they can run, in whatever funky style.
Patreon and Spotify already implement subscription-based podcasts, and I am positive they use RSS/Atom under the hood. So the tech is already out there, you just need to turn it into a self-hosted solution.
Indeed, Patreon has private feeds for patrons for exclusive content. That's a decent solution but it's platform-specific, which is both a bad thing (not easily used elsewhere) and good (backwards compatible with good old RSS).
Did not know Patreon's tech was lock-in. I subscribe to a podcast on Spotify and they give you a private URL that you can feed to any app. If you are worried about malicious customers sharing the URL you may likely enable some form of rate limiting (e.g. the server may only serve up to x MiB/month on this URL)
I would so love to help my many artist/musician friends get set up direct-to-consumer with digital content, subscriptions etc — and with their own shops, that they can run, in whatever funky style.