Castopod

Castopod is an open-source, self-hosted podcast hosting platform built for independence and reach. Publish and manage podcasts, host your audio and cover art, serve standards-compliant RSS feeds, and follow your audience with built-in analytics, all from a server you control.

Key features

• Full podcast hosting: episodes, seasons, audio and cover art, and RSS feeds
• Fediverse (ActivityPub) built in: listeners follow, like, and comment from Mastodon and the wider fediverse
• Built-in analytics that respect listener privacy
• Podcasting 2.0 features (transcripts, chapters, funding, and more)
• Web admin for shows, episodes, contributors, and settings
• Co-located MariaDB bundled inside the appliance, no external database to run

Use cases

• Independent podcasters who want to own their hosting and their audience
• Organizations running branded or internal podcasts
• Federated audio that plugs into Mastodon and the fediverse

Why run it on the NetActuate edge Hosting Castopod in a PoP near your listeners shortens the delivery path for audio downloads and the web experience, and keeps ownership of your feeds, analytics, and audience data with you.

Deployed from the NetActuate marketplace, Castopod boots pre-configured from your seeded values: the superadmin account is created headlessly at first boot so the web installer is already finished, and the database password and analytics salt are generated and persisted. Sign in at /cp-admin and start publishing. Federation and public sharing need a real domain name and TLS termination in front of the appliance (a documented follow-up); the single-VM appliance serves the full web UI over HTTP on the instance IP out of the box.