I love listening to podcasts; and in 2020, after many years of thinking about it, I finally decided to record my own podcast. At the same time, my friend Shivek Khurana also wanted to start a podcast, so we started talking about podcast hosting platforms, RSS feeds, open APIs, etc., like you'd expect engineers to.

We realized that the podcasting ecosystem is very open (which is great!), but is also limited by the lack of open-source tooling available. MuxFM aims to fix that.

Problem#

Anchor FM is the easiest way to start a podcast. But ease comes at the cost of SEO juice. The one click distribute option provided by Anchor publishes to their channels. This makes is impossible to move to another provider. This also puts the host in a compromised position, since access to audience is controlled by Anchor. Although Anchor allows for an option to submit feed manually, essentially returning control to the podcaster, there are still links that point back to Anchor services.