Run a podcast from your community, with a feed that Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Overcast and the rest will accept.

The feed is the point

A podcast is not a page with a play button on it — it is an RSS feed, and directories are unforgiving about the details. This gets them right: the iTunes namespace, owner verification, categories and artwork as attributes rather than text, episode and season numbers, episodic versus serial ordering, and enclosure lengths in real bytes so players can draw a scrub bar and seek properly.

Episode identifiers are permanent and opaque. That sounds like a detail until you rename an episode with a feed that derives them from the title, and every subscriber's app re-downloads your entire back catalogue and sends them a notification for each one.

Publish when you mean to

Give an episode a future date and it stays out of the feed until then. Nothing reaches a subscriber early, because “early” means already downloaded. Drafts are invisible, and so are their pages — not merely unlinked.

Every episode can have its own topic

This is the thing a podcast host cannot do for you. Choose a forum and publishing an episode opens a topic for it, so the conversation happens with your members instead of in someone else's comment section. Optional, per show, and off unless you ask.

On your site as well as in apps

A page per show and per episode, with the browser's own audio player — which means keyboard control, playback speed, media keys and screen-reader support you would otherwise have to build and maintain. The feed is advertised in the page head, so a podcast app pointed at your show page finds it by itself.

Details that save a support ticket

• Artwork is checked against Apple's size limits when you upload it, not months later when your show is rejected.
• Durations can be typed as 1:02:03, 62:03 or a number of seconds. Whichever your editor gave you is fine.
• The audio's real byte size and MIME type are read from the file rather than guessed.
• Deleting a show deletes its audio, so you are not paying to store episodes nothing references.

What you need

Somewhere to put the audio — your own uploads directory, or any file storage Invision Community is already configured to use, including S3-compatible object storage. No third-party podcast host, no monthly hosting fee, and the feed address is yours.