Castopod
A website and open-source podcast hosting platform for creators who want RSS publishing, ActivityPub interaction, analytics, clips, and control over their shows.
What Castopod is
Castopod official site presents Castopod as a free and open-source podcast hosting solution for creators who want to self-host their shows, publish through RSS, and keep control over their content and audience relationships.
Who uses Castopod
Castopod is used by podcasters, independent media teams, community projects, educators, agencies, and self-hosters that want a podcast website, episode pages, analytics, social publishing tools, and distribution without depending entirely on a closed hosting platform.
How the website works
The public website introduces the project, links to documentation, download options, source code, community channels, and hosted offers. For a new visitor, it works as a starting point for deciding whether to install Castopod, read the docs, inspect the code, or join the community.
Podcast hosting and RSS
Castopod centers on podcast hosting: show pages, episode management, RSS feeds, embeddable players, contributor roles, and tools for moving a podcast in or out. Its documentation describes publishing to podcast indexes and apps through RSS, including major listening destinations.
Fediverse and social podcasting
A major difference from many podcast hosts is Castopod's ActivityPub support. A podcast can act more like a social web presence, allowing compatible Fediverse accounts to follow, share, favorite, and comment on episodes without forcing every interaction through one central platform.
Analytics, clips, and publishing tools
Castopod includes built-in analytics based on IABv2 audience measurement, plus tools for generating video clips and soundbites. The project also emphasizes Podcasting 2.0 features such as transcripts, chapters, people, locations, funding links, and other richer episode metadata.
Strengths and limits
The strength of Castopod is control: creators can run their own hosting stack, shape their podcast site, and connect to open social and podcast standards. The tradeoff is operational responsibility. Self-hosting still requires updates, storage, backups, moderation, deliverability planning, and enough technical comfort to run a web application.
Why it matters
Podcasting has long relied on RSS, but hosting, discovery, analytics, and audience contact often flow through large intermediaries. Castopod matters because it tries to keep podcast publishing open while adding modern social, analytics, monetization, and media tools that independent creators expect from a contemporary web platform.
WHOIS domain data
Data pulled: May 24, 2026View current WHOIS record
- Domain
- castopod.org
- IP address
- 46.105.202.232
- Registrar
- OVH sas
- WHOIS server
- whois.ovh.com
- Referral URL
- http://www.ovh.com
- Created
- August 6, 2019
- Updated
- September 20, 2024
- Expires
- August 6, 2026
- Nameservers
- dns12.ovh.net (5.135.86.81); ns12.ovh.net (5.39.102.21)
- Domain status
- clientDeleteProhibited https://icann.org/epp#clientDeleteProhibited; clientTransferProhibited https://icann.org/epp#clientTransferProhibited
- Contact privacy
- Registrant, admin, and technical contact details are redacted for privacy.