This has been going on for about a year.

Starting with a fresh gPodder directory, I can import my podcasts from an OPML file and then download all of them. However, even while the download is still in progress, "Check for new episodes" always gives me this error popup:

"No network connection. Please connect to a network and try again."

I am only able to refresh podcasts by deleting the gPodder directory and going through the process again.

The log file is empty and I have no messages on the command line.

gpodder 3.10.17
Packaged for nipkgs 20.09: https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/blob/master/pkgs/applications/audio/gpodder/default.nix