@mitch @martin

I've been thinking about this and I know even know what to tell you guys tbh. TLDR Alby isn't "free" anymore and we need an alternative and it's not going well. We've been looking for an alternative for years and well doesn't look like one really exist.

Good news is that Alby still does it all and more but requires resources from the users.

Since you guys are talking web I think just using the Alby extension is still the way to go.

@mitch @martin

I've been building stuff over the past few months and started with Bitcoin Wallet Connect and add stuff to it. It supports Alby and other wallets but they don't really work for what we're doing yet.

I had Claude do a summary of what I used when build stablekraft.app that's been my catch all for this stuff over the last few months so I hope it helps.

stablekraft-app/docs/alby-payment-references.md at main · ChadFarrow/stablekraft-app

Contribute to ChadFarrow/stablekraft-app development by creating an account on GitHub.

GitHub (github.com)

@ChadF @martin thanks! This summary is helpful. It looks similar to I'm working on locally at the moment.

I'm not using those libraries (trying to avoid libraries in nextgen, when feasible) but besides that, looks about the same.

@mitch @martin

I'm vibecoding so I just drop in GitHub repos and hope for the best but the Bitcoin Connect stuff is what really got the ball rolling for me but you already have the Alby stuff working in Podverse web.

This also does NWC that Oscar and Franco have been working on but that's still very early and has a lot of issues still.

@ChadF @martin wow, that's a lot of apps in Bitcoin Connect. I guess they don't all use WebLN, and therefore have different steps for connecting your wallet to the page?

I have not gone through the NWC payment flow yet, so I don't have good mental model of that works.

Also, the UX of stablekraft.app is cool. Has a nice music library feel to it.

If you ever have coding questions I may be able to help with, feel free to reach out. I'm on Discord and Matrix in addition to here.

@mitch @martin

Most apps listed in Bitcoin Connect are just NWC connections and when you click on them it gives you detailed instructions on how to connect them which is nice but kind of misleading.

Those wallets also don't support keysend and most feeds have keysend addresses still so it's a nonstarter anyways but I'm just throwing everything at the wall to see what sticks.

Thanks man.

@james @mitch
So is boosting not really a thing anymore? Or is it just annoyingly complicated?

@james @mitch @martin I think that building tools like you did, and making it easy to use it for podcasters will pave the way.

@ChadF @mitch @martin Look into NWC. It's not that hard and opens up the possibility to connect many different wallets. https://github.com/getAlby/awesome-nwc?tab=readme-ov-file

@ChadF @mitch @martin that's the reason many consider keysend “deprecated”. It still works great, but the vast majority of wallets don't support it. So we have two paths at this time: stay in an Alby-only world (I love them, but most users won't install AlbyHub to use a podcast app), or embrace LNAddress and extend it so it brings metadata. I'm chosing the second, and added NWC + Boostbox API to Castamatic.

@francosolerio @ChadF @mitch I am completely new to NWC/Boostbox. Can you give me the tl;dr and maybe a link to get started? How easy is it for the end user? What I loved about the early days of Alby etc. was that you could just buy satoshis for 20$ (or whatever) and then it was mostly plug and play.

@martin @ChadF @mitch BoostBox API is a way to comunicate and store the old metadata payload we used to include in keysend, but on a separate server. It's quite simple, you POST the json metadata to a server, and get back a url to include in the LnAddress/LNURLp payment comments. The recipient of the payment uses that url to GET the same json metadata.

BoostBox

(boostbox.cloud)

@martin @ChadF @mitch For the user it's quite simple. Get any wallet you like (eg. Primal app gives you a NWC wallet for free if I remember correctly). Scan a QR code to connect app<->wallet. Then send boosts and stream sats as before.

AlbyHub can still be used via NWC.

Most difficult part for newbies IMHO is buying sats with USD, but that’s the same as before.

@mitch @martin From the podcast creator side, lnaddress is much easier than keysend. With lnaddress you can pay me with a payment to james@podnews.net - with keysend it’s a complex set of numbers that are not portable. Strike is just one app that is available that acts as a (free) payment wallet.

Both allow you to send metadata with the payment. The difference is the length of that metadata. With lnaddress you need to send a URL pointing to JSON; with keysend you can send the data with your payment. It’s not true to say “no data” - just “less data”.

The privacy remains similar - the URL containing the JSON is still a long, GUID-like URL, which like Google Photos is open but is quite difficult to guess.

Worth remembering that the podcast creator side is one part of this; and then there’s the podcast listener side (for apps). We need both to be easy to develop
for and for humans to achieve.