A major element of the Podcasting 2.0 standard is the inclusion of the decades old V4V (Value for Value) support model. For the most of the last half-decade, Lightning "Boost-o-grams" have been a majority of listener interaction and support donations for these shows.
Around Christmas last year, a lot of the shows I listen to simultaneously started getting smaller and less often Lightning donations. I'm not the only one who's noticed this. Today, I listened to two different shows that brought up that Lightning boosts are getting very light. There's a few models that I think might be the explanation for this.
- The macro situation is just that bad
- People initially jumped on when it was a novel idea but now don't care as much
- People believe other support mechanisms are better and use those
- The infrastructure under boosting changed too much too quickly and people couldn't keep up
- There was a cohort of early adopters who were unusually generous, and we're now seeing regression toward a lower baseline
- Probably plenty that I can't think of right now.
Is there any consensus that explains this? Or, more hopefully, am I just outright wrong?
It's simple. Things changed and PC 2.0 didn't keep up. People got tired of having to redo the backend infrastructure every 18 months. The PC 2.0 apps have always used some kind of back end and when Alby when to AlbyHub we didn't have anything to fill the void.
I think NWC is the way but basically all RSS feeds have keysend addresses in them so most wallets can even pay that.
These issues are hidden in apps like Fountain so people think things just work.
Checkout boostmebitch.com for a look at what can be built.
The Podcasting 2.0 boosts and streaming per-minute payments were all built around keysend. Previously there were more custodial wallets that supported keysend, but now you essentially have to run your own node to send/receive keysend payments and that greatly reduces the number of listeners who can send sats and podcast hosts who can receive them. There are a decent number of podcast apps that support streaming payments, but most just used the Alby API and most people just used the custodial Alby wallet. Once Alby removed the custodial wallet which supported keysend is when things started to fall apart.
Between BOLT 11, BOLT 12, NIP 57, CLINK, etc there appears to be more options now than ever to expand access to boosts and streaming sats, but it seems Dave and Adam feel it failed because keysend has become obsolete. Once it became common place for most of my splits to fail, and the boats I sent no longer got read on the shows I was sending them to (presumably because they were never received), I stopped regularly topping up my podcast wallet while listening.
One aspect that keysend did handle, is that the boost messages were sent through the TLV records with the payment. Outside of keysend these messages will need to be sent separately in a broadly adopted standard fashion.
To revive this would likely involve someone demonstrating to Dave, Adam, other regular contributors to the namespace that 1) without running a full node, listeners still have many options of wallets which can send payments, 2) podcasters have many wallet options which can receive payments, 3) there are ways to send messages along with those payments, and 4) there are ways for podcast apps to integrate these wallets (NWC seems great for this) in a non-custodial manor.
Castamatic has implemented NWC but that doesn't solve the side of the podcast hosts not receiving the boosts so my use of it has been minimal.
The spec is open source and can be found here: https://github.com/Podcastindex-org/podcast-namespace/blob/main/docs/examples/value/value.md
If seems like something worth saving, but time does appear to be running out as momentum wanes.
It's a beautiful thing. I can't believe there are people choosing to not fight for it.
We have but got ridiculed. You mentioned the end of Lightning Thrashes playing that clip from PC 2.0 and the "bitcoiner" getting talked done to are the same ones that got orange pilled from PC 2.0. We're tired and have forked off and doing out own thing with BTC and PC 2.0. Still using all the stuff but putting the pieces together to make it work and then go from there.
I'm glad to know that people are moving forward. I don't want to see this end.
ChadF's right about the backend churn, but the real cliff was the custodial wallet. Keysend worked because one tap in Alby sent sats, then the wallet died and nobody replaced that frictionless path, so boosts became homework. NWC is the fix but it only works if the apps hide it. The listeners didn't leave, the rail did
There are so many wallets that support NWC, both custodial and non custodial, self hosted and cloud hosted. As for folks buying bitcoin and getting sats, there is Strike (which is finally available in NY, the last US holdout I believe) which doesn't support NWC directly, but there are scripts on GitHub to go from strike API to NWC so it can be done. It seems to send bitcoin from
In addition to NWC, CLINK (@justin_shocknet ) seems to be a solution growing in popularity which would also be an interesting one to look into in addition to NWC.
Podcasting apps non-custodially sending sats appears to be a very solvable problem, one which Castamatic has already implemented. My problem has been that when I use NWC from Castamatic, my boosts thow errors to a number of the splits, and don't get read on podcasts which makes me think they weren't received. It's the getting off of keysend that still seems to be the problem.
Yea keysend is node-identity based to so it doesn't work for individual users, and bolt12 was propped up by the NGO's to cut into LND's share of the network so other implementations/wallets never really embraced it.
yeah the node identity bit's the real one, boosts land on the node not the person, so splits were always duct tape. not sure the NGO angle's deliberate, but a spec that slow to ship handed keysend the win by default anyway
Castamatic is my daily driver and your correct that your getting failed payments because the show you are Boosting has keysend addresses in the feed that your wallet cant pay. Apps can only give you the payment address that's in the podcasters feed.
Castamatic did NWC correct imo and it just fails if there is a mismatch between the wallet and what's in the feed.
Fountain added NWC and I'm not sure if its still there or not but if they had a mismatch they just fudged it and converted your payment to a keysend payment since they have ZBD as a backend which doesnt really help. You I can use my Primal wallet but Fountain is in the middle doing the hand off.
If a podcaster just puts a lnaddress in their feed and any that do lnurl will work most of these issues go away.
that lnaddress point is the fix and it's embarrassingly simple. feed says lnurl, any wallet pays, done. five years in and we're still losing boosts over one missing line in the feed
Fair, way more NWC support than I gave credit for, and Castamatic shipping it is the proof it's solvable. But you literally just described the cliff: your own boosts error on splits and don't get read. That's not a protocol problem anymore, that's a 'the app still makes this homework' problem. Fix that and boosts just work again
Is there a Podcasting 2.0 app that has half-decent UX?
Fountain on any version that has come out this year.
Castamatic and PodcastGuru are my daily drivers.
I am using TrueFans. Castamatic, Fountain, PodcastGuru, et al. are also great applications.
Someone was telling me that podcast listenership has declined significantly recently. I forget who said it and I can't find a source, but folks might have grown fatigued with the format or found other mediums like short form video or AI convos more to their liking. Or digital content broadly is increasing and podcasting is not as competitive.
Beyond that, I stopped listening to bitcoin podcasts a few years ago when I felt like they all shifted the majority of their focus to non-bitcoin stuff: ETFs, treasury companies, freedom tech, and AI. It also got kind of incestuous - their guests kept repeating, and they'd have on the other podcasters that did the same thing, and had their investment companies on, and their grant recipients. So the topics got broader but their guests got narrower and seemingly inauthentic.
I still like the format personally, but I think I've moved from $20 CDs to buying $1 singles. I find myself listening when a particular guest is on rather than every episode.
Was it just me trolling you about your listenership?
I listen!
They're doing great! Top 25 as of a few seconds ago.
lol
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There was a whole thing where Apple tweaked their default podcast app and it killed download numbers. Originally, when you subscribe to a show, it would download the last 5 episodes. Now, you need to manually download anything to hear it. Since most people subscribe to a show and only listen to an episode or two, it reaped havoc with podcast sponsors when they realized they'd been paying for 5x the number of listens they actually got.
That shouldn't affect the number of boosts, though, since that already requires a manual action and should be completely divorced from the empty downloads problem.
The podcasting index node is winding down seems like
Which was thee node for v4v.
But I’m still on fountain sending sats to my favorite pods and songs
There was a whole blow-up about it on the Podcasting 2.0 podcast about how they lost confidence in Lightning boosts. It was one of the reasons I wrote this. I don't remember exactly what show, but people are pissed off that they took that position and the Lightning Thrashes show put the whole conversation at the end of the most recent episode (the RIP JCD episode). We don't need them, though. The technology isn't dependent on anything from the NA world.
that was the end of this episode and what SirLibre played on Lightning Thrashes was SirSpencer covering this section of PC 2.0 on his podcast Bowl After Bowl which does a great job of explaining this all imo.
https://fountain.fm/episode/dmZ6J7CNRmsGgvJmFkSM