Paywalled is a blogging platform powered by the lightning network that would allow content creators earn through Bitcoin micropayments. I wrote about it here: https://rukundo.mataroa.blog/blog/i-built-a-blogging-platform-powered-by-the-lightning-network/
Here's the repo: https://github.com/crukundo/lnd-paywall
Let me know what you think
Love it! Do you have a demo running somewhere? Would love to give it a spin and provide feedback
$5 per month is way way too much for blogs. You can only subscribe to like 5 before you start questioning your life choices.
The killer value of this is the ability to charge much less than that. Hopefully you could still do a monthly payment kinda thing though. People like that “set it and forget it”model.
completely agree. Even CNN+ failed to get $3.99 after throwing $300M
Patreon creators charging like 25usd is madness. The entire market suffer, because you have to choose and many creators would be left behind.
That is why I dont like monthly subscriptions. Also in a worldwide market, the less you charge, the more you make.
Well done, but I believe that the paywall approach is misguided. Would love to see this forked and adjusted to a value4value based model.
yup
if you want to do recurring payments with Lightning you can re-ignite the allowance spec discussion under lnurl-rfc which would allow regular payments from wallets to services like this.
otherwise awesome!
I don't like to be the negative person but isn't blogging basically dead?
First wave was people just turning their life into a story à la gossip girl and second wave died with Tumblr. People nowadays are either content creators on podcast/Twitch/Youtube or communitymembers like SN, Twitter or Reddit, Discord etc.
You must ask yourself: What (besides Bitcoin integration) will revive blogging? What could draw in the mainstream?
I see plenty of blogs on HN and lobsters.
There's a normie renaissance with Substack too.
Medium isn’t so bad
As a project coming out of a program, I will give A+. You made use of your time nicely to showcase a what can be done with lightning. Really impressed by the quality of the code as well. Keep up your good work..!
For comparison of antoher LN powered paywall blog:
Self-host your own blog with a lightning paywall - no censorship! [In Development]
#19783
https://github.com/suhailsaqan/lightning-blog
https://lightning-blog.vercel.app/
Interesting, I see there is a commercial LN-enabled paywall offering as well:
Payment per blog post (Pay-per-Post) - BTCPayWall - Bitcoin PayWall to sell Content and Digital Goods on WordPress
https://btcpaywall.com/payment-per-blog-post/
https://coincharge.io/en/btcpaywall-integration/
($249 license purchase)
BTCPayWall was previously "Lightning Paywall", but was re-branded in February, 2022.
Great work.
Nice!
Very nice and interesting.
super nice! we need to get webln in it make it compatible with @Alby and other wallets
Very interesting I could see content providers opting into this once they understand true value and value 4 value
This is a great contribution! There are content creators that wish to publish their content and ask for tips (SN), and there are others that want subscription based model (substack), but this enables another option where you can pay-as-you-go. There is a wordpress plugin that does something similar, but really... is wordpress usable by mere mortals anymore?
It would be interesting to release the paywall after an expiry period so only new content (maybe something newer than 6 months) would need to be paid for. Something also valuable would be for the readers to have a lnauth account so they don't need to pay for the content again the next time they visit the site. You might also have a threshold for readers so if they pay so much per month they will gain access to all content until their pay-per-month quota falls back below that threshold.
Question: is there a sample site where the code is running?
I find the platform very interesting, good job