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So, I tried it out now but it still seems like very early days
  1. It's weird that I have to pay for looking at my own images?
  2. Blurred picture before looking at them is kinda shit. I find tipping after watching at them (like on SN) better. Also lower barrier to entry for newbies.
  3. Why do images have a price but when clicking on them I can set how much I want to pay? Is it a "pricetag" for looking at it or a recommendet price?
  4. Can I give my Photos a title/description? Where is my profile? Can I follow people? What is this place?
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I agree with all your points most especially with point #2.
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These are valid points. Thanks for mentioning them. Hopefully, someone will pick up your feedback and continues working on it. That´s why we open-sourced the code. Above all inSatgram is a showcase of what you can build with Lightning already today.
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As much as I believe that it's important for content creators to be compensated for their creative work, the current model Alby has right now with InSATgram makes it really difficult for people to truly appreciate content created by the content creator.
If you look at the model that SN and Zapread have, they are literally creating a platform where creators are compensated/given sats for their creative work. The creative work does the speaking and the consumers get to vote (with their sats) on how valuable the content is.
From a content marketing and branding perspective, the InSATgram model doesn't give room for the content creator to create a genuine connection with their readers. That makes it difficult for the creator to grow. If the creator doesn't grow, it will affect the success of the platform.
If you refer to the model that Starbackr has, you get to see content creators actually given the chance to get their content and creative work to do the talking. It would be interesting to see InSATgram doing its unique spin on Instagram using the current model that Starbackr, SN, and Zapread are following.
I think the InSATgram model as it is right now could work for the content creator's premium content or subscriber-only content where the content is locked to non-subscribers but open for subscribers. But this model should never be something that works as a standalone.
I love Alby and what they are doing but I feel that InSATgram would need some work. I look forward to see what they come up with.
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hey, yeah totally agree and nicely put there!
This is a hackday showcase project exploring what we can do with lightning web technologies and how easy it is becoming to build lightning integrated web apps. (without the app even touching sats directly actually)
To make this into a real product used by creators to sell content quite some more work is need and there are already great platforms that do that - I hope they will deeper integrate lightning to make the UX and payment flows better. (this is also what we at Alby want to help developers with... making it easy to implement the open lightning web standards).
I've made some notes on how the app works in the background: #63022
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what you said is absolutely right, and people will upload random stuff to sell, and that might be even copyrighted content also. Just like opensea, at first people made everything as an NFT for a quick buck. Still, this is still a new project and I like to give it the benefit of the doubt. But again, what you said is on point.
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Yeah, I also want to give a benefit of doubt. Alby creates awesome products so I'm looking forward to how InSATgram will evolve
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It's not meant to be a product. It's a demo application of the gin-LSAT library developed during the summer of bitcoin.
Someone is going to 10x this product and build a Lightning-powered OnlyFans.
Only a matter of time.
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It's open-source. Would be cool if people build on it.
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https://app.starbackr.com/ already does this afaik
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*** message deleted ***
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true, they are probably the leader in that market today
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Thanks for your research for the ""benefit of Bitcoin"" lol :D
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Lol how many dudes are really going to simp with sats?
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The question is rather who will make content.
Bitcoin community is 99% male and 1% female and only 1% of women have tig bitties. Only few of them are comfortable with content and want to earn money.
It's like the opposite of Onlyfans: lots of women wanting to make money on onlyfans but only get 10 subscribers and 1 harassing stalker, only very few make almost all the money and the subscriberbase is only big enough due to being worldwide for all fiat-normies.
If one was to do this they would need at least 1 hot influencer. Which would be awesome for adoption but only low-conviction adoption.
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I agree with everything you said, if you wanted an app like this to take off, what you could do is just run strikes API fiat degens and thots don't give a shit about bitcoin, but if you give them the same tool and they can use USD and the fees are way cheaper than onlyfans you'll quickly migrate the thots over because they are greedy and well the simps will follow them anywhere
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lol, agreed :D
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Only the natural direction of such a platform as well
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Information wants to be free. Paywalls set the price for liberation.
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The full quote from Stewart Brand is much more nuanced than that.
“On the one hand information wants to be expensive, because it’s so valuable. The right information in the right place just changes your life. On the other hand, information wants to be free, because the cost of getting it out is getting lower and lower all the time. So you have these two fighting against each other.”
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I've been discussing this with people recently.
This framing helped me (and is consistent with Brand's POV): information wants to be free, but services don't (discovery, UX, etc).
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Steve Wozniak shared a related quote you might like from the same 1984 Hackers Conference…
“Information should be free but your time should not”
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Awesome, great read! (Also just ordered Hackers.)
Perhaps we can generalize further. If services = time, perhaps information = commodities.
Commodities want to be free, but time does not.
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i think i follow the analogy, but i think data or information are better words than commodity.
commodities makes sense if you view commodities as raw forms of information, but their traditional definition is for things like gold, oil, water, time, etc… things that are scarce.
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Fair, information/data is enough of its own thing.
I guess I was more so to our desire to make commodities as cheap as possible. It's not really possible to make certain commodities (gold, oil, etc), zero cost, but we certainly try to. It just so happens it's possible to make data free.
Also, I wouldn't consider time a commodity in the same way I would gold, oil, or copies of data.
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yeah that’s true, time doesn’t really belong in that category… it gets more expensive as people become wealthier.
yeah, keep in mind this is a technical showcase..showcasing some lightning web technologies.
and with those we allow new ways to monetize on the web even with content being free.
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Hey, thanks for sharing the link here. I am one of the developers... please keep in mind this is a Hackday showcase project. We want to showcase what can be done now and how easy it actually is to implement.
It's cazy sometimes how well lightning on the web already works and how much it really has become "click-done"
So in this demo we use three lightning standards:
  1. LNURL - Lightning Address: insatgram does not hold funds, sats are sent directly from the viewer to the creator and all the creator has to do is to provide a lightning address. insatgram uses the lnurl-pay spec on the server to request an invoice from the creator's wallet. this invoice will then be passed to the viewer
  2. LSAT - this is a highly under-used spec. LSAT describes a way how servers send invoices to the client (using the famous 402 HTTP response code) and how clients provide payment proofs. And in this case we use the lsat middleware for Go developed as a Summer of Bitcoin project. When the client says it wants to pay the server responds with a HTTP 402 an an invoice, the client pays that invoice and sends the same request again with a payment proof, server validates and responds with the real image
  3. WebLN - this spec describes how the website can use JavaScript to programmatically call the wallet. The invoice is programmatically passed to the wallet, Alby asks the user for confirmation and passes the paid preimage back to the website. This allows this super seamless integration, and basically any interaction on a website can now include a stream of sats... and all this on an open protocol. This JavaScript based two-way communication (website passes the invoice to the Alby wallet, and the wallet passes the payment response/the preimage to the website) also makes the verification of the payment possible WITHOUT the need that the server has access to the node (remember the server only knows the lightning address of the creator)
so the flow basically is:
user clicks on an image -> HTTP request to the server with the Accept-Authenticate: LSAT header -> Server generates an bolt11 invoice through LNURL-pay (using the creator's lightning address -> WebLN calls Alby and prompts the user to confirm the payment -> with the preimage from the paid WebLN call another HTTP request is made with the Authorization: LSAT header
I've also made a video explaining this and showing the LSAT requests: https://share.cleanshot.com/Ec8R5H
I hope this explains a bit more what's behind... and now imagine what all we can build with this flow and a bunch of simple HTTP and JavaScript calls.
I might make a video coding session one of the next days to develop another app like this - ideas on what I should live-code?
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Buy my Criag's Mom meme! Definitely worth yo sats. Promise!
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Thank you secret donators. Crazy! 😂🍻
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Where/what does it save to know that I paid for a picture @Alby? Is it Cookies or IP address or do I have to have the Alby Addon in Firefox and be logged in?
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it uses LSAT to authenticate and the LSAT details in this showcase are stored in local storage of the browser.
(some technical explanation: #63022)
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That's f-inf awesome 🤩🤩
I miss the days of Instagram looking like a fashion magazine or coffeetable book
Probably not enough users yet tho 🤔
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Great, now Instagram models can earn from simps without worrying about getting shutdown by dollar processors XD
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Just had a test, nice; It reminds me of unsplash but with sats!
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Bug bounty: 5 downloads—10500 sats earned But only 2100 sats reach the wallet 👀
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Hi Natalia, unfortunately, the sats count is incorrect at the moment at the bottom of the images, we will be fixing these, this was just a demo released, lots to be worked on. :)
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np, keep up all the great work! 🤓️
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pretty cool, Alby should post their updates here directly
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Keep us posted. Well be interesting to see it evolve into to something cool (but not holding my breath).
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I'd love to see this implemented in more of a style like stacker.news
@k00b Maybe this can be a feature to add later? photos.stacker.news maybe?
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We want to make a meme sub eventually - and eventually allow people to create subs that only allow image posts.
I'm not sure how I feel about everything having a paywall tho. I think having a paywall option is interesting, but I tend to think that unless the service providing the paywall is amazing, people will try to find the image for free.
i.e. I agree with @dergigi that information wants to be free, but information providing services (UX, discovery, etc) doesn't. IMO this is why substack, spotify, etc work.
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Agreed! I'll never use this as implemented because i can't even see anything about the image before I'm asked to pay. I'd rather have the value4value approach and pay when I like the content. (like stacker.news. =)
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hail ya
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insatgram. you won Alby. 👏
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