[00:00:00] Speaker A: Obviously, we're trying to make Fountain the best possible listening experience and the best possible app for discovering great audio content.
But more broadly than that, we don't want to turn into, you know, another version of Spotify where things only work in Fountain. We want to enable discovery and the signal around valuable content to come from anywhere and be consumed anywhere.
[00:00:31] Speaker B: Anywhere.
[00:00:32] Speaker A: That's going to make Fountain a lot better.
[00:00:51] Speaker B: What is up guys?
[00:00:52] Speaker C: Welcome back to Bitcoin Audible. I am Guy Swan, the guy who has read more about Bitcoin than anybody else you know. This show is brought to you by Leden. You can actually get fiat from your bitcoin without selling it. You can avoid capital gains taxes and still own your bitcoin. Now this doesn't come without risks and trade offs, which is exactly why Leden is one of literally two companies that right now I would actually do this with and two companies that I have used this service with because they have survived a vicious bear market.
They do proof of reserves, they have open books every month and they just make the process easy.
Read the terms carefully. Like I said, it doesn't come without risk, but this is a really awesome tool to have. There's a special link down for you.
[00:01:41] Speaker B: In the show notes.
[00:01:43] Speaker C: Also a shout out to our other sponsors, get Chroma. They are all about light health and red light therapy and you know, getting your hormones and circadian rhythm right. Something I swear by. It's been a huge game changer. I've got a 10% discount for those.
[00:01:57] Speaker B: Guys right down in the show notes.
[00:01:59] Speaker C: PubKey and the incredible stack that they are building. PubKey app that's P U B K Y dot app to check out kind of this proof of concept for what they're doing. They have a ton of other tools. You've got to check them out if you're a builder. And then of course the Human Rights foundation, they are just an amazing organization. They do the financial freedom report they put on the Oslo Freedom Forum.
[00:02:21] Speaker B: If you haven't checked this out, if.
[00:02:22] Speaker C: You haven't been to the Oslo Freedom Forum, you got to links and details all down in the show notes. Now today we're actually doing a conversation with Oscar from Fountain fm. Now we've done a show about Fountain in the past and they've been slowly integrating and adding some new features and specifically they've kind of had this really not only like from my personal perspective have they continually gotten better, which has just kind of gotten me excited about the way they're doing things, but they're integrating nostr They've integrated lightning, they're building.
[00:02:56] Speaker B: Their own system with.
[00:02:58] Speaker C: They're now releasing hosting. I think it's public, actually, and I may be switching our hosting over to them.
[00:03:04] Speaker B: I haven't fully done it yet, just because it takes time to figure it all out, but this conversation kind of kind of tipped me over the edge.
[00:03:12] Speaker C: But more than anything, I think this conversation is just great for understanding the why and some of the how of implementing a lot of these protocols into an app that kind of gets the best of all worlds and creates a set of features and a degree of openness that you really can't get anywhere else. And I've just been continually impressed and.
[00:03:35] Speaker B: I thought it was time to actually bring them back on to kind of continue our conversation, because I think there's.
[00:03:40] Speaker C: Just a lot more to dig into. And this is just something that's super.
[00:03:43] Speaker B: Interesting to me and I've been following.
[00:03:45] Speaker C: Really closely, and I hope you guys enjoy this one as much as I did. So this is Chat 141. Oscar Mary from Fountain Protocols Over Platforms.
[00:03:59] Speaker B: Welcome to show Oscar. How you doing, man?
[00:04:01] Speaker A: Yeah, I'm doing well. Thanks, guy. I appreciate you taking the time to have me on.
[00:04:06] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, for sure. You know what? Since. Since we're talking about the app at some point, I actually just want to start right there because that's what I'm curious about right now.
So basically, what's going on with the project? And plus the. You said there was going to be a new version soon and give the rundown kind of for the audience who doesn't know, anybody who might not be aware.
[00:04:32] Speaker A: Yeah, happy to. So, yeah, just a brief intro for anybody that doesn't know.
Fountain is the podcast app that we work on. And it's like any other podcast app does everything that you'd expect it to do. The. The key differentiator for us is we have payment, so you can support your favorite podcasters directly from the player or directly from the content page. And we also have social features so you can see what the people you follow are listening to, interacting with and finding valuable in terms of the payments that they're sending.
And yeah, I guess the goal of Fountain has always been to help people discover content that's really worth listening to, Especially when you discover podcast episodes on external social media, it often can get lost in the noise.
And so we're trying to kind of bring podcast discovery natively into the app where people listen.
We use Noster for all of the social features in Fountain. That was an update that we made just coming up on a year ago, actually, what's really cool about this is you can download the app, login with your Noster credentials, and then you bring your follower graph into the app so you don't have to build up a brand new follower graph. Everything's just there. And we can also take advantage of the external Noster network because we can index any posts on Noster that are related to specific shows or specific episodes. This is quite interesting, especially for content creators because again that, those, those shares on something like, you know, Twitter X, they often get lost in the noise because the algorithm doesn't, you know, boost them in the feed.
So if you have an audio only feed, which we have in the Fountain app, you can see a lot more of this content that you'd otherwise miss.
So yeah, that's like a super high level overview of Fountain and happy to go in any direction you want to, I guess. Yeah. The new version that we have almost ready and might actually be live by the time this goes out is fountain 1.3.
And really this has just been a big overhaul of all of the social features, but also our search functionality, which I know you personally, guy, you know, that was top on your list to get sorted.
[00:07:07] Speaker B: So, yeah, the podcast index. I know y' all been using the podcast index and it has driven me crazy because I can't search my own show on it and it makes no sense why. I don't know what they do. What did y', all, what have y' all done to make the search better? What, y' all built your own index?
[00:07:22] Speaker A: Like, yeah, so we've completely built our own search index now, which we've been planning to do for a while, but actually it just made sense to do at the same time as this Noster kind of social refresh because we're actually using like a database that links the two together and that way you can kind of, you know, do really cool things, which we're only scratching the surface on in terms of fountain 1.3, but you can actually link the search queries to the social activity from your follower network.
[00:07:59] Speaker B: That's awesome.
[00:08:00] Speaker A: So we have the data pre, like imagine you searched for a specific topic and then in the search results you could see the interactions from your follower graph that have applied to those search results. So it's that kind of extra little bit of signal that, oh, this episode on a topic is more worth clicking through to and checking out than the next episode, which has no interaction from your followers. So that's why we kind of, you Know, bit the bullet. And yeah, built. Built our own content search index and also hooked it into all of the noster follower graphs to try and really elevate the search. Because, you know, podcast index are amazing and the stuff that they provide has been a big part of how we've been able to get the app to where it is today. But, yeah, there was many examples where you'd search for an episode and it just wouldn't come back in the results. Whereas now the new search is, you know, it's pretty good at finding really, really niche episodes. Also not even necessarily based on the title of the episode, the show title, things like that. We go actually into the show notes and we're looking at expanding that to things like transcripts as well. So, yeah, improving the search was a massive job and excited for people to test it out. We're still testing it because you do have to be opinionated in the way that you rank search results. You have to decide, like, okay, for a given query, do I, you know, slightly up rank shows versus episodes, or do I, like, slightly downrank the description the show notes? Because then you can get people that do, like, keywords, you know, filling and, and trying to boost themselves. So, yeah, still a lot to do. But yeah, I think people really enjoy it.
[00:09:52] Speaker B: Nice, Nice. Yeah, the. It made no sense to me. I don't even know how you have this error in the podcast index. And I'm not, I'm not trying to crap on the podcast index because I know they do, like, seriously awesome work.
But when I would search it and fountain or the podcast index, same thing. I literally, if I typed in the word bitcoin, you could not find my show. You could not find an episode of my show. And there is. There is no word more on everything that I do than that word. And I could literally scroll all the way to the very end and I'd get episodes of these completely random shows that had nothing to do with anything, that had bitcoin somewhere, like deep down in their description or like somebody mentioned it or something. And there would be no bitcoin audible. And then the only way they would actually come up is I'd type in bitcoin audible, A, U, D, I, B, L. And it wasn't until the L that the show would actually show up. And it wasn't until the E that you would actually propagate all of the things that were relevant. It had to have the exact thing in totality for it to even show up in the search results. And it's just bog I don't even know how you do that in their. How they did that in the. In the index to make that happen.
It seems like some wizardry, but.
But that's awesome that y' all have built a completely new thing.
[00:11:18] Speaker A: And. And that's such a great example, right? If someone searches bitcoin in a podcast app, you know, how do you do the ranking based on that?
What's so cool about having access to an open social graph is that you can actually rank it based on your personal view of who's important to, you know, listen to in terms of what they've been recommending. So that's something that's not going to be live in this 1.3 release that's coming in the next week, but that ability to rank search results based on your social graph is something that we can definitely do and have plans to do. So you could. You search bitcoin and you only get results based on the people that you choose to follow on Noster and what they've been either sharing or liking or boosting or commenting.
That's. That's another thing, actually, that we're adding in 1.3 is the ability to like any episode or show in the app.
[00:12:28] Speaker B: Oh, sweet. Okay.
[00:12:29] Speaker A: And we're using Noster for this as well, so it's totally open. And we hope other podcasting apps will adopt this, because what we found was that in the current version of Fountain, you have a choice of things that you can do in terms of social interaction around an episode. You can send a boost, but that obviously requires sending money and requires the show to have Lightning payments enabled, of which there's only about 10,000.
You can send a comment. Well, that requires thinking of something to say and deciding that you want to share that thought publicly.
And so there wasn't really a light touch way of you signaling that this episode was worth listening to. That could apply to any episode in the world.
[00:13:21] Speaker B: You know, having a low barrier way, a simple like. Like, low investment way to just signal, I like this or this is. This is good. You know, I. I completely. I completely see that whole framing, and I think that's. That is lost on the whole. You know, everybody's a bunch of people are like, zaps, only zaps forever or whatever. Like, nah, you need to have a like button. You need to have a like button. There's a lot of introverts in the world that don't want to do the next step, and they just want to. They just. They just like, I'll. I'll do the Thumbs up. That's how they'll do a heart. That's it. You know?
[00:13:57] Speaker A: Exactly. And especially for when it applies to external content like podcasts, you know, we don't want to have to have podcasters say, yes, I want to sign up for Noster so that people can like my show. We want likes to be able to apply to any episode in the world. And luckily, OpenRSS has the podcast GUID standard, which does provide global identifiers for every episode and show. And that's how we can, you know, build this open liking system with Noster that just references the guids and then other apps can query those likes based on the goods.
[00:14:36] Speaker B: How do you marry those together? Like, where does the like exist? Like, would it actually propagate? Is like that episode is now like a Noster post somewhere? Or is it literally just assigning with the guid or whatever the thing is for the rss and there's just a signature and it just propagates. But it wouldn't show up in, you know, primal or something because it's not.
It's not like a type one or something, you know, like, what? How does that even work?
[00:15:08] Speaker A: Yeah, exactly.
It's a great question. And this is something that ever since we started thinking about Noster as a great solution for open social and discovery within podcasting, we've been debating and the big debate is, does the show and the episode have to exist as an entity or noster for these things to work?
And my view is that that should not be a requirement, because if I want to go and like an episode, maybe the episode is 10 years old, maybe, you know, the podcast that who created that episode is no longer doing it. You know, they've moved on in their life.
That shouldn't prohibit somebody in the app interacting with that episode so that other people can discover it and get value from it. And so my view has always been the social elements that use Noster need to work for any podcast without that podcast necessarily being on Noster. It doesn't stop there being another podcast specific Noster spec, where people can publish their episodes on Noster. That's totally fine, but it just allows these amazing social dynamics to work on any episode. So the way it works for both comments and likes in Fountain is that we use the.
There's a NIP called NIP73 which allows you to reference external content IDs that have some kind of formalized spec.
Podcast GUIDs are one of these. So you can reference a show GUID or an episode guidance, but this also works with, for example, books and ISBNs. It works for movies with these codes called ISANs, which are, like, globally recognized. So the idea here is you can reference this external data in any Noster event. And so when you like something in Fountain, we create a like event. It's actually using the existing generic reaction or external reaction. I can't remember the name. I think it's kind 17.
And then we just insert the podcast guids into that event as nip73 tags. We also include a URL. URL hint. So any clients that want to render, you know, a preview of what would like, can do so. But the main idea is that any podcast app that is, that wants to integrate and, you know, read these likes from any app and allow people to, like, back and forth and reply to each other on different apps. All they have to do is know how to look up a show or an episode based on the guid. And every podcast app will know how to do that because it's a very common thing. So it leaves the content entities outside of Noster and just uses Noster for the social dynamics.
[00:18:14] Speaker B: That is awesome.
That is awesome.
Do you know anybody else who, like, are y' all kind of, like, setting the standard for some of this stuff as far as, like, having a non Noster app use Nostr, you know, like, like, because Fountain isn't Noster native, Fountain is like pulling in Noster where it makes sense.
But, like, because, like, this is really one of the major things, like what we've been thinking about with the projects we've been working on, like paradrive and stuff, is being able to pull in, like, I didn't even realize there was the, the.
The nip about, like, doing ISBNs and like, you know, guids and stuff like that.
[00:18:59] Speaker A: That's.
[00:19:00] Speaker B: That's actually really awesome that that's kind of a formal thing because that means I could just make a request based on that, and if that was hosted anywhere else, I could literally pull in all of the likes that people have put in on Fountain or people to put in on Noster or any other. Like, you start to see how all of the environments can start to build on top of each other and, like, give a feedback that, you know, this app is producing more likes and, you know, network connections for this other app or this completely alternative purpose.
Um, so.
But how has the implementation gone there? Like.
[00:19:40] Speaker A: Like.
[00:19:40] Speaker B: Cause it's. It's definitely a different way to think about stuff, and it is a different set of tools and tech kind of. What are the big challenges that you guys have, like, what's the most annoying thing about the integration that you guys have run in so far?
[00:19:58] Speaker A: That is a great question.
We have had to do a lot of custom stuff around the relay, so we've built our own relay to that ties in the. The content entities that we know about from the podcast side. And that's been a big engineering challenge. But I would actually say that the most challenging thing is the key management for new users.
Dude.
[00:20:27] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:20:27] Speaker A: Because we. We also went back and forth on should we have a, like, custodial key signer set up for new users that don't know anything about Noster, and we kind of look after their key until they're ready to move on? We decided against that. And so the way that you.
[00:20:49] Speaker B: The honey pot problem, ma', am, like, if. If y' all ever get hacked a God, that'd be a nightmare.
[00:20:55] Speaker A: Exactly.
[00:20:56] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:20:56] Speaker A: Yeah. So the approach we took was we allow you to log in with your NSEC directly in the app, but we also support remote signers like Amber on Android, and we'll support any more that come along.
But the biggest challenge is the.
The gap between mobile and web.
So as an example, if some. If somebody downloads the Fountain app and creates a Noster profile in the app, which we allow people to do, and it doesn't even really feel like you're creating a Noster profile. It feels like you're just creating a profile in Fountain. But we do explain this profile works anywhere. Like, go and check out the rest of the Noster ecosystem.
A big challenge is, okay, they've done that. They're in the mobile app.
What if they want to interact on web? What if they want to, like, reply on web? We have to explain the concept of key signing extensions and, you know, point them towards Albi, which is also a wallet, which can be, you know. So the onboarding in terms of key management is still a big challenge, and I think that we need more simple solutions in terms of even, I think, like, custodial options that do the remote signing capability that just allow people to.
Yeah, like, sign in anywhere. I also think I like what Primal are doing in terms of extending into Noster Wallet Connect.
I do feel like whatever your main Noster client is, your kind of daily driver, whether that's Primal, Damas, Amethyst, I think those clients should become the remote signers as well, so that people don't need to have. If somebody wants to use the Noster features in Fountain, rather than them having to, you know, download Fountain, download Primal, and install a Browser extension and then move the keys around each three. If they could just sign up to Primal and then remote sign into any other app or client and get the wallet and get the app, I think that would be much easier.
[00:23:07] Speaker B: Have you ever heard and, or looked into Open Secret?
[00:23:12] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, it's, it's super interesting. Yeah, I think something like that, which was almost like a self serve remote sign up would be incredibly beneficial to Noster.
[00:23:29] Speaker B: So kind of as I understand it and actually correct me if you know the details, it's been a while since I've had this conversation and it also may have changed since I had the conversation with him, but is that they have a blind server that is actually technically hosting keys but they have no visibility into anything that's going on. It's just a total, it's a black box to them. They're literally just a blind host. So, so that there's a computer out there that they can make requests to. And then what they do is they make it so the user can sign in with Apple and then they have a key in the secure enclave in you know, Apple keychain or whatever. You know, however Apple does it to basically open up and see, see the window into their little space in the Open Secret server and then that allows them to pull the key.
And so the Open Secret server is actually the one that's doing the signing. It's just that they. And you can you know, verify exactly what they're running. Which is funny because this is something that Hal Finney actually talked about in kind of the early days of like trying to build a precursor to Bitcoin was okay, well you can have centralized servers but you can have it in a very Open Secret way. You can have it so that like they can literally verify like through a hash or whatever exactly the code that's running on the server. So there was this idea of like having nodes check the work which was just showing what was being run on the central server.
So this is actually kind of extending that. Like okay, well let's. How do we do this with Noster keys so that we can get the benefit of like a centralized server hosting the keys for you. Because how freaking convenient is it but to always have a remote signer on but then also know that they can't see it, that if somebody hacked them that that person can't see it either because all of the keys are at the edges. And then you give the user that incredibly simple or expected user experience of just being able to sign in with Apple or sign in With Google or whatever you know those more typical options are, but giving them a degree of security. I guess the problem there would be the big difficulty I would see is that like if somebody's using a separate Open Secret server and you sign in with Apple again, you're going to expect to see the same keys. But like if Fountains run an Open Secret server and then Primals running an Open Secret server, how do you make sure that when they log into Fountain they use the primal if they already made keys over there rather than creating a completely new account? And you know, how do you, how do you get those people to talk together so that there's like kind of like a common network or stash of blind keys for the user?
But it's a fascinating and interesting idea and I talk about this all the time and sometimes I just kind of get brushed off on Noster and I'm just like guys, y' all are missing the point. Like I know this is a headache and I'm so happy that that's what you said that the. Well, I'm not happ.
But the key problem is kind of the biggest headache and the barrier for new people because I just think it's something that has been a little bit just like ah, whatever, you know, like everybody's a bitcoiner and technical, everybody just needs it. You gotta learn how to use keys. And I'm like nah man, nah. You gotta meet users where they are. Like give em. Give them the best of both worlds. And I feel like Open Secret's probably the best I've seen as far as like trying to marry the, the expectation versus the, the new model, you know, like the. How investors dependent on keys.
[00:27:26] Speaker A: Exactly, yeah. And I feel like all the pieces are there in a sense. Like we have the remote signing capability.
It works really well with, with Amber on Android we have the ability to, you know, have these secure server setups where you can. As long as you're authenticating with one provider then it kind of works in that way. I think what we need is just to combine the two and then also have the main clients.
And I say main in the sense that they are, you know, the traditional social media feed type clients, be the remote signers as well. Because it is incredibly difficult to get anybody to download a single app. If your entire onboarding depends on people downloading two different apps then you know, it makes it even more difficult. And I think that it's a great opportunity for whichever client adds a remote signing capability directly into it. That will mean more apps that are Kind of adjacent or using Noster as not their, you know, main thing like Fountain will, will push people to go and sign up to those apps. Because of the remote signing capability and the easy ux, I feel like it's.
Yeah, it's, the pieces are there, but it is such an important thing for ux. And I do think that Noster's.
One of Noster's biggest advantages is the fact that you can have all of this interop between different apps and it's, it's more enjoyable to use Noster the more apps you use.
But for any developer out there thinking, oh, I've got this idea for a Noster game or, you know, a Noster Media experience or a Noster Social experience, once they get to the key management part, you know, yes, there's the browser extensions and yeah, we all understand that they are easy, but installing a browser extension is something that a lot of ordinary people have never done.
And so it is confusing. But yeah, hopefully we'll improve on those things.
[00:29:48] Speaker B: Sometimes I think we have this developer blindness in the space where everybody's so technical they've completely lost touch with what the average person actually expect. Like, like just having someone who has installed a browser extension is a niche within the niche of a, like technical community of that that stretches into normie land. And then to have like a super niche extension that manages keys is like you're, you're looking at like 0.001% of anyone who's gonna actually do that or, or fight with it and figure it out.
It's just like you have to be somebody who's like really interested in Noster and in Bitcoin and stuff. It's like that's, it's, it's only at the convergence of all of those things, not the, it doesn't, it doesn't expand it, it specializes or narrows down your, your group.
But yeah, there's so many, there's so many little problems like that that I think are introductory barriers that if we can get across the experience on the other side is so great.
It's funny because, like, I'll still like link to the Fountain episode quite a bit. But more than anything, the index I still have to link to Spotify, which I don't even want to, but because of the indexing thing, because people can't search the episode.
It's actually one of those like, small introductory barriers because of the podcast index because, because, you know, if I'm asking them to be like, oh yeah, you just. The parts 2, 3 and 4 are already up there for the great.
The great taking or whatever.
They can't. They can't search it in it, so. Well, they can now, but. So I'll still have to, like, give, like, a Spotify link. But that's, like, kind of a great example of, like, just that one. One little barrier makes such a big difference because once you get in there, the ability to just, like, when I go to Fountain and just, like, I can search through and see other people's comments, and I'll even see something that I missed on Noster. You know, I'm usually in Domus and Primal or whatever, checking messages and notifications, and I won't see something because they didn't specifically mention me. They didn't. They didn't tag the guy Swan. Yeah, but they're talking about the show.
And then I go to Fountain, and then, boom, there's comments and a post sharing out my episode, and I'm like, oh, hell yeah. And then I boost them and, you know, and. Or zap them and repost or whatnot. But it's just cool because I kind of get this, like, alternative view, this kind of, like, from my podcast out rather than from my account out in noer space.
So it really does.
It just adds.
[00:32:45] Speaker C: It just adds.
[00:32:46] Speaker B: And the more things. This is why I think it's so underrealized, I think, how powerful Noster can be, because as it gets adopted, it feeds back on itself. It's a little bit like liquidity on Lightning, right? Is the more people who adopt Lightning, the more new people come on. And Lightning just works as expected.
But there's this kind of extended bootstrapping phase of, okay, well, do we have likes in this app? Do we have. How do we, you know, attach to content that's external, et cetera, et cetera, which we've already talked about. But the potential is just massive. The potential is just massive to have that. That standard.
[00:33:25] Speaker A: Yeah. And I think as well, I've always been just a huge believer that podcasting is a great fit for Noster because it is already decentralized. There's, you know, hundreds of different podcast apps out there that people use. There's hundreds, probably thousands of different hosting companies, and podcasting doesn't have any social features. It's not like you're going to an industry that already has comments, shares, recommendations from the people you follow and saying, hey, use this other thing. There's. There's nothing there. It doesn't exist. Everything's just, you know, tied in. If something like Apple Podcast does have reviews, then it's tied to Apple podcasts and you only get less than 30% of what you're seeing. And yeah, so I have this big belief that Noster is a perfect fit for podcasting.
But in speaking to other podcast app developers and hosting companies about this, because I'm really trying to get this adopted more broadly than just Fountain, what I realized was that for a podcast app developer to add comments into their app, that is quite a heavy lift in terms of development cycles, because you need to add, you know, the ability to post the comment, the text editing, the rich text rendering, the mention handling. When you're tagging people, you need to do the.
You need to like, write different text kind, passing tests and make sure that all of them look good as comments.
Then you also need to do, you know, like, safety stuff. You need to make sure that, you know, if the podcasters don't want certain explicit language to be in their comments that you need to work on that.
So adding comments to a podcast app is a very big engineering task, whereas adding likes to a podcast app is way less of a lift.
[00:35:34] Speaker B: Oh, yeah.
[00:35:36] Speaker A: In order to add likes to a podcast app, all you need to do is add a like button and then sign a noster event when that like button is pressed. And then if you want to show the other likes, you write one noster query and you pull in the likes and you render the profile like avatars. That's all you need to do. And that can be done very quickly, very light touch, with lower risk in terms of big changes to the app and the ux. And so that's why we think that these decentralized podcast likes have a really great chance of being adopted by the podcasting industry, because it's just a bit easier to dip your toe in the water. And then the apps that have success with that, they can move on to things like adding comments, move on to things like adding payments. But yeah, that light touch is hopefully an easier start.
[00:36:30] Speaker B: Have you been talking to a bunch of other app developer, like podcast, like people, like, kind of. What's been the reaction in thinking about that?
[00:36:41] Speaker A: Yeah, I definitely have other podcast app developers, other hosting companies.
The appetite for something like this is definitely there.
And we've actually seen some podcast hosting companies experiment with, you know, other protocols, like Transistor, who are a massive podcast hosting company, actually added the ability to optionally add blue sky comments onto your hosting web page.
And, and I think they've had some success with that. But I. What I find with the Blue sky protocol is that it's very limited because you know, doing things like the ability to like any podcast episode is just not going to be possible there. So yeah, people are definitely interested in it.
[00:37:35] Speaker B: And now the centralized Blue sky servers are kycing people for crying out loud.
It's like defeats the purpose, my man.
[00:37:43] Speaker A: But yeah, but yeah, I mean I think there's definitely interest. It's just about how can like where's the guidance to. To dip your toe in the water and. And do something very simple and hopefully once this new release goes by you. Yeah, as I say should be next week people will see that liking capability. And we're also going to set up some demos in terms of how to query the likes for any episode.
You know, how to implement it if you wanted to like some sample code.
[00:38:15] Speaker B: Oh, that's cool. That's a big deal, man. Sample code.
Even just having it available like it's shocking the difference between like having like 20 things on GitHub versus one thing on GitHub that AI, that you can have AI code something for you, you know, like that you can like really kind of piece it together and then like tweak it or make corrections when you get an error or whatever to kind of like put the things together. Especially if it's like a simple thing that the, the again low barriers, like you know, just a like button, just signing an event and just doing a query.
It just makes, it makes such a huge difference and I think we discount it way too much.
[00:39:00] Speaker A: Yeah, but yeah, that's our kind of goal with it is to help people just get started. Because any Fountain, obviously we're trying to make Fountain the best possible listening experience and the best possible app for discovering great audio content.
But more broadly than that, we don't want to turn into, you know, another version of Spotify where things only work in Fountain. We want to enable discovery and the signal around valuable content to come from anywhere and be consumed anywhere. That's going to make Fountain a lot better because we're going to have more data to play with and more data to use in our, for example, trending sections, things like that. So if there's like a podcast app that's really heavy or maybe it's not even a podcast app, maybe it's like a topic specific website that just is conversation around a specific topic and got focused on podcasts.
If we can use that data in Fountain then it just makes the discovery better. So yeah, really always trying to get more people building and more people contributing to the data set.
[00:40:26] Speaker C: You don't actually have to sell your bitcoin to access its value. You can actually borrow against it very easily without selling it. But when you do this, you need to be careful. You need to do this with a company that is trusted, one that has survived a bear market and one that will literally show you that they have the coins, that they have proof of reserves or some mechanism where you can look at your balance and know that it is safe. This is why I've been a huge fan and a customer of Ledn for a few years now.
[00:40:57] Speaker B: So one of the bitcoin backed loans that I got a few years ago.
[00:41:00] Speaker C: To finish renovations and the basement and studio in my house, I would have paid three times as much bitcoin had I just sold sold it as it now takes me to just pay off the loan. And that's if I sell the bitcoin to pay it off, which I think I'm going to be able to get equity out of the house and pay off the loan and get all of my bitcoin back. This especially makes sense if you're making an investment.
If you're doing something that is going to pay you income in the future, or if you're investing in bitcoin mining, it's a whole lot easier to beat the interest rate if you loan against the bitcoin and keep the the bitcoin. Leden also makes this like crazy easy. Like if you went to do this right now, you could probably get the money by tomorrow. They do proof of reserves twice a year and I check it's a very easy process and you don't have to do monthly payments if you don't want to. You can just accrue the interest and pay off in chunks whenever it makes sense. And best of all, they just recently got rid of all the noise. They had some other features.
[00:41:59] Speaker B: They had Ethereum loans.
[00:42:00] Speaker C: They're like, nope, chop it. They had a yield product. Nope, chop it. They had loans where you could get a lower interest rate and they didn't have it on their books. They lent it out. Nope, chop that. Now it's just custodied, fully backed Bitcoin loans doesn't work for every single situation or every person. But there are some times where this is an incredibly valuable tool to have. Don't overextend. Remember bitcoin is volatile and read the details. But if you need access to your bitcoin's value and you just don't want to sell, Leden is a brilliant and simple tool for doing exactly that. And I've Been a happy customer for a couple of years now. You can check out the links right down in the show notes. It's L E D N Leden IO.
[00:42:48] Speaker B: Have you seen this? There's been some posts. I don't feel this quite in kind of my Nostra experience and maybe it's just that like the people I interact with are still just active, but that the overall stats have been pretty much stagnant and or like declining a little bit over the past probably year I guess.
And there was that one like real hot zone.
Actually there's been kind of two growth periods.
But I'd be curious what your, what your thoughts on that are. How do you feel about like the trajectory of Nostr because like technically like from a structure and theoretical sense, like all of it feeds back on itself so. Well, I love the implementation and like the, the back and forth that I get with Fountain and like I can. The potential is so huge if you had adoption. But the question is how do you get across that, that canyon to.
To allow the feedback mechanism to work for it? Um, and so kind of what's your experience about that in, in relation to that and feedback activity, like all of that stuff. What's, what's your thoughts on the status there?
[00:44:03] Speaker A: Yeah, I think that the reality is that right now the apps are just not good enough. They need to be better.
Like Fountain needs to be a lot better than it currently is. You know, we've already talked about. Our search kind of sucked.
We had some scaling issues with our relay, which meant that sometimes we weren't getting all of the data that we wanted to in terms of indexing or people were experiencing issues.
The onboarding was a bit confusing in the app for a long time in terms of what is a profile, where are your keys, like what is master.
So I will definitely like put my hand up and say Fountain has not been good enough as good enough that it needs to be to really contribute to the growth of Noster.
We've been working on this 1.3 release for about three months now. So I really think when people check it out, they'll see a big difference in terms of, you know, the design, UX performance, usability, but also the value that the social element of Noster provides.
Because really the comments. We had the Noster comments on the episode page, they were pretty useful.
But the feed was like, you know, sometimes useful, sometimes not useful. The new home screen that we have is, has some like trending sections and it's, it's a lot more interesting, a lot more Useful. So I think yeah, the apps just haven't got there yet in terms of delivering an amazing experience that makes you want to try them out and then stick around.
And then for the main, I always use sword main nostalgia. I don't know if that's the right term. But like the daily driver feed type clients, I also think there's so much improvement that needs to happen there.
A big example for me is some kind of catch up feature and actually it was interesting. I can't remember the episode but Jack Dorsey was or talking on a podcast. I'll try and find it and send it to you afterwards. He was using the example of Twitter where when they first introduced the catch up section on the feed, it was incredibly well received and you know, really helped them in terms of their growth. And I think Noster clients need something similar. You know, no one wants to be checking their social media feed all day long every day. People don't want to do that. And especially people that come to Noster, they want something that's a bit different.
You know, every, you know, major Noster client that has a feed should have some kind of catch up section where you can see, you know, trending notes from your network of a period that based on like when you last use the app.
Primal Primals trending feature is amazing. I think it's a great way to, you know, see what's been happening on Nossa in the past like 24 hours. But it would be great to have a more personalized version of that where I can see the stuff just from, you know, my network and what's happening there. So I think yeah, the catch up features in the main Noster clients and then also just the, you know, interoperability and the key management that we talked about before, like you want to try as many of these Noster apps out, but the key management issue is still a blocker. So I'm not surprised about where Noster is today. I actually think it's in a great place. I think it's got a core user base, it's got enough people using it and enough developers building on it that I think there's going to be an amazing future for Noster. But don't expect growth like, you know, wild growth if the products are not very good and they're just not there yet.
You know, I think that if we can improve the onboarding, improve the experience of the main clients, have some cool new, cool interoperability between different clients, you know, fix things like DMS with the, you know, MLS stuff that's happening. There's just a lot of things to continue to work on. And only then once all of that has been polished, can we really expect an average normal person on the street to, to get value from Noster more than just like the technical interest of it or something like that.
[00:48:39] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:48:40] Speaker A: So, yeah, I'm, I'm still very, very, very bullish on it. It's just you have to face reality in terms of where things are.
[00:48:49] Speaker B: Yeah, the, the big thing to me is just where I think those conversations are, I guess misaligned, is that it's the expectation that it's going to be adopted like a product that they think they see open AI chat, GPT got this many users this fast and Facebook got many, this many users this fast. It's like, well, this is not a product. Primal is a product. Fountain is a product. Like those are, those are apps built on top of it. But I fully expect to see the adoption cycle of a protocol, because that's what it is. Nostr is a protocol that.
I mean, as we've just covered in, this thing has so many various use cases. It's not one thing, it's not a, it's not a Twitter replacement.
It's a backend that could make a different type of Twitter, but that different type of Twitter might not necessarily exist yet. And all of the ease of, or the new thing that the new Twitter can do, that might be the thing that gets that product, like adoption cycle.
[00:50:07] Speaker C: Very likely might not be developed for.
[00:50:09] Speaker B: A year or two. Um, and there might be other problems to solve first. And protocols go in waves. Um, and, and I, I think you're right too, that it's got like a strong people. Really, really, really Ms. I think how powerful having that atomic network is that, that network of people that is sustaining? Like, I have no, I have no reason to ever like walk away from those two right now. There are people that I can contact and that I'm connected to and Bitcoiners on Noster that, that are just there. And so, and that's like my community, you know, and having that atomic network of enough people there talking coherently enough about one or two topics that they care about, that you can go there and find the relevant people or find your friends. That's the value of a network, you know, is that you can talk about what you're interested in and you could find the people related to that and that means that it's sustainable. So the question is, how do you expand that into another topic, into another type of community, into Another application use case or you know, connecting to RSS feeds and liking podcasts and all of that stuff. Like, then it's just about expansion and making the tools work for getting to that next, getting that next flow in.
So I, I agree, I'm still super bullish on it. And we've also got like tons of different, like the variety of things trying to solve this problem. Just, I'm, I'm, I've never been more bullish on. We're going to solve this problem with Pub Key, Noster, the Pear stack and everything that like the guys over at Key and stuff are doing. It's like, like we're going to figure it out. We have so many tools that just work and maybe it's some weird the marriage of all of them. Because, you know, Nostr, what you're doing with Nostr is using rss. You know, it's not like there's only one protocol on this. You're using RSS because it works for the feed and then you're using Nostr because it's a great one for the interaction in the environment, for social and web of trust networking and stuff.
So who knows what it's actually going to, how it's actually going to be married all together. But I think we're just. There's too many people working on it like you guys, like, like too many different teams thinking about the problem and something's just going to click and you know this will probably happen 10 times, right? Something's going to click that kind of gets us to the next stage and there's going to be another inflow and then something else will click in a different.
But slow and steady. It's slow and steady wins the race. You know, like that's how you build protocols. And that seems to align with everything I know about the history of protocols, which is like kind of the thing that I geek out on more than anything else.
[00:53:03] Speaker A: So.
[00:53:07] Speaker B: I'm curious, speaking of protocols, because you've got another protocol in Fountain that you guys work with a lot and this is the thing more than anything else that I have won in a podcast. And it's why even though I hate and don't want to change my podcast, backend my host ever again. Because I don't ever want to do it ever again.
But I might is a private feed, alternative feeds, paid for feeds and lightning integration like, like just straight in or natively I guess is is the term.
And I want you to kind of unpack this. I want you to sell me on it again because I've been talking to Johnny about it a little bit and he's like, listen, okay, like we, we can do it if, if you really want to. And I'd love to have an ad free version for people and kind of like an easy way to on board. Like my.
I have the Audio Knots which is kind of like the fans of the show and the people who have donated and we have like our own little group. But I've not really expanded it or like I just kind of like our little crew that have been around for a couple of years.
But it would be nice to be like, okay, if you pay for the ad free version of the show, you get an ad free version of the show and then also you can come hang out with the audio knots because it's a really great resource and I love having those guys that just really know the show and like are die hard bitcoiners and interested in these topics.
But so kind of sell me on the, the Fountain hosting and the. All of the little tools that you've Guys. Guys have built and the frustrate. Like what's it like putting another protocol in this? You know, Lightning has its own problems. Like what's the biggest headache you've had in, in that whole thing as well?
[00:55:02] Speaker A: Yeah, okay. There's a, there's a lot there, so I'll just. But yeah, more than happy to give you the live pitch on air and we'll see, see how it goes.
But yeah, just to give a bit of background. So Fountain has helped podcasters for the past two or three years through a bit of a roundabout mechanism where they would claim their show in the app and that would allow them to receive Lightning payments.
But this was a very disjointed experience because as a podcaster, you know this, you do everything from your hosting dashboard. That's where you manage everything. That's where you view your download analytics, make changes to episodes and just, you know, think about your show.
So we, we realized that in order to properly help content creators get paid and also drive discovery for their show, we needed to, you know, help them in the place where they do the rest of their work, which is the hosting dashboard. We also over the years worked very closely with Dovidas from RSS Blue, and last year we decided to join forces and rebuild.
Dovidas is the hosting product that he'd worked on within Fountain. Yeah, yeah. So he, he has joined Fountain and we, for the past, you know, six to eight months, we've been working on this new hosting product which we launched, we soft launched it about two months ago now.
So the goal of Fountain hosting is to provide, you know, a best in class podcast hosting product in terms of all of the traditional features you'd expect from publishing episodes.
You know, adding additional features like transcripts, chapters, the metadata around the episode, but to bring the payments functionality of the Fountain app and the social features of the fountain app into the hosting dashboard.
So in the fountain hosting dashboard you can see your download analytics in all of the, you know, traditional ways you would around downloads per episodes per time range, things like that. But alongside that and with the same filter controls, you can see revenue analytics. So you can see, okay, what episode brought in the most revenue, how much am I making over the last 30 days, who are my top supporters, who are my active subscribers?
And part of this, the revenue analytics is the monetization methods that we've had up until today, which is the value for value, you know, actions like boosting and streaming, sats zapping.
But as part of the fountain hosting launch, we have introduced these premium features for podcasters that allow podcasters to create a premium subscription that unlocks certain benefits.
These kind of premium podcast benefit features, they do exist. They exist on platforms like Patreon or Memberful.
The issue is that in order to use them you need to have a private RSS feed.
So what normally happens is you'll purchase the subscription, you'll get a unique private RSS feed, and you put that into your app and then you can access, whether it's bonus episodes, early access, ad free versions, it's in a separate feed.
This is difficult for people to do. It's full of friction which stops a lot of people doing it because it's so complicated. But also we're massive believers in discovery and social discovery around content.
And if your, if your top supporters, the people that love your show the most are listening on a private feed, then they're never going to share the episode links because you can't share those episode links publicly because they're, they're private, their private feeds. So what we've done with the Fountain hosting product is we have used the Lightning Network and this protocol called L402, which is essentially like a HTTP status of payment required to allow podcasters to offer things like bonus episodes, things like ad free versions, things like early access, all within one RSS feed. The way this works under the hood is that there's a special type of episode which is marked as paid, or if it's an ad free version, there's something called an alternate Enclosure, which is a new RSS tag that was proposed by podcasting 2.0 about a year and a half ago. And so the alternate enclosure allows the RSS feed to tell the app is the regular episode audio. You can play it like normal, but if you understand alternate enclosure and you understand L402, the user can pay for an alternate version, a version without ads or something else.
And what's really cool about this is it works in the Fountain app, but it's completely open. So any podcast app could integrate with this, read the RSS feed, load the payment details from the L402 response, and then allow users to either buy the subscription or buy a single episode.
And what this looks like for, you know, listeners in the app is that instead of having to go and load a private RSS feed, you can just subscribe to the show in the app, become a monthly supporter. We support Fiat Payments with Apple Pay, Google Pay, but we also support Bitcoin Lightning Payments as well. So you can subscribe to the show and then you can get access to all of that bonus content, whether that's ad free, early access, or bonus. And then what's really cool about this is all of the subscription authentication actually uses Noster. So when you purchase a subscription or a bonus episode or anything like that, we use Noster authentication to manage all of that.
That gives two benefits. Number one, in your hosting dashboard analytics, you can see your top supporters, you can see who's a subscriber, and those profiles are Noster profiles. So you can just click straight out to them, follow them on Noster. But number two, the subscription state is independent of Fountain. So if you wanted to take your.
[01:02:01] Speaker B: Subscription, I'm about to ask if this is extensive. Like, can. Can you take this out? So. Yeah, sorry, keep going.
[01:02:08] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, exactly. So if you wanted to, like, you know, groups and group chats and community stuff, that's another example of Noster. There needs to be so much more work done. You know, the tools aren't really there, but, like, you could imagine, like Fountain, we're already doing enough. We don't have the resources to build like, group chat software like Discord. Yeah, but imagine another team is building that for Noster.
They could just.
A user who's joining that group wouldn't have to do anything because the subscription to your show is based on their Noster profile. So you would already have access to the list of profiles and they could just join the group. So that's why tying the, the premium subscription in with Noster allows us to. To do some of these things. But anyway, that is a. That's a big, long explanation of fountain hosting.
The main thing to take away from it is that we make it incredibly easy to set up a premium subscription and do things like add free versions, bonus episodes, early access.
We've enabled the app payments with bank card because we also got this feedback from podcasters that were not in the bitcoin space or close to it that bitcoin was intimidating.
And by giving them both payment options, it allows, you know, people that don't know about bitcoin to pay with a bank card, with Apple, pay with Google pay. But if people want to pay with bitcoin, they can. And actually the fees are lower with bitcoin payments. So it's a nice kind of nudge to podcasters that are just getting started with this to introduce their audience to bitcoin as well.
[01:03:46] Speaker B: That's awesome.
But I like the flow of like, you know, there's going to be cheaper kind of putting that in front of them. It's like you could use, you could use bitcoin if with less fees and, you know, do lightning and all that stuff.
But on your side, you know, I was talking with Steve from the round table.
We've been having this ongoing conversation because mechanic and I use lightning all the time.
Like all the time. And it. Especially with Noster and everything these days. Um, but Steve owns a bar and he has, you know, waitresses and everything. Like, like people who get tips. And tips are a massive part of the entire process.
And literally nothing is built around individual like a bartender doing an invoice and then getting a tip in addition and having that separated out for that person.
Like he said, like the, the absolute headache. Like, he literally doesn't accept lightning.
Like, he does let people.
And this is like something we've done with like the bitcoin crew or whatever.
Basically get like a, a tab with lightning that you can like buy or. Well, with bitcoin in general.
But like, he doesn't like accept like an invoice system because, like, nobody's just built around that environment. He just talks about like the huge headaches of. And then, you know, it doesn't work half the time, mostly because of compatibility issues. You know, it's like, oh, we do bolt 12 or we do a zero, you know, zero amount invoice and this wallet doesn't recognize it. Oh, Bolt doesn't recognize it. You know, just like this constant. Do you take bolt 12? Do you take bolt 12 with no. No details. Do you take bolt 11, do you take a reason reusable? You know, lurl the key send. I just. What happened to keysend? I feel like keysend is like hardly ever used anymore, but like just a huge headache, like and because of that he doesn't accept it. So I'm curious like what's been yalls biggest frustrations? Because I feel like people haven't built for Steve's situation.
What have y' all had to workarounds, trade offs and issues with with Lightning and experience with like users. How have users responded to after you did implement it in the way that you've implemented it?
[01:06:21] Speaker A: Yeah, it's a great question, I think. I mean we've had a lot of issues.
One of them is, you know, Keysend, the podcasting 2.0 standard was built on top of key key send and a big part of the payment metadata. Things like which episode was this payment related to was actually sent as part of the key send payment.
And about a year ago or actually longer than that, I kind of realized that keysend is not getting adoption from any wallets and it's not going to be around and it causes this incredible UX friction because with, with something like a Lightning address, people would, we would have to say, oh, sorry, this Lightning address doesn't accept keysend, therefore it doesn't work in Fountain as a podcaster.
So that's been a big hurdle. Luckily we've managed to or we're just in the process of switching from keysend to LN URL Vault 11 within the Podcasting 2.0 community.
And this is because if any Wallet, if any Neo bank, if any service supports Lightning, they will support Vault 11 and Lightning address. Like that is the standard that everyone is kind of like table stakes.
So we're switching from keysen to ln URL. But then we have had challenges around payment metadata and there's still an ongoing discussion there. Yeah, it's just a question of UX and usability. I think apps like Strike have done an incredible job in terms of building a slick, you know, user friendly app that you can use with Lightning.
And we actually have an integration with Strike in the app so you can deposit with one click.
I think that in terms of like ux, I think the Lightning address makes a lot of sense and your average person can understand it like, hey, this is like an email address, but you use it to send money and you can use it in many apps. Like that's just, that just makes sense to people.
So I think in terms of onboarding for Lightning, you know, Go get yourself a Lightning address. That's a great phrase for new people to understand and it's once you Google, you know, Lightning address wallet you will have a lot of use, beginner friendly results. And also as more, you know, neo banks like I'm based in the uk, you know, I've seen some, some stories that apparently Revolut which is a big bank here or like Neobank are going to add support for Lightning. So if Revolution offer Lightning addresses then that would be huge. Then people would and it would click for them, it would be user friendly. So I think there's a path forward for it.
Yeah. In terms of people using it compared to the bank card, I think the experience is actually better with Lightning than it is with the fiat payments. You know, it's faster, there's 4x lower fees, it's just simpler. You can do it all from one app because the payments are open. So it is definitely a better experience. I think getting people over that first hurdle of having bitcoin in their wallet is always difficult because in order to buy bitcoin you know, you normally need to kyc. So that's quite a difficult process.
Yeah, yeah. I think what Primal have done in the app where you can top up your wallet with an in app purchase is absolutely genius and I think that really solves that problem of like initial first lightning payment.
But yeah, generally, you know, yeah, there's been challenges but generally I'm, I'm really happy with Lightning both for Fountain and also in the times where I've used it, you know, maybe at an international conference it's a lot easier than using the local fiat currency and managing the exchange and all of that and you start to get a feel for, you know, pricing things and sats and so yeah, generally it's great. I think that same with Nosta. You know, it's just the UX and onboarding issue. That's all it is.
Can you have one place that you can send evil to get a Lightning address, get a wallet, buy Bitcoin without too much friction. You know the UX is slick. So yeah, it's just UX and onboarding really.
[01:11:16] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. I'm really sad keysend didn't stick because keysend was so cool. I, I really thought that was like a great solution and it was already just around like I tim a bootstrap bandit and I always talk about it. He's like, I mean I'm a key sin maximalist. Everything should be said.
[01:11:39] Speaker A: Yeah.
[01:11:40] Speaker B: And, but, but it didn't, it didn't Catch for, for whatever reason.
But yeah, the ln URL or the Lightning address stuff, it's definitely more intuitive for the user because it just looks like a email address. You know, like, it's, it, it's pretty clear, you know what, how to interact with it because everybody's got that familiarity.
That's great. I think actually the one on my Noster.
No, no, it's not my fountain. It's not my Fountain address. I think I've got my Primal in there right now.
But, but yeah, it's, you know, it's super easy. I'm, I'm the guy Swan at Fountain FM. I'm the guy
[email protected] or whatever.
[01:12:26] Speaker A: The cool thing about this as well is like, as an example, if your main wallet is your Primal Wallet, you know, the guy
[email protected] and we see a lot Primal doing an amazing job in terms of onboarding people to Noster and giving them a wallet and giving them their first experience with lightning. Let's say somebody that joined Noster and had a Primal Lightning address. Then here's about Fountain hosting, for example. And then they say, oh, I've already got a wallet. I've already got a lightning address. Let me just add that. And then we would say, oh, no, sorry, this, this lightning address is not the right kind of lightning address. It doesn't work, it doesn't support keys. And that just like, that's just such a letdown when the promise of all of this is open interoperable payments.
[01:13:14] Speaker B: Yes.
[01:13:15] Speaker A: So that's like the big issue. And actually in the Fountain hosting product, you can use any Vault 11 Lightning address, and the payments will just all flow through to whatever wallet that is.
[01:13:25] Speaker C: I did not know that.
[01:13:26] Speaker B: So I can actually host, I can actually grab my own, that I use at Bitcoin Audible, and I can put that in Fountain for my host, like, you know. Oh, damn.
[01:13:40] Speaker C: Oh, damn.
[01:13:41] Speaker A: And all of the, all of the subscription payments and the purchases of like, ad free versions will all just flow through.
[01:13:47] Speaker B: I'll just go straight to it. Son of a bitch.
All right, I'm gonna talk to Johnny.
That's awesome. That's awesome. I didn't even, I didn't even realize that. I thought it was just like, because I've been, I've been mostly using like little custodial wallets. I, I, I use them at, at the edges or whatever and then unload them into my, my, you know, start nine, like main, main setup. But being able to, and what's funny is, like, people always talk about like, oh, don't. You shouldn't use custodial. You're not a cypherpunk. It's like, man, come on. Like the trust model makes perfect sense to have what you consider a small amount in custodial. What you have in like kind of the medium to large amount. Like when it becomes something significant, you put it in your own, your, your Albi Hub or something from Start nine or whatever or Phoenix or Misty Breeze, you know, just something that's self hosted where you're holding the keys. And then when it becomes like super significant that you don't want it in a hot wallet, you put it in cold storage. Like, like that is literally the model to protecting the bulk of the wealth for the whole world and actually realigning the trust relationship to minimizing the fallout we have where the foundation of all money is a trusted situation so that the, the scaling of any damage literally prolongs over like a century and the consequences are literally the destruction of its society. Like, that's, that's how bad our money is right now is that when the trust problem finally breaks, it takes everybody with it. And that's, it's a total flipping of that on the head where like the degree of things where I have to trust Fountain or Primal or whatever with like, you know, zaps and all of that stuff is like up 100 bucks or something. Like, it doesn't. We're not destroying society because like the foundation is bitcoin on chain is like, is the nuclear bunker of digital networks.
But anyway, it just, that always gets me. It's like, man, you got to have like, you got to have a hierarchy here. You got to like understand the relationship between those, like the convenience of having like a lightning address that you know, somebody else has provided even when I have my own. But that's the, that's, that's really awesome though, to be able to kind of like skip that step and go right to my own thing with a paid or like a private feed, but it's like easily accessible. And the other thing, I don't think you mentioned it, but the last time we were talking about Fountain on the show was having the previews and stuff. So like people can see that like that other thing exists and they can get like a little preview of it and then zap it. That's so cool. Cool. That's like a really, really neat thing. I didn't even realize that this was kind of universal to RSS so that you can take it with you. You can have like my L402 invoice or whatever. Like with. With nostril, you can go punch it. Like, if Spotify ever supported this, they could literally go watch or listen to the. The paid feed in Spotify knowing that it's already paid for. That's just.
[01:16:57] Speaker A: Yeah.
[01:16:57] Speaker B: God, again, exactly. So much potential.
So much potential.
[01:17:02] Speaker A: The other thing we're doing, and this is also built on Ultimate Enclosure, is we've added. Well, it's in beta, but we've added support for video versions.
So for podcasters that want to publish video, you can just instantly switch to the video version in Fountain. But this is also in the RSS feed in the alternate enclosure. So any app could pull that in and then. Yeah, the nostal authentication for L402 can work in any client. So if you, you know, purchase the ad free version in one app, you can just listen to it in another app.
[01:17:38] Speaker B: That's so cool.
Well, I know we're.
You actually have somewhere to be here in just a little bit, so I'll go towards wrapping this up. But let's go to a bigger picture thing.
How do you feel about where. I feel like there's a lot of people who couldn't be more bullish or excited about Bitcoin and then there's a whole bunch of people who are like, poo poo. It's like, oh, government's involved and ETFs and all this stuff. And I'm always curious, where is your framing on that, on where Bitcoin in the broader space is and kind of the direction of technology. Are things getting worse? Are things getting better?
Is what does this look like in.
In the mind of Oscar?
[01:18:28] Speaker A: That's a big question.
[01:18:30] Speaker B: It is.
[01:18:31] Speaker A: I guess I would. I think about it maybe in two ways. One is like the broader perception in society of Bitcoin. And I feel like because of where the price is and also because of the. Maybe the narrative within the media and even in US Politics, which we all know affects global politics, the perception of bitcoin to your average person on the street that doesn't own any has changed a little bit. It has been legitimized in some way. And even if that brings it kind of like closer to traditional finance, I do think that's a good thing and that's like an encouraging step forward in the uk. Just to give you a practical example, I think there's less people that are like, this is a total scam, it's a Ponzi scheme than there were two years ago or one year ago because of that change. So that's one part of it and then the second part is more directly related to what we've been talking about and everything happening with the Lightning network, with Noster, with micropayments.
I feel like, and this has been the story of like the Fountain app since its inception, which is, you know, trying to make micro payments on the Internet work and experimenting and trying different things and struggling through it.
I do feel like there's a real amazing future for this where as a person on the Internet, you have your endpub, you have your Lightning address, and then you're kind of good to go on the Internet and you can go and explore, you can try out cool things. You can get paid for your work.
You can get paid from not just the payment system that you set up or any, any payment system, any app, any client that chooses to share that money with you, and also any country in the world as well, without permission over the Lightning network. So that is incredibly exciting. It was incredibly exciting, you know, three, four years ago when Fountain first started.
I think like, many things and many like, big changes in the world and on the Internet, these things take time. And yeah, we've, we've talked through all of the, or a bunch of the onboarding and UX issues today that they're getting solved, but it does take time.
But I think that future where you have a Lightning address on the Internet and you can just get paid in cool ways and everything's interoperable, you can bring your profile into any app. That's an amazing feature and it's really not that far off. It requires, as I said, point polish from the apps. It requires deep thinking about UX and onboarding and there are issues that that are currently blocking it from mainstream adoption. But it's moving forward every, you know, every six months, getting easier. So yeah, I sa.
So yeah, that's kind of my, my ramble on. On how I think about it.
[01:22:27] Speaker B: Yeah, no, I pretty much largely agree and I also, I also think that the thing that will onboard, like there's always going to be that the set who like thinks, oh, I missed out and you know, the price there will probably get to a point where people think that like, oh, Jesus, this thing's just kind of like going up in fiat terms. But I think for a lot people just see something that's gone up already and they think, oh, well, that's that like now, now I missed it because it already happened in the past, but being able to lower the barrier to, to people just earning money, um, I really don't think like that, like far and away this is what got my sister in law excited about Noster and just like, what is this weird crazy place on the Internet that I didn't know about? Because I got her on board and then I posted some of her design stuff and I was like, you know, check out follow my sister in law. She does great stuff. And she literally over and she just said, hey, just checking out Noster.
And she interacted like a couple of times. And you know how people knowster are. They're just like so stoked to have something new. And she ended up getting like $80 or something like that in zaps, which on this thing she's like, people are.
[01:23:54] Speaker C: Just sending me money.
[01:23:55] Speaker B: What is, what is this crazy place?
Only I've never, I've never witnessed this ever. This is the craziest thing I've ever seen.
And she was just baffled and she kept asking me about it and like that experience to just. And the fact that that can interact with your podcast app and your like, like all of these other things, it's just kind of this open standard for, you know, like you said lightning address and in pub.
God, that's so huge. And people don't realize how many barriers there are to that type of thing. Like the difficulty of just doing that, of making content and letting someone purchase and, or contribute to you.
[01:24:41] Speaker C: It's h. Like it's a pain.
[01:24:43] Speaker B: It's a horrible, horrible pain. Like I've been, you know, working our butts off on getting video content and stuff for YouTube and all this stuff and slowly building up subscriber count because I've got no followers over. Nobody on YouTube knows me. But I've got tons on Twitter and Noster and none of these things, these are all walled gardens. They don't, they don't talk to each other. I've made exactly Nothing off of YouTube. You know, like hundreds and hundreds of hours we put into it and, and it's just, you know, the show's free, you know, it's just like putting it out there. But it's just wild how much people don't realize that if you can have somebody come onto a thing to, to make a podcast in Fountain or to post a video somewhere and like have it hosted and let people check it out and to make $1 to make a thousand sats, 900 sats, whatever it is like that, that would explode some people's brains for the amount of time and energy they've put into doing things that have earned them Nothing to. To just see that come in. I. I think you do. Could not discount the amount of excitement and, like, feedback loop of dropping those barriers from zero to earning that first 900 SATs or a thousand SATs and seeing the people who have felt excluded or felt like there's no real possibility to that, who have that energy and that drive to really do something with it, man, that could be that. That's a big deal. I mean, this is. This is what's convincing me to probably move to Fountain is because of, like, that integration I've been waiting. Just like you talk about the annoyances of private feeds and, like, not being able to. You can't share it out, you know, and you have to be closed on this platform. Like, whatever it is, you don't really have an option, and it's never been perfect. And the hell if somebody's going to implement bitcoin, which is what I want to do, I don't want to have a private fee that you can't buy with bitcoin. You know, the hell's a bitcoin show?
So shout out to you guys, like, every time I come back to the app or for the new updates, it's better.
You've got more things integrated that I'm excited about. I love the Noster stuff.
That's. That's been a big thing for me. In fact, that's why I was. I was looking down earlier. I was like, I haven't checked before feed actually in a while, and I saw. I was, like, scrolling on Fountain there for a minute.
And it's just a.
Such a great way to kind of plug all of these things together and really show what's possible with it.
And there's not that many people who are kind of pulling it together. Everybody's doing, like, their own one little thing. Off on noer or off on lightning or, you know, it's a lightning wallet.
So, anyway, just a. Just a kudos to you guys. Y' all been building something really, really cool, and I'm. I'm loving it more and more. And honestly, the fixing of the index, just being able to search my show may literally be the thing that, like, tips me over the threshold of like. Okay, there's no. Why would I. Why would I direct anybody to anything else? So thank you. Oh, my God. Thank you for doing that.
[01:28:04] Speaker A: Sorry it took so long. Sorry.
[01:28:05] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. Understandable, understandable. It wasn't even Yalls fault. It was just.
[01:28:13] Speaker A: Cool.
[01:28:13] Speaker B: Okay, where can people find you guys?
Give the. Give the lowdown and we'll we'll wrap it up. I know you guys, I know you gotta go.
[01:28:26] Speaker A: Yeah. Well, thanks so much for having me on again, guy. I really appreciate it. Yeah, for anyone that's interested, just go to Fountain FM and you can download the app there. Give me a follow on Noster. And yeah, check out the Noster features.
Please check out 1.3 fountain 1.3, which should be out by the time this drops or maybe a few days afterwards. As I said, brand new search, brand new Noster features, new like trending episodes, you know, cross app likes and yeah, just really appreciate all the people that get in contact and send us feedback because it's really, really helpful. So if there's anything that you would like improved, please just contact me. You can send me an email. Oscar fm, and always looking for feedback.
[01:29:12] Speaker B: Perfect. Perfect. All right. I'll have links and details in the show notes. If, if you think anything else, literally shoot it my way. And I'll just have it down there and everybody can just go to the description and find it whenever they need it.
Dude, thank you. This was. This was awesome. Always love the updates and love what you guys are building.
[01:29:29] Speaker A: Thanks, man. Appreciate it.
[01:29:33] Speaker C: All right, guys, I hope you enjoyed that episode.
[01:29:37] Speaker B: Yeah, honestly, I think that was just a fascinating conversation.
[01:29:40] Speaker C: And one of the big things is the ability, and this is something that I really hope more people who are building out there leverage. This is the ability to use open protocols to adopt, to get the adoption of a network effect that you don't have to bootstrap.
Like the number of times I have some new service that is trying to get me to sign up and then go on, you know, have conversations in.
[01:30:06] Speaker B: A forum or I have this fresh.
[01:30:08] Speaker C: Account that I have with this one service about this one topic, and I'm just like, I don't need another social media. I don't want another freaking account for all of this stuff.
And being able to leverage these open protocols is such an enormous advantage.
It's an advantage for people who are small. It's an advantage for products and applications and tools that are niche because it means that you can tap into a network where this person doesn't feel like they're coming into something with no context, with no network to lean on, no way to share it, no way to talk to or get advice about something. You're already. You're leveraging a network that already exists. You're leveraging social circles that already exist and you're allowing them to use it in a new place or in a new niche. And I really think people discount how much that changes the ux, how much that changes the experience for the person coming to something new, and how it lowers the risk and lowers the barrier to engaging in something new. And that's exactly the sort of thing that I genuinely believe has been the.
[01:31:21] Speaker B: Biggest big piece of the puzzle, that.
[01:31:23] Speaker C: That moves things into new paradigms, that gets across that hump of I can only get this in this new place and I can, I can now carry this with me. This is exactly what the Internet did with the idea of social to begin with. And I think that's why it exploded and people were finally like, oh, this is so much better than the, the old way that we used to do things.
And this is exactly the sort of thing that starts to tear down the walled gardens and the silos that we have built up with all of these platforms. And it's never been more important than ever to start tearing those down.
[01:32:03] Speaker B: So I just think Fountain is doing.
[01:32:05] Speaker C: An incredible job and kind of leading the way and, you know, working the kinks out for the rest of us.
[01:32:11] Speaker B: And I love what they've been building. And like I said, I think I'm, I think I'm finally switching over.
[01:32:17] Speaker C: Almost did it last time.
[01:32:19] Speaker B: But really that the last, the last.
[01:32:22] Speaker C: Nail in the coffin or the last, the straw that broke the camel's back is the fact that they have now built their entire own search index so.
[01:32:29] Speaker B: That you can find my podcast that drove me crazy. Podcast index no. Hey, I love you guys. You're doing God's work or Lord Satoshi's work, but that drove me bonkers. I couldn't even find my own show.
[01:32:42] Speaker C: Anyway, don't forget to check out Fountain fm. Also just a shout out to our amazing sponsors, Leden. That's L E D N I O for Bitcoin backed loans.
[01:32:54] Speaker B: This is just an incredible way to.
[01:32:56] Speaker C: Not have to pay capital gains and get some fiat if you need it from your bitcoin while still owning your bitcoin, especially for an investment.
[01:33:04] Speaker B: If you're actually going to be able.
[01:33:05] Speaker C: To pull income from something, uh, then you only have to beat the interest rate. You don't have to beat bitcoin. Also, don't forget to check out the HRF and their amazing Oslo Freedom Forum conference.
Basically it is the center of like freedom activists sharing stories, ideas and tools from around the world. Um, there will be links to check that out if you haven't been. Also their newsletter, the Financial Freedom Report, which I've covered a number of times on this show and of course. Pubkey P U B K y check out PubKey app. These are tools just very similar to Nostr but with probably a more tried and trusted set of tools that have actually already kind of proven their sustainability and their worth which makes what they're building really interesting in my opinion. I've been following them very closely for a while as well. Link in the show notes and then get chroma for red light therapy. In fact I'm probably getting to the time where I need to get my.
[01:34:00] Speaker B: Nightshades on so I can kill the blue light.
[01:34:03] Speaker C: Get your circadian rhythm and your hormones in order. Trust me, this will make a difference. You will feel the difference and even better you will feel it in your sats because you got a 10% discount.
[01:34:13] Speaker B: With code bitcoin audible right down in the description. Check them all out links and goodies and that should close us out. Thank you so much for listening.
[01:34:23] Speaker C: I am Guy Swan and until next time guys, that's my two sats.
[01:34:28] Speaker A: It.
