I agree with all your points about the on-boarding being hard. Here’s my take on on-boarding from someone who has been following podcasting 2.0 since the beginning.
TLDR we started with Sphinx (no longer used)
Then moved to the Breez app (still works great for sending sats to podcasters)
Then we came across something called LNPay (https://github.com/lnpay) that allowed each 2.0 app to create a listener wallet that we could top up to send sats to podcasters. Tim eventually shut this down.
The apps that were using LNPay moved to Alby’s hosted wallet since it had a similar implementation and this was actually a benefit as a listener since each LNPay wallet was tied to each app so as a listener I had 4 wallet across 4 apps and the Alby wallet was 1 wallet across 4 app.
Fountain then came along somewhere in there but I forget exactly when but everyone is familiar with that.
So 5 years in we basically have Fountain and AlbyHub for PC 2.0. Most of use in PC 2.0 were telling people to get an Alby wallet because it could be used across several apps so you could pick which app you liked best and weren’t tied to just one. Alby also made it easy for podcasters and musician to use to receive sats via the PC 2.0 protocol. Then Alby switched to AlbyHub and the diehards (myself included) fired up lightning nodes to keep the freedom we already had from Alby. Some people Uncle Jimed friends and family onto their new nodes but that’s something that should only be done with someone you trust. Others just switched to Fountain and some that were on the fence about Bitcoin just gave up.
What my point in all this? I don’t really know but over the past years I’ve seen Bitcoiners claim to support V4V and PC 2.0 but haven’t seen any growth outside of Fountain and Alby. Now enter Nostr and the divide grows even wider because Nostr fixes everything and nothing at the same time.
That CurioCaster payment at the top was a streaming sat payment from me while I was watching the concert in an app that 99.9% on here dont even know about but was the first one to implement these cool features that made this concert happen including the Magic Wallet Switching Technology that got these bands paid. StevenB++
Thinking about this more and if this was pre-nostr integration in Fountain then Fountain would still be the wallet being used because its backed by ZBD that supports keysend payments which PC 2.0 has always used.
If this isn't true then the Primal wallet should have worked for the bands to receive sats eliminating the need to on-board to Fountain and Primal.
#thinkingoutloud
Correct. Just using Primal would have been fine for sending and receiving and profile displaying. However we wanted to show them a Spotify alternative.
The whole podcasting 2.0 project is to fight The Podcassting Industrial Complex. It started when Alex Jones got kicked off of Apple and then Bitcoin got added to fight PayPal deplatforming.
Honestly Nostr is the least coolest feature in Fountain. It distracts from the larger point of PC 2.0.
Just like Nostr it's about using any app backed by the podcast index to listen to your favorite podcast.
A lot of us in PC 2.0 discovered Bitcoin because of PC 2.0 but have been let down by everything being pigeonholed into just Fountain and now even further with everything needing to have Nostr now.
Don't get me wrong every little step forward helps in the long term but if everything is consolidated to Fountain then we have just reinvented Spotify.
I've been using Fountain since the beta was first released by Oscar to the PC 2.0 group but sometimes it breaks and it would be nice for people to use a different app.
Only a few people like Oscar, Nick, Bumi, Moritz really get what PC 2.0 is trying to do in the Bitcoin world.
It's about taking back control of our content and hosting companies like nostr:npub1pj3a304qsdh99yr5wkug75rfznr284fzy7zalfnuwkctwyye2djsae7des and nostr:npub1gr65v2hqq83n3vqfh6m65eej65hxlqwyjp0echc9ghvw5p6pvqpse3mmjc are doing a great job and gaining traction in the Bitcoin space but they are even stuck with the "easy" wallet solutions.
We need to make these apps like Podverse, PodcastGuru, Curiocaster, LNBeats etc easier for people to use because they are great but right now it's just the diehards running some version of AlbyHub that can use them because it's the only thing that works thanks to the Alby team seeing the vision and helping these apps out in the first place.
If there's a way to make this succeed on a mass scale without custodial wallets, I sure can't see it.
The sad reality I've seen is that people just don't want to part with their tradfi payment methods. If lucky, I get one chance to on-board and get them to download an app. If it's not smooth as butter, they delete and go back to doom-scrolling TikTok.
