Hey all,

For the bitcoin++ I had the pleasure of hacking on blogstr / magstr.

The Problem

Currently, the publication industry requests individuals to write articles by paying them. This is quite costly and risky for the publications if it doesn’t resonate with their users and lead to higher retention and engagement.

For individuals, the amount is pretty minimal, though, if the publication is the visibility and brand awareness could be worth it.

Additionally, if the writer says something the publication doesn’t like, they can lose their content, the visibility, backlinking, and more.

… but what if there was a publication platform that could solve these problems?

The Solution

Nostr allows users to publish content to a set of relays and grow their following without requiring a particular platform. They could gain the advantage of the visibility to the users of the platform, censorship resistance, and to take their following with them, along with having a higher upside from being able to receive lightning payments.

The What

• A codebase built on Next.js that is easily deployable to Vercel that uses the nostr network to fetch long-form content events (kind: 30023) and render them in a UI. It’s easily customizable by using an environmental variable to set an array of pubkeys.
• You can create a blog out of this if the array only contains one pubkey, your pubkey.
• If you set multiple, you can evolve the UI to become something quite like Bitcoin Magazine.
• The codebase is entirely dynamic and it fetches the article writer’s lightning addresses from their nostr profile metadata.

Why Now

• Community members of Nostr PHX are asking for this.
• Get more of the internet off of massive social platforms and more to their own platforms.
• Community members and organizers that are marketers want to be able to contribute more to the nostr network.
• Disrupt publication incentives and costs.
• Get more communities to use nostr without needing to know Nostr.
• Value 4 value, enabling the users to not have a ceiling on their earnings.
• Empower publishers to easily aggregate nostr content to one place and curate the experience.

Codebase

You can view the instructions to setup and deploy the codebase in the GitHub repository.

You can try it here.

Thanks ~Santos.