Introducing Stories ✍️

Over the last few months, we’ve been working hard to bring some new updates to BOLT🔩FUN’s maker platform. We're excited to finally announce a brand new feature - Stories ✍️ !

Here’s a quick breakdown of this new feature, how to use it, and how to reward other makers with our new upvote button 👇

Share your electric story ⚡️

Makers can now #buildinpublic - sharing their stories, updates, and insights as they journey into the world of bitcoin and lightning product design and development. Stories allow makers to document & discuss topics like:

What does your local development environment look like?
How did you deal with problems connecting to your lightning node?
If you’re not a coder, how did you make your no code application or how did you start accepting ⚡ payments on your website?
What are the most useful JavaScript libraries you found for making bitcoin web apps?

This #buildinpublic approach not only aligns with Bitcoin’s open-source philosophy but also allows makers to publish key findings (e.g. blockers/solutions), resources, and tools with the rest of the community - creating a collaborative environment that makes learning about lightning design and development fun and easy.

Keeping the flame of creativity burning🔥

Makers can now directly reward one another for publishing their stories with the new upvote 🔥 button - a fun, lightning powered interaction that uses WebLN to tip content creators with sats.

This button was designed to keep the flame of creativity alive within our maker community, as well as providing a way to naturally curate useful lightning and product driven content for the community to digest. It also gives makers a powerful incentive to provide regular, open, and transparent updates on their lightning projects as they #buildinpublic.

Who can use Stories ✍️?

Makers can currently use our Stories feature to either discover or create quality content.

For readers 👀

Makers can easily discover lightning related news, articles, and tutorials by scrolling through our Stories page and searching by popular tags (such as #Tutorials, #WebLN, etc), or by filtering popular, featured, or recent content. Makers can reward other content creators by using the upvote 🔥 button to send sats directly to the author using WebLN.

For creators 🌈

Using a basic markdown editor, makers can create content in the form of articles, product updates, developer tutorials, app reviews, design critiques, OpEds, + more. Makers have full creative freedom over what they publish to our community platform, with the added incentive of creating high-quality content by receiving lightning rewards from other makers hitting the upvote 🔥 button.

How to write your first story

i. Create your maker profile

To create your first story on BOLT🔩FUN, you’ll first have to create your maker profile and authenticate it by connecting your lightning wallet.

To do this, go to https://makers.bolt.fun/blog and click Login in the top right-hand corner. You’ll be asked to authenticate your maker profile either using WebLN (“Click to Connect”, e.g. Alby) or by scanning/pasting the lightning invoice using an external lightning wallet that supports lnurl-auth (e.g. Breez, Phoenix).

Once you’ve created your maker profile, add some basic information + a Lightning Address before creating your first story (this allows you to receive any sats from upvotes 🔥 when your story is published).

ii. Begin writing

Once you’ve set up your maker profile, head to https://makers.bolt.fun/blog and click Write a story. Use the basic markdown editor to write your first post. You can even preview it before publishing in order to check if you’re happy with how it looks! Remember to add a title, header image, as well as a few popular tags so that your story stands out and gets noticed by other makers.

When you’re ready, click Publish and share it with the rest of the community. If you need to edit or delete your post in the future, you can do this directly on the story’s page (you’ll just need to make sure your maker profile is connected first).

What’s coming up next?

We are currently working on implementing a comments feature to our story’s page, in order to generate more community engagement, feedback, and sharing. This feature will use Nostr relays in order to store comments and replies directly to federated servers rather than our own.

Much like Reddit, makers will also be able to upvote comments using sats, helping curate and order popular discussions and feedback on a story’s page.