It's hypocritical for people here to dismay about the fall of print journalism and long-form writing, when every article from a paid source is followed by a https://archive.is/xyz link.

It's unfortunate - the issue is in the age of the internet people read news from many different sources. Subscribing to a single source just isn't worth it unless you are a truly regular reader.

I'm surprised there hasn't been some kind of payment aggregator for news - eg. pay some amount for articles from a number of different sources. I imagine there's some business reason that has prevented such a thing from being introduced.

I have this hair-brained vision of a world where all of the content is available on all the platforms that want to distribute it.

In this world, instead of having an exclusive distribution deal with a single company, content creators (tv studios, journalists, sound cloud musicians, youtubers) would price their content at whatever they think it's worth, and make the viewing key available via e.g. smart contract or some other payment system and API.

Apple/Netflix/Hulu/Youtube/Popcorn Time could each have their own pricing model: ad supported, subscription based, usage based, pay as you go with a self-custody wallet. They can also distribute the content they want to carry. They can compete by reducing their hard costs for distributing the content, or by having better recommendation engines or content search, or delivering a better experience however else they like.

In this kind of world these platforms become more like interfaces to a universe of content that exists outside the walled garden. You can choose the interface you like and still have access to any content. You could use a community-supported FOSS interface that you self-fund, that kind of interface might give you access to the whole firehose, or you could subscribe to a hyper-curated Montessori-approved children's portal to content that is educational and not over-stimulating, for example. One can dream!

You may know this, but if not, fantasies like this in the digital world date back to Vannevar Bush and Ted Nelson (who is still alive!). The unfortunate reality is that they are based on a different networking physics, whose primary purpose is to enforce Intellectual Property. Such a physics in practice is unusable. "Worse is better" dominates both in media as well as in engineering.

I’m not sure if lsat.tech is having issues, looks like the protocol was recently renamed L402: https://docs.lightning.engineering/the-lightning-network/l40...