The Interledger Community 🌱: Radhy

Five Years After Being a Grantee: How Things Are Going for Me

Radhy — Wed, 25 Mar 2026 23:02:19 +0000

So I got email about upcoming newsletter so I reckon I'd write some updates regarding my journey as a grantee from 2021.

A word about my project

First things first, the grant funded project that I was working on, ProgNovel, was officially dead - though not simply. Shortly after Coil discontinued in 2023, I put my project on hiatus and put development on hold due to many reasons. I had few inquiries about the project but the adoption rate was abysmal so the hiatus decision wasn't so damaging.

At that time one of the main reason for my hiatus was a technical one. One Javascript framework, Astro, was rising at the time and it has things that my project was all about. So I explore and dabble some projects with it and see if I can learn one thing or two. It was so good and as the exploration went on, some things came to my mind thinking about my hiatus project: "well, it's cooked now" or "what's the point continuing if this framework has it all". Fast forward to 2026 I thought it again and realized that it was really cooked from the start. Seeing the technical prowess and inovation that Astro team has (that led them acquired by Cloudflare) left me no room to compete with them.

The project ProgNovel went hiatus in 2023, it was never returned, archived in 2024.

What comes after that

So during my exploration on Astro framework gave birth of a social media project that I named ProgForum - the prefix Prog because it was a spritual successor for my archived project ProgNovel. I didn't choose to build novel platform again and pick a social media because the previous experience wasn't going well for me, a decision that proved quite right since now that community was filled with industrialized AI generated slop content that even prominent creators had since "pulled out" of the scene by cashing out and sold their platform to some Korean IT giants. The dead internet theory was so true in that community that beginners starting out creating content won't ever have chance to compete with contents pumping out of ChatGPT or Gemini.

Anyway, back on ProgForum topic; this thing is built on Astro, the thing that made me gave up on my previous project. And one thing that so good about Astro is that it's an agnostic framework, meaning my years of learning of Svelte framework during building ProgNovel wasn't wasted - many codes even reused in the new project. While Astro had its own edge I had fun building a social media with it. Astro was a framework that was ahead of its time adopting next gen tech like View Transitions - the most fun I ever had working on a project. Seeing that one component seamlessly morphing into other component as the page transitions make me want to give a chef kiss every time.

As a social media, ProgForum has two tightly knitted spaces - tweet feed à la Twitter where users can, well, tweet, and another one is a good old fashioned forum where people can discuss things at great length.

There's a plan for Web Monetizaton in this: later on users can set payment pointer so they can stream revenue when people engaging with their tweets or forum post the made. It was pretty simple at that front. The real challange however come from another (that I thought pretty rad) freature that I'd like to call emoji clapping. It is a emoji "like" button like any other reactions button in other social media like Discord but instead of toggling a button you clap (like clapping mechanic in Medium website). So one user can give multiple emojies and claps on them multiple time because I thought sometimes one thumb up might not enough - sometimes you just want to slap multiple thumbs up, even thousands if you can (ignoring the fact that is's phyiscally imposible in real life), just so you can express how you enjoy tweets or contents people made. Now here's the Web Monetization comes into place: or rather, it has more to do with Interledger payment than Web Monetization API, as emoji claps can be used as "currency" to reward creators. There wasn't a solid final plan on how to do this but the general idea is that by the end of the month or so you can setup a tipping budget (either by subscription or one time payment) that split tips to creators based on how much you spend mouse clicks clapping emojies on them. Clap clap clap. Money money money.

ProgForum started around 2024. Around 2 years in, it wasn't actively developed and I haven't picked it up since last year. The thing about Astro is that it is a Javascript framework. And the thing about Javascript is that it moves fast and break things even faster. One morning (let's call it morning because I don't remember the exact time) I just happen to chill and see - oh cool, a new update! Run the command to update dependencies and immediately starting to regret it. Not only it breaks the dev server, even after rolling back, the dev start command won't even start anymore. The error message I see wasn't helping much because the thing about shiny new toy in coding is that because it's new, there wasn't enough people to share their error problems and not much posts on the internet for me to fix my problem. I didn't know whether Astro framework, or Svelte, or Tailwind CSS v4, Drizzle, or Bun that gives the problem (all of them was quite new and or was in unstable version at the time because I fancy myself creating "next-gen" social platform), after amateurly diagnosing the problem myself and failed at it only to rage OS restart, the problem somehow went away on its own later on. I don't know which one that has the new update that fix the problem, but anyway I could still continue developing the project. However, despite some feature ready to test like emojis, tweets, and comments, and so on, the previous errors left me jaded and I felt like I don't want to give a chef kiss anymore.

I didn't touch it again somewhere in 2025 because my focus went to another side project (a Javascript game) and some hackatons. The code is just sitting there, and since it was a project that I had the most fun and had the feature that I proud of (like emoji claps and the transition animation), I got a complicated feeling whenever I accidentally see the project folder. I'm not sure if I want to continue with it because after the fun and hype I had with it, I know now that building a social media was a huge undertaking. A short lived enthusiasm won't cut it. What I had now is still far away from being a proper, realiable social media to be used for people to enjoy. In short, I was burn out.

2026 - what now?

While now I'm not actively developing anything related to the project from five years ago I occasionally checking out things on Interledger space, like the Interledger payment API, how things going with Web Monetization spec, and so on. I remember now I had few small projects that I share back a while ago that I forgot about until I write this. I even checking out Interledger blockchain-based rival, x402 initiated by Coinbase, though that one isn't exactly one-to-one rival to Interledger since the two focus on two different use case (Interledger focus being agnostic and inclusive while x402 focus on crypto and automated payment made for AI agents). Earlier this year one particular online hackaton that I participated in was memorable, since I create a freelancing platform with blockchain escrow via Solidity with it - something that I wish Interledger could do that too.

As someone who live in a country that a credit card wasn't a mainstream I still thought Interledger (and x402 too) is cool and still want to use them in my future projects. (Unfortunately no ILP wallet available in my region at the moment).

Check it out guys!

Radhy — Wed, 30 Apr 2025 21:41:01 +0000

Revshare Generator Webapp

Radhy ・ Apr 30

#paymentpointers #webmonetization #revshare #webapp

Revshare Generator Webapp

Radhy — Wed, 30 Apr 2025 21:36:42 +0000

I create a webapp to intuitively generate revenue share with Web Monetization, please check it out! 🙏

https://revshare-gen.pages.dev/

You just need to add names and payment pointer (href) and adjust their weight by scrolling over them. It's that simple!

For now this webapp can only generate probabilistic revenue share Javascript codes to embedded on HTML.

There are planned features I had in my mind like WordPress & API integration, webhook, users collab, discord links/auth, etc, but at this moment I'm not confident whether I can commit time and money to develop those 🤔.... Anyway, I think with basic features as it is now the webapp is in pretty good shape for a MVP site and to showcase its capability. Anything beyond that I'll see how it goes first.

Again, please check it out! 🙏🙏🙏
And thanks for your time! 👍

Interledger Summit is LIVE now on YouTube

Radhy — Mon, 06 Nov 2023 16:24:48 +0000

Hi guys

Just sharing that if you're missing on it that Interledger Summit is now live on YouTube on Interledger Foundation account

Just now ex-founder of Coil is talking about Dassie
https://github.com/justmoon/dassie

Web Monetization after Coil Shutdown...

Radhy — Tue, 13 Jun 2023 06:48:41 +0000

Hello folks! 🙋‍♂️

It's been a few months after Coil closing down their services.

I'm curious if there's anyone still maintaining/developing their WM-backed projects or just be waiting for Coil replacement to open their services.

If still developing, how do you do testing and other stuff that required WM provider previously? Is there any issues or something to learn from it worth to share?

If not, how do you hope the next phase of WM community will be?

Are you happy with current community direction post-Coil or if not happy, what do you think we can do to make it better?

Let's discuss all about it here
🥸🥸🥸

Interledger Payment for E-Commerce Sites

Radhy — Sat, 03 Jun 2023 11:49:32 +0000

Hello folks.

I recently dabbling myself on e-commerce project after I made a merch Print-on Demand website for my brother (link for the site)

For now the website is close-source but I'm planning to make an open-source version of it in the future, and use Interledger payment as option for buyer to pay for product.

This is a long-term project so probably ETA for open source is few years away since I have other side projects going on. However if you have another open-source Interledger related projects that benefits e-commerce please let me know in the comment for possible integration in the future👋

Internationalization for the Community?

Radhy — Sun, 26 Mar 2023 15:15:47 +0000

Hi folks.

Just wanting to share a side project of mine on internationalization that I made to make the community more inclusive to non-English speakers. I'm sincerely hope this project could benefit this community and GftW going forward - for now, though, it is only a MVP product that still has a long way to go into production.

You can see the demo here:
https://i18n-widget.pages.dev/

(Click the globe icon to select language of your choice - auto target detection based on your country will be supported in the future)

What is this project about?

Have you ever watch on YouTube app some videos made by a foreign creators, and most of the comments were not in language you understand? Usually you'll see a text Translate to XX at the end of those comments that lets you read those comments in language you prefer.

This project is a JavaScript widget planned to be distributed as Web Component. After setting up the backend to connect with translation engine, anyone can implement the same translation widget that translate a body of text. This can be an entire post or individual comment. The best part is, since it is Web Component, you only need to add a few lines of code to your website's codebase - the translation backend will run as microservice that run parallel to your website's backend.

But why would you do this when Chrome already has web page translation feature for free?

Well, for a few reasons:

1) The said free translation feature might not available for all browsers
2) Browser's built-in translation goes one-way from one language to another, and will take entire text in the page into account - which is not appealing if we want to build a website with diverse people with many different languages in it
3) Browser's built-in translation UX focus on translating foreign websites. So the experience of translating other languages in a website that designed for a native one might not smooth enough that in worst case people will avoid posts made in different language because the inconvenience.
4) In case of free translation sucks, there's nothing we can do about it

Some of the improvements that are available in my project:

1) Have control over UI/UX of the translation widget to suit our needs
2) Can support other translation engine other than basic Google Translate machine. For example, the demo site I have is translating using ChatGPT - GPT 3.5 to be exact because I still have no access to the new GPT 4 model.
3) Supports broader countries with ChatGPT engine than Google Translate API. Just look at those flags!
4) Using Cloudflare Workers as a backend, which comes with generous free-tier usage and excellent edge caching for blazing fast performance gain.
5) Content-based hash caching - ensure that the same body of text in a certain language will be only translated in an expensive or slow cloud data center once, and serve the stored translated result from edge caching nearest to users.
6) The translation engines still can be tweaked and improved with ChatGPT Plugins or custom training on GCP Translate in the future.

And...

Like I said before, there's still many works to do before the widget can go into production. For example, the backend is not ready for Google Translate API because Google takes language codes as parameter as supposed to country ISO codes that are being provided by Cloudflare's backend, so I have to manually mapping each of the countries to their language codes supported by Google API. While ChatGPT provides more broad language support than Google and alternative translation result, the translation performance for non-cached content is quite slow even when we are using GPT 3.5 Turbo which supposed to be faster than other new models. There are also quite a lot of client-side issues that are still need to be addressed before other websites can adopt the project into their websites.

As the end goal, I'm hoping that this will be good enough for Forem and Web Monetization community to consider to add to the community forum codebase so we can start experimenting with non-English posts and grant reports. This way we can start seeing more diverse community members from non-English background start contributing their ideas. After all, if we consider about 15% of world population that speaks English, then currently, 85% of the humanity is out of reach for this community and Grant for the Web opportunities.

What do you think? Share your thought on i18n topic for the community in the comment section below!

Cinnamon.video is shutting down

Radhy — Fri, 13 Jan 2023 08:30:23 +0000

Today I received an email from Cinnamon.video team telling that they are planning to shut down their service in February.

I'm not a video content creator and don't usually use their platform, but hearing this quite a shock to me since they are one of the top project ever involved in Web Monetization. And the fact that they never growing out from BETA phase make it even more saddening. Very sad to hear that it doesn't work out for them.

Finally got to play with Rafiki

Radhy — Sat, 27 Aug 2022 14:42:46 +0000

A few months ago I didn't managed to spin up local Rafiki to play around with because of my macOS doesn't play nicely with the codebase. Now that the Rafiki team has updated the documentation for local deployment I decided to give it a try again and it's now working 🎉🎉🎉

For now I'm only able to create a new dummy payment pointer and nothing else - but that's only because I'm not familiar with graphql. I'm planning to explore it in the next few weeks and see if I can make something with it.

Web Monetization Outside the Web?

Radhy — Mon, 11 Jul 2022 13:48:34 +0000

Howdy folks! Been a long time since my last post here 👋

We know that Web Monetization, since there's a word "Web" in it, is supposed to be designed for the web. But in desktop and mobile apps too we have ads driving monetization and collect user data, so eventually Web Monetization without the Web is a good thing too!

So here's the thing: how far, or perhaps, do we even have tools to bring WM outside the browser? For folks working on native apps or with hybrid engine like Electron etc that implementing Web Monetization I appreciate if you can share your info and story here.👍

Next Call for Proposals ETA?

Radhy — Sat, 09 Apr 2022 17:52:59 +0000

Hi folks.

I would like to try submit another GftW entry for next CFP. Really appreciate if I can know rough ETA for the next one so I can plan for a prototype appropriately @ayeshaware @erikad @chrislarry

Has anyone tried running Rafiki locally?

Radhy — Mon, 28 Mar 2022 07:52:54 +0000

I know Rafiki isn't ready yet, but I've been wanting to try running Rafiki on my local machine. Tested it on Mac mini M1 chip, but got crash when trying build with Docker.

The script I'm running:

yarn docker build backend -t rafiki-backend

It seems that the crash because I haven't set the Docker to run as non-root user, but I couldn't manage to set that up because I'm clueless as a mac user less than one year experience and to add to that, most guides to set Docker as non-root user seems written for Linux users.

Any help appreciated 🙏