Solving boostagram visibility for cross-app comments

[theDanielJLewis]

(This is one of several posts that I'm starting to focus on solving specific issues we may have preventing full support for cross-app comments.)

Love it or hate it, I believe the majority of podcasters and audiences will see boostagrams as comments with attached value, similar to the "superchat" features in some live-streaming apps.

And at their core, they are comments and I believe they should be shown and even highlighted within the stream of show/episode comments. Doing so will encourage further engagement, healthy competition among the audience, and even challenge others to also boost.

Thus, I suggest that any platform that handles boostagrams should also crosspost the boostagrams to the appropriate activity stream, but with extra data so the app can highlight the boostagrams.

For example, a normal comment's data might look like this:

{
  "author": "John",
  "createdAt": "2024-02-12T12:13:23.000Z",
  "timestamp": 620.5,
  "content": "Loved your point!"
}

But then the same comment, if left as a boostagram, would be published to the activity stream like this:

{
  "author": "John",
  "createdAt": "2024-02-12T12:13:23.000Z",
  "timestamp": 620.5,
  "content": "Loved your point!",
  "value": 100000,
  "currency": "sats",
}

With this data—specifically the timestamp (in seconds), value, and currency—the apps can highlight that boostagram in the stream of comments with color or position. The apps can also place the comment in a timeline or hyperlink the timestamp to that point in the episode.

This same kind of treatment would be extensible, too! Maybe an app allows a listener to send $10 to the podcaster's PayPal account via the <podcast:funding> tag. The podcaster might have other software or a service that can translate that external fiat gift into a comment, which might look like this:

{
  "author": "Allison",
  "createdAt": "2024-02-09T14:09:15.000Z",
  "content": "Thank you for this episode!",
  "value": 10,
  "currency": "USD",
}

As I hope you can tell, my goal for solving this issue is to expose all V4V payments with comments across all apps that support cross-app comments, even if the app doesn't support any form of direct payments.