http://agora.download/files/blog/mvp.html

Who wants to buy a readme?

tl;dr: Agora is a program that lets you sell files in exchange for
Lightning Network payments.

We've been busy these past few months building an MVP of Agora. The
basic idea of Agora is very simple: It allows you to host files on a
website and charge users to download them. It uses the Lightning
Network for payments.

The current version is still lacking a lot of functionality. But
we're proud to announce that -- as of August 2021 -- an initial
prototypical version of Agora is running at agora.download. It gives
you a simple file listing, including Agora's README.md, which you can
purchase on the site for the low low price of 1,000 satoshis.
Payments can be made with any Lightning Network wallet. Some mobile
Lightning Network wallets are Wallet of Satoshi, which is hosted, and
Muun, which offers self-custody.

Sidenote: You can also go to the Agora GitHub repo and download the
readme from there for free, but where's the fun in that?

Another sidenote: You can also go to the Agora test instance at
test.agora.download. There you can purchase our readme for testnet
money. htlc.me is a simple Lightning Network wallet that comes
pre-loaded with testnet coins.

On agora.download there's also two other folders, blog and paid. They
both contain the blog post you're reading. It's free to read in blog,
but -- as you might've guessed -- can be purchased for the low low
price of 1,000 satoshis in paid.

The Lightning Network is a layer on top of Bitcoin that tries to
solve the so-called Scalability Problem. Bitcoin payments are slow to
settle and have high fees, making them unsuitable for small, quick
payments. The Lightning Network is designed to overcome these
problems, and enables microtransactions: Small payments with very low
fees that settle instantly. We think that makes it a very good fit
for paying for files. Err, I mean, lots of files on the internet are
free to download, and that's great! And we don't want to change that.
We don't want things that are now available for free to suddenly be
locked behind Agora paywalls. That'd be terrible! But there's lots of
files on the internet that you pay for in some way, and that way is
usually a bit weird. For example you pay by watching ads, or by
giving services access to some of your private data. Or by paying
with your credit card. (Credit cards are weird, right? RIGHT?) So we
think that in some situations it'd be great to be able to use the
Lightning Network to buy and sell files on the internet. And that's
what Agora is for.

We hope that many people will use Agora to host files for a variety
of use-cases, which is why we made Agora open-source. You can head
over to github.com/agora-org/agora, download Agora and run it on a
server with files that you'd like to sell. Installation instructions
can be found in the README.md. (That you can also buy here, for the
low low price of 1,000 satoshis.) This is a very early version, so
any feedback -- feature requests, bug reports, usage reports and
general comments -- are very welcome, for example in the github issue
tracker.

Sonke Hahn, 7/31/2021