Let me start with a disclaimer—I was researching this topic out of curiosity for quite some time. My framing was: I'm looking for tooling to guarantee provenance for my writing and amateur visual art. Tooling that will also help with distribution and ideally provide pleasant UX/UI. This is also the order of importance of these points for me. Later, I realized it might interest more people, so I tried to summarize it into a short read.
This might be a helpful overview if you're a creator considering moving away from web2 writing and subscription tools like Substack, Wordpress, or Medium.
Let's start with the basic idea of onchain media - after you have created something, you save it onto some persistent storage (like Arweave or IPFS) and sign it uniquely with your wallet proving provenance. You are saying - I made this! This works for writing, visual art, music, or anything else. And it will soon be (I believe) the most important part of the creator's journey - you will effectively prove that a human made this, and just by that, it may stand out in the sea of free AI-made content.
Farcaster native creator stack
I intentionally mentioned that tools should help you with distribution. Most creators today are kept inside closed gardens of tools like Medium or Substack. Then you try to create reach outside of these gardens by using social media where different social media networks are walled off from each other and closed. It doesn't sound nice when I say it like this, does it? It sucks!
I know most of you here are Farcaster fans, hence let's have a look at how could a typical fully onchain creator stack within Farcaster ecosystem looks like:
1/ Collectable and token-gated writing & newsletters on Paragraph.xyz (saving to Arweave or IPFS)
alternatively you could use Mirror.xyz;
2/ Token-gated chats directly on Warpcast.com;
currently has some limitations on number of people in the chat but it's continually growing
3/ Subscriptions via NFTs on WithFabric.xyz;
very cool addition to your Paragraph newsletter or to your regular art drops.
4/ Onchain questionnaires and forms to gather info via Deform.cc;
I didn't know this one existed, found out when I joined TerminallyOnChain, and I love it.
5/ NFT art - images, video, audio - minted on Zora.co;
Zora is becoming very universal platform for everyone who want's to put something/anything onchain. Their creator roaylties program is the best invention since Blur destroyed royalties.
There are some limitations on the size of files but I would say, so far so good, since I'm minting my podcast videos there.
6/ Podcasts - you could use Zora, or you could check pods.media as a native onchain podcasting host, with limited functionalities now, but growing every week. And there are others coming out of stealth soon - like Scoop3.
7/ Video calls & meetings with your community, collectors or fans can be done on Huddle01. You can easily record, mint the recordings, and much more.
I'll be honest, I like this stack. Probably because I've been here too long and this stack is so much more user friendly than what we had with own smart contracts, then Opensea, then Manifold Studio. I mean these were all great options, but very user unfriendly.
Today I can easily bring a friend over to Paragraph and they can start writing even without the wallet. But more importantly, they'll be able to understand the UI pretty much intuitively. Will they complain? Sure 😃 It's not yet so slick and you click differently than on Substack, but they can start using it now.
Common (not so onchain) Tooling Options
Let's get the off-chain options out of here because I can almost hear some of you saying - what about X and X communities, Discord, Telegram groups, or NAS.io, guild.xyz and many similar community focused tools. It's possible to use. It's less onchain and someone can pretty much always shut you down if they won't like what you're saying/doing on their platform.
Since my BrightFutureGuy Twitter account suspension, I hate such option over my community or personal brand.
But I said I'm looking for three things with onchain tooling - to guarantee provenance for my writing and visual art, help with distribution, and ideally provide pleasant UX/UI.
My five tools stack above is getting closer by the day to providing single user interface for all interactions. And that interface will most likely for now be Warpcast - but the great think is that any ambitious team of engineers can build a native Farcaster client for creators that will include all these tools in a single interface. Keep dreaming 😴 you are thinking - but who knows 🤔
Less Known Alternatives
The above tools are pretty well known. They work mostly within Ethereum ecosystem and those integrated with Farcaster are probably getting themselves attached to a rocket 🚀 ship.
But are there any other options? Sure ... Let's look at them.
One such option is Sutty - Sutty is making tools for making distributed websites and also makes CMS (Content Management System) connected with Distributed.Press and IPFS.
Some of you may know Single - Bitcoin secured blogging & newsletter platform (kinda like Paragraph but on Bitcoin).
Honorary mention - some of you may remember Steem - I don't know how much alive it is these days, but it was one of the first integrated creator/social suite of apps on separate blockchain. It just never took off.
Also, there is relatively high number of onchain tools aimed at book & poetry lovers - trying to give authors more control and bigger share of their royalties but my feeling is that unless some of these tools integrate into ecosystem of newsletters, socials, audio&video, they will slowly die on the side lines because they won't have any distribution for their users, hence minimal traction.
I hope you found something interesting in today's post. If you liked it - bring your friends - they may love it as well! If you feel extra generous, you can MINT this writing and own it forever!
Let's connect on socials - find me as BFG (aka BrightFutureGuy)
- on Farcaster: https://warpcast.com/bfg
- on X: https://twitter.com/aka_BFG
Check out my podcast with builders of novel blockchain solutions!
- Web3 Magic Podcast on Substack - https://www.web3magic.xyz
- Listen & Watch on YouTube - http://tinyurl.com/w3m-youtube
- Listen on Apple - http://tinyurl.com/w3m-apple
- Listen on Spotify - http://tinyurl.com/w3m-spotify
or find it in a podcasting app of your choice.
