If I were to join Farcaster today, rather than last year, I'd possibly be get lost on a wishful thinking that I'd survive tectonic plate surf on the influx of liquid new friends magma on a niché platform called Warpcast—yes, I use Supercast and Flink, too—well I would be lost for about a week at least but some friends are not aware of the potentials that protocols such as Farcaster offer if they are just lost in the noise in any socials.
Wut means?
I tried to make a genuine and organic social graph on X for the last 5 years even though I'd been on the platform for more than a decade—after at least 10 deleted accounts, and current ~30 alts because people tend to squad your alternative usernames to leverage their malicious intents across the social gambling enabled via hypershitcoinization of the zeitgeist. I still have my account there but I only follow my lists titled such as MEV, Solidity Gas Golfers, or Core Devs; which is due to the fact that only in the last 18 months have I convinced myself that I can build something beneficial at the nexus of crypto-systems and emergent social layers via new governance and alternative direct democracy mechanism designs thereabouts. It's not to say that everything is political but decision-making processes as directly informed by incentive design through these primitive social blocks are prone to polis-making.
Up until, two months ago, Warpcast was like my safe haven—it still is—on which I could evade the nonsense across X—I value my social graph there for which I really put in effort to connect with the bests across all epistemological bubbles that constantly pop unto each other—, and other constant flow of attention-gripping channels of information present on Discord (200 servers) and Telegram (~300 groups/ channels). It was because I had started to feel like a RSS feed that nurtures these environments without creating something meaningful other than a couple of conceptual art pieces, some short reads, and other conceptual shitposting fests, the tools for which I had not myself built.
Are you even building?
I am trying. In the last months alone, I have come to realize that you need a social graph where you can mutually nurture one another on varying topics, and offer guidance if you are an expert on a thing. No, hunting airdrops, or fetching the best hourly yields on exotic pairs do not count as a guidance—you can learn that in the course of a month if you just follow the best repos.
Ah, I see, I created a channel for 2.5K WARPS per annum. No, creating a channel, or getting an active badge just because you happen to acquire followers in a short time on pure grifting does not count. You know I can catch noise at night on a radio scanner, too.
I am coming from a Humanities background with two literary degrees. Not a single soul told me about the possibilities that are easily accessible in many parts of the world if not all. I am lucky that I have been following the best developers, builders, programmers on X and elsewhere before even though I could not understand 99% of what they were sharing. I just "aped" into their blogs, codebases, Discords, Telegrams—no, copypasting a contract written in Solidity does not make you a revolutionary (nor shitting on people for they do not use dirigibles instead of planes).
However, there came a vibeshift where we started to witness many faceless anon gas golfers create intermediate level guides, newsletters for free minus gas.
I started coming on at 100 domains at once trying to learn basic programming languages—still learning—not excluding, all those tools such as Adobe Creative Suite, Ableton, Final Cut Pro, Logic Pro that I bought during the late 2021 mania, and started to experiment at least on the creative level.
There came another vibeshift: I saw Farcaster, DM'd Mr. Romero on X, and after 2 months, I was in without any direct reference from my graph. I did not use it frequently in the beginning. But, I tried to onboard many people who ended up not using it because in my opinion they were just blind to experiments happening in our "industry." &, you know anon, our industry has this valuable blockspace and people could not think about anything else even though they have never visited the Ethereum Research forums, or those of Solana, or anything else.
I tried Lens, Bluesky in the interim but for like 5 posts each. It did not allure since they were not offering a social graph where the users are predominantly builders, programmers, founders, VCs etc. who are open to dialogue regarding anything, and at the end of the simple async chat, you now had another idea, or there were new enterprises—products that launched on top of Farcaster that you use today.
Indeed, I am not a strict gestapo type who dislikes memes, shitpost, degenerous arbitrage opportunities, shitcoin praxes, and the like since by focusing on these you also see what different user strata want, and what these environments lack, and at times offer: A seemingly ridiculous shitcoin design can give rise to lindy structured products that noone has ever tried before. Many DeFi primitives were just volatile hypershitcoinery experiments in the summer of 2020.
Active Badge
I did not have an active badge till November 2023. In October, I was admitted to ZuConnect Istanbul 2023 as a resident where I spent most of my time as a volunteer even though I did not have to—missed many talks but it was worthy since I made many based friends IRL. Following that, I was also a volunteer, solo hacker—couldn't hack—at Devconnect Istanbul 2023.
During that month, I spent majority of my time on Farcaster given the presence of the channels like /dev and /devconnect since I was able to meet the very people I know there at a coffee table or during a workshop in the same time. Applications such as Frens made it even more comfier to "track" my friends and meet them all on top of Farcaster.
Then, I realized that I had a social graph organically grown outside the domains in which I could do my best to offer opportunities to both myself and our friends in the crypto-systems ecologies.
But since I just cannot hold my tongue some based friends from these systems thought I was a pure shitposter of degen ends whilst degen shitposters thought that I was a mere regen. I was just sitting in the middle to make most of the use of knowledge in the "society" for all. I was learning, I am still learning but I am seeing some new smart friends are lost.
The mistakes you are making
You are focusing on the protocol as if it's another SF in 1899 where FCFS rules apply. This is not true. Many late comers with smarts created a nice social graph of theirs through which they are already shipping novel ideas, and products. Hence, it is up to how you leverage knowledge with the real users.
If you find the 1. meaningless, look around you: Genuine channels with active users and good moderators are leveraging themselves as platforms and offering private chats to diminish the noise and focus on the quality. Individuals with skills are creating their own gated systems so that they can focus on the betterment—and, no, this is not another paid group even though those types of paid groups you are used to do exist here, too.
You are thinking that developers and builders are here merely invested in profits rather than growth at the same time. Growth means retaining a userbase, which I prefer to call friends. qDAUs are already venturing out for one another on attestation layers so that we can know each other by on- or off-chain signals for any emergency muster point or a meaningful and secret cult—I know you like these words. It is in fact just to signal to the entire protocol that the attested FID is a wholesome person till the attest is revoked in case of they go rogue. Meaningful growth leads you to brighter futures without any unnecessary gamification that kills the spirit of the play—the game of life.
You are cutting to the chase in terms of frames. For me, the most alluring next frame would be the that can go into the new realms made probable by open graph, frames and farcaster frames and i bet some people are focusing on that. Sharing a simple ready-made frame by other unless it offers a favorable usecase, either complex or a just a simple click to reach a rich object, won't bring you fame. Open that frames documentation and read it. You have tools like LLMs and easy-to-deploy environments such as Replit—since I am a nerd I am doing everything on local but I have just met Replit again it eases the production line for me.
You think that genuine friends in your Farcaster social graph are ready to take off once there is another liquidity opportunity: No, they will turn these channels, chats, and the like into platforms that are portable on the Farcaster protocol or any ecosystem that would be interested into talking to them on the infra layer in the bright future. You are missing this detail. You might create an army of smart wallets but you'll have a single social graph tree when it comes to Farcaster.
Love your friends here.
