Welcome to the 3 people who've joined since Sunday.
Grateful to all of you for reading, hope you're having a great week so far!
If you're enjoyying the content join the /nerdery channel on Farcaster.
Unlocking Potential
Key Takeaways
Experiment with content a lot to find what engages your audience. Newsletters, memes, podcasts, art, memecoins, shitposts, hot takes, giveaways, doubtcasting, livestreams, try it all and see what hits.
$DEGEN is the bluechip memecoin of Farcaster. Tip it, buy it, LP it, and enjoyy.
Frames are small apps that run inside of casts. They supercharge engagement for creators and builders and make the Farcaster content feed even more interactive for users!
Alternative clients like Supercast give tools for power creators, enabling thread writing, cast scheduling, account switching and more!
Making Friends with Channel Hosts
Despite the reputation mods have as power-hungry basement dwellers, channel leads are happy to work with you to drive more attention to your announcements if you coordinate with them. @frodo reached out to me about his puzzle competition and I offered the /onchain-gaming channel as a place to concentrate attention in public and get more marketing power vs posting it in a brand-new channel with no audience.
Channel hosts can pin posts to spotlight them for people coming to a channel, guaranteeing that the post will be seen by everyone coming to that channel. I strongly recommend working with people with existing large channels in addition to building your own channel audience.
Cooperation > competition or as @nonlinear says:
Engage for Engagement
Make sure to engage with people who earnestly engage with you. In the algorithmic pecking order, comments go farther than you'd think, especially if it's the first comment and it results in a comment chain of replies.
Comments > recasts > likesEngage with people who engage with you, give them fast replies and like their replies back, dopamine feels good! If you have some engagement history, you can tip $DEGEN on Farcaster, but you will get higher quality replies without mentioning that up-front.
Remember your ABCs and let your audience reveal their preferences to you.
Always
Be
Casting
You can start a new conversation using someone's cast as a prompt by quote casting them, it's not always just blatant engagement farming! Comment replies are 1-to-1 whereas a quote cast is 1-to-many. Your account engagement only counts for Active Badge and $DEGEN when you are the root caster, the one starting the conversation.
Involve Others in Your Stuff
As I shared previously,
Get other folks tangled in your web of brilliance early on.
More, Better, and Iterated Ideas: Incorporating others in your project means a shitload of fresh and dope ideas. You get different inputs and perspectives, ramping quality up to another level.
Ownership Feeling: When people get involved early, they feel like it's their baby too. It's like a community garden of creativity where everyone plants their seeds of genius.
Context Absorption: Sharing early drafts means folks can absorb the context better. It's like giving their brains a git diff to more easily track the progression and appreciate the final product even more.
Memes
A great way to boost engagement is to wrap your cutting witicisms as visual memes. Memes are cultural artifacts which serve as your Proof of Culture, PoC. How quickly and how well can you recontextualize issues, problems, and talking points in recognizable templates for easy consumption?
Memes are cultural artifacts which serve as your Proof of Culture, PoC. How funny can you be while recontextualizing issues, problems, and talking points in recognizable templates for easy consumption?
Wrap ideas and comment replies in a visual meme for a boost on social media. My personal meme stack is imgflip for adding text + GIMP for customizing images. From the last year of being online, I can create a meme comment reply in under 2 minutes. I use a nonstandard font as a bit of a signature as well, but that's mostly just preference.
Onchain Artifacts
Creating onchain artifacts like Zora NFT mints, Paragraph posts, and sound NFTs gives fans a way to tip for content they enjoy. Mint your memes as Zora mints, put your podcasts onchain like gmfarcaster, create a supporter subscription through Hypersub! Keep creating and give people ways to support your creativity.
Collecting Paragraph posts is a great way to tip the author of the article and indicate your superfan status with onchain history. And collecting after reading doesn't put the reader in the painful position of trying to guess which content is worth paying for. If you found this post value-ful, please collect it.
Total side note, check out the referral fees-paid dashboard from @pixel on Farcaster https://dune.com/0xRob/referral-market
$DEGEN
$DEGEN is the 2nd generation Farcaster-native memecoin. Following in the wake of fizzled-out $POINTS, $WOWOW, and $FARTS, $DEGEN launched with social and LP incentives and has been widely adopted across the Farcaster ecosystem. It integrated with projects like Ponder, Bountybot, Launch, Perl, and more.
On the social side, users tip each other with messages that include XXX $degen. Tips are points until consolidated in airdrops, distributed seasonally so far. Visit https://www.degen.tips/airdrop2/season2 and check the details to see your daily tipping balance, based on your engagement on Farcaster.
Your connected wallet must hold a minimum of 10k $DEGEN to be eligible to receive $DEGEN tips.
Respond to casts you like with text that includes XXX $DEGEN (500 $DEGEN for example) to tip other users.
DO tell people why your tipping them, it's much more value-ful
that's awesome fam! 2222 $degen for bettering yourself
DON'T use $DEGEN for low-quality engagement farming
Buy $DEGEN on BASE: the easiest method is to onramp fiat directly to BASE L2 from Coinbase. Get it from Uniswap v3 or the new Aerodrome pool.
You can LP $DEGEN for points and receive an airdrop in the future, the Uniswap LP incentives program runs until July 8 2024.
Check out the /degen channel for announcements from founder @jacek and to find other users, builders, and fans.
Here's my favorite way to use Degen, get people posting interesting things:
WTF are Frames?
Frames are small apps that run inside of casts. Interactive off-site content, basically telegram/discord bots that interface with users within a single cast. The bot commands are exposed for users to interact with as buttons. The frame gets to use some data from its server + data about the user interacting allowing for a personalized, interactive feed.
Check out Packy McCormick's article explaining in more detail why Farcaster's Very Small Apps are a Very Big Deal.
People have sold Girl Scout Cookies, minted NFTs, played games, and more using frames. The user interface offered by frames consists of pictures, usually with text, and up to four buttons for user interactions.
We've seen five general categories of frames so far:
Marketing/Growth hacking (e.g. PFP remix, cast2mint)
Action Links (i.e. skip off-site conversion funnel)
Crypto distribution channel (e.g. tipping, ecommerce)
Advanced social media posts (e.g. polls, token-gated content)
Games and Fun (e.g. YOINK)
Frames supercharge app engagement and make it easier for devs to interact with their users by putting the interactivity in the Farcaster feed. Use your apps without leaving the feed! Teachnically-minded folks can get started building frames with @df's fantastic repo awesome-frames on GitHub.
Frame devs should check out /frames and /top-frames for inspiration and /frame-devs and /frames-hackathon for assistance.
Nascent frameworks are in use already like frames.js, Frog.fm, and Neynar's No-Code Frame Studio.
Power User Tools
Farcaster is a "sufficiently decentralized" network which means Dan has been hammering that Warpcast will make opinionated choices and that if we're unsatisfied with the answers, "it's an opportunity for alternative clients."
The Warpcast team is building Warpcast to have great UX for 90% of users. They are leaving the hard to do, tricky, or not-likely-to-be-used-by-many features to other devs to build. So alternate clients like Supercast, Crew, and Herocast are building those features for those that need them.
Supercast killer features
Multi-accounting on 1 device + account switching
Gif uploads
Threads
Cast scheduling
Polls
Crew killer feature
Shared access to accounts (brands)
Herocast killer features
FOSS Farcaster client
Non-custodial shared access to accounts via Hats Protocol
Polls are not native in Warpcaster and require frames to run within one cast. Ponder is a great tool for gathering qualitative sentiment from an audience in a frame, and you can token gate responses via ERC20s and ERC721s.
Warpcast search is pretty good but anyone who's used Twitter advanced search is left wanting. Searchcaster.xyz allows you to filter by caster so rather than finding all the "status" posts and scrolling through looking for Dan's , I can search for "status" and require the caster be @dwr.eth to get all Dan's thoughts on status-seeking monkeys.
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